Happy 100th International Women’s Day

by | Mar 8, 2011 | Off topic

There’s a fantastic array of blog postings to mark the 100th International Women’s Day today, and twitter is abuzz with stories, links and random celebrations of people’s mothers (funny to think that Clara Zetkin, who is credited with coming up with the idea for an International Women’s Day, would not understand that sentence at all).  A selection: the Guardian has a great feature on women’s voices from around the world.  The strongest message coming from that is one of hope and things getting better.  Duncan Green has a wonk’s guide to IWD, with links to some interesting looking research on how women’s movements have been successful in making some of these changes for the better actually happen, in South Africa and the Middle East.  And this, slightly less optimistic piece from Canada’s Globe and Mail is about how far many of us have to go.

For those in search of numbers, there’s some here, also from the Guardian on the gender pay gap, and an analysis from Tim Harford on why it persists (though it only really applies to professional women).  More numbers from a survey of UK women, with the slightly depressing fact that only one in five consider themselves to be feminists. I’m with Rebecca West on that one :

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

(though perhaps I do know what feminism is – at least, my daughter told me that it’s about wanting things to be fair, which will do for me)

And for those who like their politics with a bit of glamour, here’s James Bond in a frock

What’s so inspiring though is just how much there is.  It used to be that no one in the UK really registered International Women’s Day – I remember many conversations with NGO colleagues when I worked at Action Aid (who also have some great stuff on their website), bemoaning the fact that no one here cared very much about the day, while our colleagues around the world were gearing up for national holidays and events to mark the occasion. According to my flower importer friend, in Europe IWD is second only to Valentine’s Day in terms of demand for roses.

Long may it last.  And a very happy International Women’s Day to you all.

Food, Libya’s rebels and humanitarian space

by | Mar 7, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa

Chris Albon has an excellent post over at The Atlantic, which has this to say:

Warfare has changed much since Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched across Europe, but one of the Little Corporal’s maxims is just as true in Libya today as it was near Waterloo two centuries ago: armies march on their stomachs. The anti-Qaddafi rebels are no different. The push to Tripoli would require consistent access to — amongst other things — food supplies. While having adequate food alone would not be sufficient to take the capitol (they also need war materials, training, and transportation), it is an absolute necessity. And, right now, the rebels don’t have enough. But we do.

The United States has the capacity and infrastructure to supply rebel-controlled eastern Libya with substantial amounts of food aid. These shipments could be transported directly into the rebel center of Benghazi, a major seaport with more than adequate facilities. The food aid would not only alleviate the emerging humanitarian crisis in eastern Libya — an important effort in itself — it would help the rebel cause. The shipments would boost the morale of rebel fighters and, more important, provide the supplies necessary to feed the newly formed army during any push towards Tripoli.

I think Chris makes a good argument – but it’s also interesting to pause and reflect on the question of how to square his proposal with the concept of humanitarian space.

The obvious answer to that is that the international community ought to be sending humanitarian assistance to both sides of the front line without prejudice or preference because, well, it’s humanitarian. But as Chris’s argument flags up, the rebels would still be net beneficiaries – because they don’t currently have the food supply lines in place, whereas pro-government forces do.

I don’t think that undermines Chris’s argument – instead, I think it serves as a useful reminder that any decision to give humanitarian assistance, development aid or whatever always turns the donor into a political actor in that arena, because there are unavoidable issues of winners and losers at play.

But this does still leave the fact that as humanitarian space gets blurred, so humanitarian workers are exposed to greater risk (see e.g. this Guardian piece by James Denselow). Pro-Gaddafi forces could easily start attacking WFP workers if they’re seen to be working to the advantage of rebel forces.

So while I agree with Chris’s logic, and think the risks involved in setting it out in a forum like The Atlantic are minimal, I also think it would be risky indeed for humanitarianism and for the safety of aid workers if the US Administration publicly espoused the same logic. The State Department and USAID should follow Chris’s advice – but whatever happens, they mustn’t admit to doing so.

The UN: replacing bureaucrats with experts

by | Mar 6, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Global system

A year ago, I blogged about the launch of a big UN review of how the organization deploys civilian experts to post-conflict countries.  As I said then, this mattered:

“Another UN panel,” I hear you cry, “whoopy-ruddy-doo!” But this is a serious panel dealing with a serious problem: the shortage of decent justice experts and other civilian specialists to deploy to post-conflict countries. Many UN missions have only 60-70% of their planned civilian staff, leaving them overstretched and unable to deal with day-to-day political issues, human rights and so on.

Now the Civilian Capacities Review has reported, underlining the scale of the problem:

As communities emerge from conflict, they often face a critical shortage of capacities needed to secure a sustainable peace. Yet the United Nations struggles both to recruit and deploy the range of expertise required, and to transfer skills and knowledge to national actors.

The report will make uncomfortable reading for a lot of long-time UN staffers. It argues that the organization relies too much on a stock cast of “international civilian servants”: generalists who deploy from mission to mission and imagine that they can somehow apply the same state-building techniques to places as diverse as Haiti and the Congo:

As well as being slow, the recruitment system lacks the ability to fill highly specialized needs. It has been described as a “wholesale” mechanism — designed to sift through bulk applications for general purposes. Increasingly, however, the contextual nature of conflict produces specialized peacebuilding demands (for example, natural resource management in Liberia, combating drugs and organized crime in Guinea-Bissau or land management in Darfur). The system is unable to meet these demands.

Ouch. The whole report is similarly unsparing of the UN’s sensitivities, and comes with a bundle of concrete recommendations to shake things up.  These include creating a far more flexible staffing system for post-conflict missions by which (to simplify) the UN could pull together expert secondees from governments and NGOs to respond to specific problems, rather than just fall back on the usual suspects. It’s good to see a honest assessment of the UN’s problems in this area – as I’ve said before, the EU should do a similar self-analysis – and the recommendations are serious and sound.  That’s bad news for quite a few peacekeeping bureaucrats out there…