 Felly, gyddoedd, ymwneud, ymwneud, ymwneud, ymwneud, ymwneud, ymwneud. Mae'n gyrus i chi, yn ddechrau. Rwy'n Zeyn A'r Badawy, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio ystod y dyfodol ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. Mae'n cyffredinol yma ar y schol. Rwy'n gweithio i chi'n gwneud ymwneud ymwneud yr unigol, ymwneud, ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. Rwy'n gweithio ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud a'u ddweud o'r hynny. Rwy'n gweithio i gwasanaethdau o meddwlol yr aelodau mewn gweldau, maen nhw, sy'n bod yr ysbryd ac yn rhaid i ddomem oherwydd ac rhaid i adotlu o'r pleidol. Rhaid i ddim yn gweithio eiton i nefyd, ymddangos yn i gael, ac mae gwrdd, ychwanegwch, oherwydd fudd ti'r ffyrdd. A i ddweud, rydw i wneud o'r chyfnod ar fy ffordd o gwrdd. Rydw i'n fawr, mae'n gweithio'r ffordd. Rydw i'n fydda i'r gweithio'r gweithio cyffredinol o'r digwydd. Rydw i'n gweithio'r pener. Rydw i'n gweithio'r gweithio yn ddweud o'r 1,5 yr hwn. I hope you'll find that our exchange is thought provoking, lively, food for thought, and heat as well as light. I'm going to introduce the panel in alphabetical order, Professor Stephen Chan, somebody most of you know, Professor of International Relations here at SOAS, and a good friend of mine, lovely man, Stephen. Stephen, I say nothing in my defence, I'm totally biased. And Stephen has, of course, written extensively on International Relations and Africa. He's an old hand at Africa. He worked in Uganda after the fall of EDR Meme. He's advised various African governments on how to do things. He's written on Zimbabwe, a biography of Robert McGarbie, and also published conversations with the current Prime Minister, Morgan Changari. And he's advised us, I saw so many governments, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Peritrea, Ethiopia. And his book, which is a must read, his most recent work, is The End of Certainty Towards a New Internationalism. And in 2010 Stephen was awarded an OBE, and he said, I never sought this award, but after a few glasses of champagne I decided I was very happy with it. So Stephen, congratulations. Our next panel member, Professor David Kennedy, sitting here to my right, he's faculty director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and also at SOAS. And in fact, this Question Time International has been set at a time to coincide with his annual teaching time at SOAS. He's a practice in lawing consultants and not just sitting in his ivory tower as an academic. He worked on numerous projects at the United Nations and the European Commission. And he is currently chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Advisory Council on Global Governs. David Kennedy's research explores issues of global governance, development policy and the nature of professional expertise. His most recent books include the dark sides of virtue reassessing international humanitarianism and of war and law, and these works are described as disturbing, shattering, provocative and iconoclastic. I'm quite intimidated sitting next to you after all that, David. David's work is often regarded as uncomfortable but always essential reading for international lawyers. To my left, another David, somebody who needs very little introduction. Of course, David Miliband, the MP for South Shields. David has of course been for a decade and a half at the very top of British government and politics. Of course, he worked for several years as leader of Labour's policy renewal under Tony Blair. He was the youngest foreign secretary in 30 years since David Owen, and he was foreign secretary from 2007 to 2010, and also he was Secretary of State for the Environment, where he worked on the legally binding emissions reduction bill. David is married to the violinist Louise Shackleton, and he has two sons. Welcome to you, David Miliband. Finally, Gita Segal is an award winning filmmaker, a writer and an activist on issues such as race, religion, communalism, feminism and multiculturalism and human rights. She was a founder of an organisation called Women Against Fundamentalism, and has done other works in this kind of regard. She's won a TV award for her War Crimes Fire, which is a documentary looking at war crimes allegedly committed during the conflicts in Bangladesh, and most recently, Gita was head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. Gita thinks that although she's been a human rights advocate all her life, every issue she's worked on, things like domestic violence, women who kill fundamentalism, that these women's issues have not been regarded as mainstream human rights by human rights organisations, and that's something we hope will be put right in this decade, long overdue, and Gita is very comfortable here because she's a history graduate of Seras. So that's our panel. Welcome to you all. Give them a round of applause. Our first question, please, is from Siar Vash Esgi, PhD student here at Seras. Siar Vash, your question, please. Hi. Is WikiLeaks good for international diplomacy? Right. Well, that's a very good one. I'm sure you've all been reading your WikiLeaks and all the various descriptions. I think David Milliband, that's one for you. I mean, the revelations are mostly about American foreign policy thoughts sent by their ambassadors from various countries, but what's your response? Well, I think that the fact and the consequence of WikiLeaks is bad for diplomacy, but the content of WikiLeaks could be quite good for diplomacy. So let me explain. The fact of a leak of 2.5 million documents is obviously dangerous because I think it will inhibit the sort of serious dialogue that any international system depends on. I think the consequence of WikiLeaks is going to be an American system which clams up in quite a dangerous way, and I think that's not very helpful. The fact that might be beneficial, or the content that might be beneficial, is that actually if you read the cables, you notice a couple of things. First of all, there's a striking consistency between what the American government was saying in public and what it was saying in private, and that's actually rather a good testimonial to the way in which diplomacy works, and I think is worth noting. Secondly, I think that as someone who was responsible for a diplomatic service of about 16,000 people, it's worth saying that at a time when it's fashionable to take hits at public servants and at civil servants in general, the overall level of reporting and insight was pretty high, and I hope that in a minor way it might contribute to a sense of pride in public service. Thank you. David Kennedy? I think by and large I agree with David about the consequences and the significance of WikiLeaks for diplomacy. I just had one observation from the American scene, and that is the very close way in which the diplomatic conversation tracked the conversation in the established media. So it wasn't just that what the American government was saying was more or less in line with what the diplomats were writing home, but also the conversation among informed elites within the United States followed very similar lines, and I think that's the reason that there was so little surprise about a large number of the revelations that have come to light at least so far. But if we ask what we can learn from that, I think one of the things we can learn is that the art of diplomacy is a very narrow conversation, a very narrow in its preoccupations in the way in which it interprets events, a very focused on individuals, very focused on the particular issues that have come to attract the attention of the media or of the political leadership at a particular moment, very bad at longer term reflective thinking about things. And in that sense, the concerns that are common to the establishment media, the diplomatic establishment and our political leadership are not the concerns of the large majority of people in the world. They're simply talking about something else. Gita, is Wikileaks good for international diplomacy or is it irresponsible and an attack on the international community as the Americans said? Well, I think we're all going to be pouring over the Wikileaks, but I'd actually like to look at the issue of the war logs that were released before the diplomatic cables. And I think there's an issue there that certainly supporters of Wikileaks have really sidelined and refused to look at. And that is the danger to civilians, for instance, Afghan civilians that was pointed out by the Afghan Human Rights Commission, which is nobody's stooge. They have a very, very hard job trying to tread the right lines in human rights. And I think the human rights organisations, the United States Watch and Amnesty International, wrote to Wikileaks protesting about the threat to civilians for their names not being redacted. And a lot of the left has, who support Assange for a lot of good reasons, but has said there's no evidence that these logs will do any harm and so on. Precisely the point that the Afghan Human Rights Commission was making was that they don't have the capacity to monitor every individual in every village who was ever visited by a NATO soldier. And that could have a really detrimental effect. Nobody would condone, I suppose, jeopardising the safety of people who perhaps may have given information and so on. But if their safety had been guaranteed and their names and identities redacted, do you think that the leaks were a good thing? I think there's such a huge thing that we're still working out what, is this a one-off or is this going to change international diplomacy and the way in which people conduct themselves? And I think the young cyberwarriors who say this is a good thing because it holds governments accountable, I think two of the foundational principles of human rights are accountability so that states should be held accountable for doing privately what they say they're doing publicly, that's one issue. But the other is privacy. And if there is no privacy, and certainly the privacy of states is different from the privacy of the individuals, but what basically was said to me, I've talked to people who, you know, are part of the whole international movement around WikiLeaks, and they said there is no privacy anymore, which is probably something that they've learnt, you know, harder than my generation has, that you can find out anything about anybody on the internet. There is no privacy, and that has been one of the foundations of human rights, that people are entitled to privacy against unauthorised interference in their affairs. And I think that larger issue is something that we've barely begun to address. All right. We're just addressing the questions, Stephen Chan. Is WikiLeaks, is it good for international diplomacy, all those revelations that were made? I think that in the long run we're going to see this as a benefit, so I'm going to differ a little bit from my colleague panellists. I think there are dangers. I think those dangers have been well pointed out. I was particularly upset also that a number of people who are out of the Western spotlight were named as if their fates and destinies meant nothing, as if this whole thing was simply a crusade directed against one or two superpowers and the fate of ordinary people came to nothing, so they could be named without any kind of consequence. I think that's a terrible, as it were, arrogance on the part of the people organising this. At the same time, I think that the whole issue of public diplomacy is a very, very real one. I think as early as Woodrow Wilson in the early part of the 20th century, that was an American president who made, as it were, a fundamental stand about the need for transparent and public diplomacy. Having said that, I don't think there has been a real drift towards private diplomacy of the sort that is suggested by the idea of WikiLeaks as expose. Almost all of this information that was revealed was in fact known to very, very wide circles of people. In fact, a lot of this information came from circulation lists which were as large as 3,000 people. In other words, what you have is a distinction between what was strictly speaking secret once upon a time and what is public and intermediate space where you have an elite monopolisation of diplomatic conversations. What I was really struck by in these so-called elite need to know conversations was how shallow the conversations were. So I echo David Kennedy's point. So much about personalities. This president, this minister does this. This minister thinks that. This prime minister thinks that. As if the underlying substance of human thought, philosophy and belief, those driving forces that make people stand up and rebel, as if those fundamental issues had nothing to do with diplomacy. In that kind of conversation, I think what the WikiLeaks revealed was just how shallow our concepts and what a practice into national relations really are. What was said about Gaddafi that he was always accompanied by a buxum Ukrainian nurse, blond nurse. It just seemed to be a little bit odd. But Stephen Chan, when you look at some of the revelations made, look on the 19th of this month, you've got the Huzhintao, the Chinese president visiting America. When you look at the revelations that the top US official on Africa, Marson, was talking about China's road in Africa, describing it as aggressive and pernicious economic competition without morals. I mean, that's not going to help them very much, is it? When they're saying, oh, we're friends, we like you, Beijing. And actually, this is what they think about their road in Africa. Well, don't forget the Chinese uses exactly the same kind of language. It's just that WikiLeaks people can't understand Chinese. I've been involved in enough negotiations in Beijing. On the African side, I hasten to add to understand that this goes both ways. You're not going to have, as it were, a sanitised zone in diplomatic conversations. And of course, the Chinese reply is, who are you to talk? The West has been just as much bully boys in the whole African historical situation as you're accusing us of being now. I don't think this is going to cause any long-term harm, but I do stress that this kind of conversation does act both ways. But I mean, it just is an observer of Africa and obviously, because you were also a member of the Trilateral US-China and Africa Board, wasn't it, sometime in the last decade. Do you think that it does reveal to you how wary the United States is of the role of China in Africa or didn't tell you anything you didn't know? I think that the Americans in particular are not so much wary of China's prisons in Africa. China's been in Africa for a very, very long time, although the manifestation of this has changed in recent years. What gets the Americans is they can't guess beforehand what the Chinese are going to do. The Chinese wrong-foot them. And this is a fault of American diplomacy and not a fault of Chinese maneuvers. OK, and David Middl, very quick before we go to the floor, you said that actually it didn't really learn anything new and what's been said in private is pretty much what's been expressed in public. And you don't think it's damaging when the Americans, what was it, describe Putin as an alpha dog and President Medvedev playing Robin to Putin's Batman and that kind of language? You can read that in the Economist of the Financial Times or even hear it on the BBC quite regularly. Look, there was a fundamental breach of trust and no society can operate when breach of trust is seen as having no consequences. So I think it's important to say that very, very clearly. Where there was the greatest dissonance between public words and private words was not in the case of the United States as it happens. The biggest revelation was what Gulf States was saying about Iran. Now, it wasn't a revelation to those of us who've been studying it or those of us who have spent time in the Gulf States, but it was a quote-unquote revelation for the wider world. And I think that says something about open societies versus closed societies. And so we can have, I think, a good debate about what's been right and what's been wrong about American policy. But the WikiLeaks does not reveal a dissonance between what is said to be the policy and what is actually the policy. The dissonance occurs in other countries, which are much more closed societies than our own. Did you find out anything? I mean, you mentioned the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, saying we want an Arab-led military force to go and take out Hezbollah in Lebanon because, of course, they don't like them. Did you know about that? I didn't know that the American government felt or that the American representatives in London felt that I was going on too much about human rights, which they reported back to Washington. So that was quite a nice thing to read. But none of us have been through all two and a half million documents or pages that have been released. But I think that the truth is that if they hadn't been marked secret, they would have seemed much less exciting than they did. I have to say, I don't think we would ever on the BBC describe Vladimir Putin as an alpha dog. But there we go. I think we'd have to delete that bit. But anyway, questioner, did that answer your question? Okay, questions from the floor on this. Was WikiLeaks good for international diplomacy and then we'll move on. Can I say anybody who wants to make an intervention to keep it very brief? Because I am a very horrible chair and I will just cut you off in your prime if you go on for too long. Any questions? I've scheduled all. No? How many hands international diplomacy has been improved by WikiLeaks? Being detrimental, irresponsible for the internet, is a responsible attack on the international community? I thought you had strong, vigorous opinions here at Soaz. You're all sitting on the fence. Our next question is Rose Parfit, another PhD student here at Soaz. Rose, your question. Panel agree that the current financial crisis has exposed the limits of the existing state and interstate arrangements for economic management. Stephen. There we go, Stephen. Did you get the question? No. You're going to answer it. Just say the question again, a bit slower and louder. Does the panel agree that the existing financial crisis has exposed the limits of the existing state and interstate arrangements for economic management? Okay, so it's about the much beloved international financial architecture of Gordon Brown? Well... Paraphrase the question. Yes. We'll come to you in a moment, David. Yes. The much beloved economic and financial architecture of Gordon Brown is not so different from the much beloved architecture of many other countries. I think that where you've got to look at this question is not so much is this a crisis for the economy as we understand it or is this a crisis for the economy as we do not understand it? In other words, I think that one of the key underlying things that we often miss is that we don't in fact have in Soaz terms a crisis of capitalism here at all. In terms of the ownership of capitalism. And again, this has not been widely remarked upon. And that is that the global economy is in fact in very rude health. The big question is who owns the rude healthy part of the global economy. When you've got countries like China able to buy up American toxic debt for instance, when you see them coming and offering to be of great assistance to countries teaching on the brink as it were such as Portugal are certain shifts going on in the international community. The whole realignment of global politics with Africa very anxious for instance to come on side with the Chinese shows that some people recognise this. So when you look at the global architecture it's not a case of the global architecture being in decay. It's very much a case of who is going to be the principal tenant in the penthouse of the global architecture. David Kennedy? It's an interesting question. I think that social and political consequences of the economic crisis are still out in front of us. So we can't see yet how that will, the impact it will have on our international governance structures in full. And I think there's an optimistic story which is that in the immediate moments of the crisis there was a retreat to public authority by many economic actors who considered themselves global and there was a surge of new forms of cooperation. The G8 and the G20 new efforts within Europe to try to come to a common solution to a variety of different regulatory problems. The longer term story seems to me less optimistic because what the crisis revealed is a fundamental disconnection between a global economy and a national political system. So politics continues to be the domain of territorial national populations and is largely the prerogative of a middle class at least in the developed world that's not very mobile and to whom capital doesn't move very easily. Whereas the economy is a much more global phenomenon and developing an international political economy, embedding the global economy in a sensible regulatory structure will continue to be a challenge as long as they're happening at different scales and are managed or owned by different players. And that tension is one that I think will preoccupy governments and policy makers for some time. David Miliband, your responses question. I'm much more with the second professor than the first professor. I'm with David Kennedy rather than Stephen Chew on this question. I think he's absolutely right to say that fundamental issue is that the economy has gone international while politics is fundamentally national. I think there are three areas that provide the best exemplification of that in respect of your question. One is the management of macroeconomic imbalances, which are obvious in the world economy today and are subjects of no governing authority and whether that's in respect of currency wars that are threatened not just by Americans and Chinese but also by the Brazilians yesterday. You can see that there are fundamental issues. Secondly, financial regulation even within the European Union huge disjunction has been revealed between European levels of regulation and national European levels of financial operation and national regulation. Thirdly, and I think quite importantly, the institutions that do exist and there are international institutions the IMF and the World Bank are global institutions. They don't reflect the current distribution of economic power in the world whether in respect of voting shares for China but also an interest of mine, the new power in the Middle East which is economic power in the Middle East in the UN negotiations the oil states are grouped with the developing countries and that really reflects a world of 40 or 50 years ago and I think that, I don't know if you're doing your thesis on how to counter these problems but if you can find some answers in those three areas you'll be doing a real service. Are they trying to reform the membership of the board of the IMF and the World Bank? There have been some changes in the last G20 meeting agreed some shifts in voting shares. Europeans are going to have to look quite hard at our own share of this but all of the, I'd be surprised if in the course of this conversation this evening three quarters of the questions don't come down to how we share global sovereignty in a way that recognises the new distribution of economic and political power around the world and the big implications for rising powers was many of them want the benefits of a global economy without the responsibilities that come with it and also big implications for the developed countries who are going to be jealous of our own privileged positions. If they have a say they're going to have to pay the new big developing nations in China. Gita? I'd like to just bring it back to something quite simple which is that when it seemed that we were heading into a crash and all these new regulatory structures had to be rushed to stop, as you said there is no crisis of capitalism to sort of shore everything up so you stop slicing up debt and you start betting on commodities instead and commodity prices go up and people start starving in countries like Ethiopia I don't understand what these discussions were having why things like that haven't actually been able to be addressed immediately quite apart from the long term structures. So you're looking at the amount of money that's been put into propping up economies and private financial institutions in the global financial crisis and not as much has been put into alleviate poverty. Basically it seems to me that bankers are continuing to be allowed to gamble even though now we either say that this country is hugely indebted as the coalition government is saying and of course it's true or you could say we actually own the banks and we could be making them do something that is not as quite as dangerous as it was and it seems that they still are conscious of the time because we've got a lot of questions to get through response from the floor to this question anybody want to make a comment or does our questioner want to come back you heard what the panel said no good okay admirably brief good next question Dr Stephen Hopgood who's director for the centre for the international politics of conflict rights and justice your question please sir oh you don't need a microphone that's okay oh they can't hear you how selfish of me those people at the back are so much further away please thank you it's almost exactly a year since the earthquake in Haiti killed 230,000 people there's still more than a million living in emergency tents subject to the constant threat of disease but this comes despite the spending of billions of dollars of aid money and the presence of literally thousands of humanitarian NGOs so it's keeping people alive but homeless and in poverty the best we can expect from the modern humanitarian aid industry okay so you're using the situation in Haiti as a kind of peg to ask a wider question about the role of NGOs okay people are talking about how trying to do good has gone bad Gita responsibility of NGOs I suppose is at the core of what you're saying I think there's a sort of pragmatism with our vision which ends up not even doing the basic thing so we're not even keeping people alive in Haiti even with the cholera epidemic people are dying that was so predictable that there would be a cholera epidemic whether it was brought in by foreign peacekeepers or not the kind of sanitary conditions that there were would lend itself to something like that happening and I think you see this in other areas than emergency humanitarian aid you have the millennium development goals which most countries in the world have signed up to there's been a huge amount of money poured into it and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference to for instance the rates of maternal mortality and I think if you go on having avoiding the questions of infrastructure of actually building an infrastructure that functions whether it's a sanitary infrastructure or education or other things then you are going to end up stumbling from problem to problem and where there's an immense regulatory framework you know the BBC programme today talked about it, the cluster system where NGOs are supposed to co-operate with each other but that regulatory framework is basically on the shelf, I mean people don't implement it in all sorts of ways I'm going to supplement the question though really I mean when you look at what's going on in Haiti it is a very extreme situation now where you actually see NGO workers having bricks thrown at them they are so unpopular NGOs in Haiti of course the United Nations also not escaping because they think they brought the cholera but it does seem as though there is a huge crisis for humanitarian organisations and it's simply exposed hasn't it Haiti the problem with NGOs living up to what they say they want to do David Miliband Well a couple of things first I think that the issue that Gita referred to that aid hasn't had the impact that maybe was expected one has to I think deconstruct that a bit the truth is that massive progress has been made on the issue of maternal mortality that you raised in those countries where aid has been combined with good governance development of trade and conflict prevention the reason the statistics are as you describe the reason why there hasn't been the sort of impact that might have been expected even from the aid levels that have gone the aid on its own is never going to be the answer and the aid in a corrupt in a society with corrupt governance aid in a society with conflict aid in a society with unable to generate economic innovation and growth of its own is not going to make the difference and I think it's important when we look at the international it's bad enough with national averages when you look at international averages in respect of the MDGs it's important to distinguish between those areas where you're making real progress those areas where you're making limited progress for example maybe the professor is an expert on Haiti in which case he should be answering the question is that it seems to me that it's the most chronic case of absolute state failure combined with natural calamity and when you have that situation for the aid agencies then to get the blame not just from people in the country but from the rest of us seems to me to be pretty harsh and the figures that you quoted at the beginning are unspeakable I mean if you even think about the process of coping with 230,000 dead bodies and the dangers that carries with it never mind the situation where the whole infrastructure of the country has been completely wrecked I think that it's pretty harsh to say that shows NGOs don't work no but you know Davie Miliband of course the Haitian state is really not up to doing very much as much but the question does say that lots of money has gone into Haiti and when you've even got the United Nations Special Envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton saying to the NGO community for heaven's sake tell us what you're doing and where you're doing it and how you're doing it I mean they are well meaning nobody is saying that they're not but they are setting up health clinics without informing the ministry of health in Haiti that it has become just this loose-limbed giant lack of coordination, duplication of efforts and often inexperience where doctors go and perform operations and then just leave and they're not providing the public healthcare there's a fundamental point here which is a political point which is how do you see the role of charitable endeavour social endeavour in a society that functions effectively for me you see a strong voluntary sector or a third sector alongside a Government which works and a private sector which works we've got a debate in this country about whether or not NGOs should take over responsibilities of the state but if you try and imagine a role for NGOs without state authorities whether they be national or international it's not going to work and the whole point of NGOs is that they go off and innovate and do things in a way that hasn't been pre-programmed but in a situation where there is no international authority it's pretty tough to blame the NGOs for the situation David Kennedy this issue of just what NGOs can accomplish in difficult situations and also the question of accountability I wouldn't single NGOs out in that way I have done some work in Haiti in the last year and it was a situation which right from the beginning a large number of people who have been involved both in the humanitarian aid community and also in the development community said we're going to do this right this time this is an opportunity to actually put all the pieces together in a way that hasn't been done before and I think we have to say there have been heroic efforts by lots of people a large deployment of resources and a number of wonderful things have in fact happened in small scale but it's a catastrophe so it didn't work in anything like the scale that would be needed to do things differently and so it's a really interesting case study for where the difficulties lie and of course there's something in saying they lie with the dysfunctionality of the local government especially under the conditions of stress created by both poverty and calamity there's something about the entrenched difficulties of the donor community but I've been struck by one thing and that is the combination of inability to govern the project of ownership and NGO involvement and the lack of good ideas about how in fact to do things better so if you look at the good governance problem only as a problem of Haiti you're missing a big story how does one govern the donors they all have their own internal relationships whether they're intergovernmental organizations or national governments or NGOs they are in a very difficult relationship with one another and there's a situation about which they may or may not be experts some of them have been there for many years and some arrived last week there is no process for governing the donors if the national government doesn't do it but there's no ability for the national government to do it if you need all those donors and that's a difficult problem that can't be unraveled easily and it's compounded by the fact made very obvious in Haiti that we do not have a development or a science of how to bring about humanitarian aid in a satisfactory way we have a lot of slogans about it there are certainly a lot of political positions and preferences about it but in fact as an international community we do not know what to do about either structural inequality or humanitarian disaster and why can't the United Nations fill that vacuum because it doesn't as things stand have any responsibility for NGOs in countries like Haiti I think there are a lot of proposals on the table for organizations who would nominate themselves to play the role of governing everybody else in the operation but surely the UN is best placed and that would be one I mean the BBC tries to do that as well so the international media in many ways sets itself up as the governor of the governing so I think somebody ought to do it but there is no somebody who knows how to do it and not the BBC the UN I think Stephen Chan, your answer to the question I agree very much that Haiti is a very very singular example it was a country in which nothing was ever going to work because of a whole range of conditions some of which David outlined but I also agree very much with David Kennedy and some of the points he was making but I have a very slightly different take on it to a certain extent this is a biased take on a position in organized international life 30 years ago after the cleanup in Uganda precisely because of reasons of this sort and that is I don't think the international community understands what to do in situations of reconstruction underneath conditions of dire conflict when you add in food deprivation and medical deprivation and everything else that makes a total catastrophe then the position is compounded I think what you've got here is a very very fundamental problem which is to a certain extent and I don't want to sound unnecessarily philosophical about this but a problem of modernity what happens when you try to make a compassionate response with an industrial solution and I think that's the key question here because all of the agencies who would go to work in countries or in situations that demand what we might traditionally call compassion do so with an industrial model will mobilize X number of tons of this will mobilize Y number of thousands of volunteers to do this we will meet our own audit requirements we've got all kinds of projects of salvation and redress that we can take off the shelf that are pre-prepared we can insert them into the situation we can make this work we've got the plan the problem is that when you have many agencies that have all got their plan and are all trying to make the plan function in an industrial modern efficient manner there is no possibility of governance or government of the different plans and the different agencies who go into this kind of mix and very often what you've got are situations which perpetuate the initial problem not so much Haiti which I agree was a no win case from the very beginning but a very great deal for instance of the problems that are protracted and which continue in a place like Darfur very much because the rebel groups are now fighting over who can control all the aid that comes in and the more aid that comes in to help people who in the first place genuinely needed it the more rebellion becomes a growth industry for its own sake so you've got all kinds of unintended consequences that get built into this the more that there is the more that there is that can also be taken by those for whom it was not originally intended it comes as a gigantic informal sector which is an unintended consequence of something which was too formalised and industrialised at the very beginning now I say this to raise a question and to express in a very slightly different way what David Kennedy was saying there is no immediate solution to this there's no immediate model that we can put into the equation and we would disappoint not only a budding industry we would put a lot of people here at SOAS out of work the technical experts and we would disappoint a number of very idealistic people who volunteer to try to help in these situations but at this time for a fundamental rethink everywhere I go and I spend a lot of time in third world countries so called addressing issues such as this but the model that is emanated from the west does not work Eta you wanted to come here Just to reflect on some of the things that have been said and going back to the question about international financial regulation I agree with David that you have to have multiple structures in place and if there isn't a state that is ensuring basic infrastructure it's going to be very very hard because where you have a humanitarian disaster you find a parasitic relationship between humanitarians coming in and employing quite often people who are the civil servants or the local officials and bringing them in at much higher salaries this happened after the tsunami in places like Sri Lanka which does have a functioning state where precisely the giving of the goodness giving aid meant that local structures and salary systems were destroyed and yet you have humanitarian aid being delivered in a system which is basically using a neoliberal model of development and not allowing strong states to actually ensure basic rights for their people and that's why you have the free for all that is one of the underlying reasons that you have a free for all where people are just patching the immediate problems and not setting up a structure and that's why if you have a medical system that works you can bring down maternal mortality you can begin to address it but if you can't just by thinking that you can patch specific initiatives only on maternal mortality without any kind of bigger medical system the more I listen to this the more it's a miracle that the really good things that David Kennedy referred to have happened because a year is a very short time in the history of any country we all know that the development of a society is something that takes deep roots that takes in many centuries never mind many decades that can't be imposed from outside and to expect all those rules to be turned in a space of a year seems to me to be fallacious really the best you can hope for in a space of a year is to keep people alive I think if you could to plant deeper roots within a year seems to me to be a Herculean task Steven Hopgood you asked that very question and David Miliband says actually a year later perhaps that is the best you can hope for and actually it's pretty good what do you think there's no sign of any ongoing improvement so we may have got through a year we'll have to look at the situation in another year I'd like to tie the first three questions together and maybe sound a similar note across all three which is all of them have been about the dispelling of illusions disillusionment with diplomacy with the international economy and now with what the humanitarian industry can achieve and that may well turn out to be a positive thing because growth comes first of all by getting past denial and what we see in Haiti is a realisation of the limits of what a technocratic western civilisation can develop and maybe some rethinking will come with that audience you know you've really been asleep I mean you're listening I know passively so perhaps get some response good some hands microphones please to the gentleman there in the grey suit and then there's a chap there at the back if you could position yourself next to him as well microphone and then there's another microphone here at the front oh I've only got two alright who's got it I can't see yeah there you go introduce yourself please in your organisation if relevant I'm Dan Plesch from the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy I'll take issue with the idea that there is simply one western industrialised model I think there was a time when there was a much more social democratic international model that provided a much more positive backcloth for the development of the societies that we're talking about and in particular just from my own work I would say even in the question of post disaster post war reconstruction the verdict of the UN working in Germany before the Marshall Plan was that they ran all their refugee camps on democratically self-managed lines and the verdict was they only worked because we never tried to manage them that the resources were there but they were organised in a self-managed way that is hard to find anywhere in the modern in the current I wouldn't say modern in the current world so it isn't just one modern model there are several and the last point I would make is that I'm not a specialist on the region but I'm a specialist that there appeared to be a coup organised in Haiti in the early years of the recent Bush administration in its first term and whether or not that had any effect on perpetuating a kleptocratic class in that country and preventing the development of a more effective governance in that particular part of the world You're referring there to the era Sorry, I've been listening to the panel discussing Just introduce yourself please, it would be nice to meet you My name is Conrad Chukodolwyr I'm lost in here I've been listening to the views that are being expressed about the difficulty with the multiplicity of NGOs trying to work in a catastrophe area Haiti being a prime example at the moment and I just wonder how difficult is it for these organisations to actually coordinate their efforts before actually arriving on the field How difficult, sorry? How difficult is it for them to actually coordinate their efforts before now mobilising on the field Is it that impossible for them to have a meeting about how they're going to run their affairs with the resources they have available to them before they now arrive and start doing various things that different people don't know about Well, I mean, I know certainly with Haiti that it's been the opposite that actually there's so many assessments, isn't that right and that a lot of the money goes into assessing the same thing over and over again and that uses up an awful lot of money And again, they sort of come down to the same problems assessments done But no coordination That is a problem, where can they not coordinate their efforts? I mean, I think that is a recognised problem, isn't it? I mean, anybody who works on an NGO here I mean, post-tsunami the lessons should have been learned, but they weren't You work for an NGO So could you give a microphone to this chap here? You stay there, you come along here, yeah Very active, just running the marathon Thanks What do you do? Who are you? I work for a humanitarian relief charity So exactly in the field that you're talking about We didn't actually do any work in Haiti but we did a lot of work in Pakistan I don't think you can understate the problem of in-country infrastructure I mean, it's fine to criticise NGOs for not being able to coordinate each other but you can turn up and if there's nothing there then it's very hard to be effective in the work you want to do I mean, in Haiti, from what I understand there was UN infrastructure there that would have been able to coordinate the relief effort but that was completely destroyed by the earthquake so it was essentially starting from scratch In terms of Pakistan, you've got an ineffective government so there's an issue there Also, I mean, it was mentioned maybe the UN can take the role of coordinating NGOs creating some kind of international governance Yes, it is failing in that role but charities are coming together to fulfil that role already and we're working on getting the organisation I work for accreditation from the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership so there are quality assurances out there which, you know, charities are moving to just to quickly pick up on what David said about good governance and also what Geese said about neoliberal-like policies being perpetuated I think that's a particular issue I mean, you mentioned good governance but the way good governance is prescribed by Western democracies by the UN is essentially just a way of exposing economies like Pakistan, like Haiti to external actors who aren't going to help them build up the essential health infrastructure education infrastructure, relief infrastructure that means they won't require the level of help that has been seen in Haiti and Pakistan OK It's very interesting to hear someone's testimonial I mean, good governance to me is very corrupt and so it serves the people that it's intended for that its appointments are based on merit and so there's some independence as to who wields power that it's accountable and transparent in what it does To me are not Western, neoliberal etc they're just the right way to run a society and so I think it's important that you distinguish between what is a an institution and how it's run and what purpose it's then used for by its leaders because if you know Pakistan well and it sounds like you do you'll know that for the last 60 years half the time it's been run by military rule the institutions have been used either by the military or by civilian government for too little time by civilian government and so I don't think it's the notion of good governance that is corrupt or lacking in legitimacy I think it's the way in which government structures are used Okay Our next question, Ryan Saddy student here Hello and good evening The UK and the US have recognised Kosovo as a state Should they now follow Brazil and Argentina and recognising Palestine as a state? David Milliband Well the I mean the phase 2 of the roadmap which was published nearly a decade ago now was for the establishment of a Palestinian state pending phase 3 which would have been the final negotiations over issues beyond borders and one of the debates that's going on in the international community at the moment is whether or not you can recognise a state whose borders are agreed but other aspects of whose constitution and other are not I think it's a legitimate to argue that we should be vaulting to phase 2 of the roadmap even though phase 1 which included an end to all settlement activity has not been achieved tragically in my view, wrongly in my view I mean the Kosovo example is different from the Palestinian one was actually the Palestinians have not declared independence Let's say they might though now haven't they, this month Well no Prime Minister of Palestine has set a two year trajectory to the achievement of the institutions of statehood and he might then go to the UN at that point there are some striking things the Kosovens did declare independence the Palestinians have representation in every capital they have effectively an ambassador here even though the Kosovens never did beforehand and you've got an international consensus about what the basis of a Palestinian state should be the way I would phrase it would be as follows that we need to, if we're going to make progress for the Palestinians then there needs to be a regionalisation of the drive in the Middle East for a peaceful resolution between Israel and its neighbours because I don't think you'll get a Palestinian state without the Syrian and Lebanese issues also being addressed so you've got to regionalise the political drive but you've also got to internationalise the effort simply relying on the Americans alone is not enough, I'd like to see the EU and the UN doing more actually because that's the only way in which you're going to make progress Okay so if the Palestinians did unilaterally declare a state just for the sake of argument as Kosovo has should you recognise them? Well the only answer that any sensible person can give is it depends and it depends on the circumstances at the time doesn't it but what I would say to you people think it's an incredibly radical thing in fact in the document that was written under the Bush administration actually the roadmap phase 2 of the roadmap was for effective recognition of a Palestinian state before the final negotiations had concluded and I think that the situation in Palestine is so bad that all of those sort of ideas need to be properly addressed Toby Kennedy Well I think I would be cautious so I think that there's a, put on my international law hat here for a moment there's, when you say recognise a Palestinian state it sounds like something at once legally technical and also politically very important and it would be both in some way but there's a it's easy to imagine that it's an automatic kind of thing or it has some kind of instantaneous effect or that there's an international law machine you can go to and get a validation sticker of some kind for your statehood as a way of avoiding the difficult kinds of procedures that and discussions that David is putting on the table I think it would it's just unclear how such a declaration or such a recognition would fall onto a very complex political process and that would be the reason for my caution it would be possible to pursue in the international arena a kind of legal antifada it would be possible to try to use international law in a variety of ways to stick the a stick into the bicycle wheel in a variety of different situations in the hopes that one could unstick or reframe the negotiations in some way but like an antifada on the ground a legal antifada is extremely hard to control once it gets going and has very unpredictable outcomes and outcomes that can sometimes be absolutely different than what one anticipated so it's easy to do something in international law because you think you're acting out of principle or because they did it someplace else that seems analogous without taking into account the way that doing will have an impact on and have fall out within a very difficult and fraught political situation so I think it all depends is about the only thing one should say in such a situation Stephen Chan are you going to also give a qualified answer it depends it's partially qualified but not quite so qualified I mean it's qualified to the extent that I would not use Kosovo as my lead example I think the independence that was recognised concerning Kosovo was so contingent and so disputed that it's not exactly the kind of model of independent recognition that you would seek for Palestine but in the case of Palestine in fact here I tend to agree I think with what David Miliband was inferring when he was referring to the roadmap and the idea of recognition before final negotiations had concluded in other words a sort of preemptory move for want of another term and I do think it does have to be changed in some way preemptory despite all the problems that it would give rise to along the lines of what I think David Kennedy was suggesting but I was in Jerusalem this time last year being taken through the different negotiating positions at quite high level if you wait until all those negotiations have refined themselves and come down to settled positions you and I are going to be extremely old people and it isn't going to happen and the dream of some kind of entity for the Palestinians is going to disappear where I think statehood as an entity does have very very desirable consequences is that a recognized state for all of the shortcomings that David has enunciated a recognized state can negotiate better for itself than an entity that is not a recognized state in other words to a certain extent you would then equalize the international playing field in terms of culpability and responsibilities and applications of law is very very important for the Palestinians as an entity to be able to say look we as a state have a certain legal personality and we demand of you the state of Israel also with a legal personality to be treated in a way that legal personalities underneath international law are entitled I think that preempting the situation and moving rapidly to that final part of the roadmap is a desirable diplomatic ambition Lita I think this yes it could have enormous symbolic importance to have a Palestinian state recognized but I wonder whether it will actually solve the problems that Palestinians actually face I mean does the recognition of a state actually endow them with the ability to have any form of sovereignty particularly given the discussion we have been having about this disjunct between international financial and global regulation of various kinds and national sovereignty and will the Palestinian state be able to roll back the settlements will the wall come down or some of the worst aspects of the current situation going to be actually entrenched in the form of recognition so although I think that the intention of the Latin American countries that recognized Palestine as an independent state recently was presumably to try and you know push people back to the table and negotiations and so on it might actually in the long run have a detrimental effect I mean one can't tell response from the floor on this what do you all think does Kosovo if Kosovo why not Palestine if it you know actually clears independence later here just take the microphones I'm really glad that Gita has added this point towards the end of the discussion because I think that talking about the state in the context of Palestine is not I mean we are not only dealing with the idea of a state but we need a viable entity which could only be so if the settlements are gone if the wall is dismantled if people can move around if there are borders, if there are all kinds of things associated with the nation state and with sovereignty ultimately the question is whether the recognition of a Palestinian state would carry with it also you know the enforcement of on Israel to recognize international law and resolutions this I mean you cannot talk about recognizing a state without you know taking into account that Israel has also to be involved into this process and to be forced to recognize so if everybody recognize it would be no good if other countries recognized Palestine, Israel it would be a fake process again I mean we need to give some content and some viability and in order for this to happen Israel should be enforced to to make this possible state viable which means sovereignty borders and so on and so forth so you don't get the Swiss cheese state with the hills okay so you don't get it though Hi Lynn Welshman from the school of law I wanted to follow on what Roba said as well but to add a bit I agree absolutely that the question is very interesting but it can become a question that we can talk about in terms of theory and when it applies and when it's a useful negotiating strategy and when does real state come there has to be land to have a state on there isn't a lot of land left now as we know and so the question really would be is there not something surely the US the EU we all know the question surely something must be possible to do to stop the settlements to stop the confiscation of land with the alienation of even the prospects of the establishment of a viable state which is the only way a viable state has to be a durable state and a peaceful state and in the meantime there is a certain amount already of legal interfather if you like that is going on in terms of assertion or attempts to assert universal jurisdiction for the international criminal prosecution or prosecution internationally of those accused of grave breaches of the 14th Convention against protected Palestinian civilians which is one thing that is not under the control theoretically of states where Palestinians and their allies would seek to have redress and recourse under international law even that is being blocked including by this country where states are capable to do it to try to stop to have to have the Attorney General's permission I'm saying this because it started in the last Labour government of which I was a great supporter and although not on Palestinian Palestine necessarily and it's continuing this government to change the criminal procedural law in that regard and what happens there is that you have the possibility of Palestinians try to activate legal mechanisms and legal strategies if you block those at every stage it means that you are not allowing people to try to make the most of international law as a remedy and then where are people supposed to go except to politics where the one side is so much stronger than the other than what happens you have to think that you have to let law work or something work I'm sorry I'm getting a bit you've packed a lot I'm a lecturer it's awful isn't it very impressive you've not drawn breath your students must be scribbling away as you're speaking any other points please from the floor okay David Mayor did you want to pick up on that point well thanks for your support for the government obviously you're not the government anymore I think it's important that just so that David Kennedy doesn't get the wrong idea there's no question of changing the level of evidence that's required for a prosecution under the universal jurisdiction and there's no question of raising the bar at which prosecution should take place the question is should there be a different bar for an arrest than for a prosecution it's a sort of technical it actually only applies in England not in Scotland it's a peculiarity of English law I think there's a more general point I'd like to make though about the Middle East issue about the Palestinian issue in particular and funnily enough there was an editorial in The Economist last week which I think everyone should actually read it's really important and it's the fundamental issue is this James Baker said in 1991 Secretary of State James Baker he said that it was not right or it was impossible for the rest of the world to want a solution more than the parties themselves it's a very profound thing in other words you can't force people to compromise now the argument of the Economist last week and it's an argument that I've made myself in various fora is that actually if you believe that the failure to resolve the Palestinian issue is a fundamental source of insecurity instability and extremism and killing around the world that the rest of us can suffer maybe we it is legitimate for us to care more about the solution than the parties themselves and therefore it's legitimate for us to consider what we're willing to do to make a solution happen now it's actually a very radical thing to and it's a big rubicon to cross but I would say that anyone here who is a student of international relations needs to think through that fundamental issue because my own judgement is that left to themselves the negotiators will not be able to achieve a resolution because a compromise has become a dirty word in the Israeli political system in quite a dangerous way and on the Palestinian side the division between West Bank and Gaza means that the legitimacy of President Abbas is severely under threat now that creates the circumstances where we all have to think what responsibilities are we willing to take to ourselves or to our own countries or to international institutions in order to force the pace on a solution beyond the speed at which the leaders of the individual states or states to be are willing to go just one final point David Kennedy one thing I wanted to ask you which is you talked about how international law is quite muddled and what is the state and what isn't it I mean why is it so muddled why does southern Sudan get the chance to vote for independence and a referendum whereas Somaliland breakaway state for two decades in Somalia functioning in all but name as a state and nobody recognises it Kosovo, why not Palestine and so on there is a great deal of lack of clarity isn't there an international law yes well and why can't clever brains like you do something about it then because you are a practitioner I think there's a very important strategic question for international lawyers which is what is the strategic value for us of our own clarity so you could imagine that there is something to offer the world in a vernacular for curing on political conversations that's plastic enough to embrace a variety of different positions and to innovate a variety of different solutions that turn out to be very context-appropriate rather than parallel across the world the idea that everybody needed a state that would be exactly the same shape and have exactly the same form had an emancipatory dimension and took legal form but we've learned it's not the right solution in every place to every problem in the effort to try to universalise it brought with it as many difficulties and advantages and emancipatory opportunities politically so I think international lawyers have learned that one size doesn't fit all and that means our project as a profession is a much more complicated one that has to be done in a relationship with political and economic arrangements one thing I'd say about Palestine is this myself I've found myself abandoning the idea of a two-state solution and abandoning the idea of a push for any kind of resolution in the immediate political horizon precisely because I don't think the position David that you just articulated is likely to prove realistic I think it's very unlikely politically that either a solution that would be stable and plausible will be pushed or urged on the parties by the most important political players in the international community nor do I believe any state for Palestine that could be negotiated would be one that would be worthy of the name for all kinds of different reasons and would simply entrench in state form a variety of structural inequalities that in the long run would be unsustainable and so my own sense is that we've locked ourselves into a perceptual sort of perpetual conversation the horizon for which is not a good idea anyway and in that sense it's maybe not a mistake that people have been so loath to adopt it on the ground and what would you so you'd go for what instead I'm actually quite puzzled about what the strategic vision of the Israeli right actually is so it would be very interesting to hear a kind of in the sense of grand strategy what do they expect to have it seems to me they're on a road that is there are two different views one is you hang in there long enough that in the end the Egyptians are forced to take Gaza and the Jordanians take the West Bank that's one idea that they've got I'm obviously not recommending it but there'd be huge second idea is that they cling to Judea and Samaria as the land of Israel and population transfer and population transfer to go with it so there are alternative quote unquote solutions out there my own judgement is that they are whatever the risks of a two state solution they're worse now you're right that the political prospects are not good at the moment and people would be making speeches about the window is closing for a two state solution for five or ten years and eventually the window does close but if you believe as I do that this is a massive source of instability around the world that the injustice that the Palestinians suffer is a massive recruiting sergeant for some of the most deadly forces around the world then you've got to be concerned about throwing up your hands and saying oh well a two state solution isn't going to happen and I think it's very significant that countries including my own three years ago we said for the first time President Obama said it for the first time for the United States that it was in the national interest of the United States to have a two state solution that is a big thing to say because if it's in your national interest that means you're responsible to making it happen and I think we should live up to that Anybody else want to say okay yeah, two click microphone because you've got a couple more questions before we run out of time Hi, I'm Bill Fryer I'm with the SOAS communications office I have some questions from Twitter that I've been trying to find a way to work into the discussion so I'm hoping I can ask these to broaden this last question a little bit about a statehood and human rights two questions first for David Miliband have the human rights of islanders in places such as Chagos and St Helena in a city of foreign policy and one for the whole group would we ever see a Kurdish state Okay, let's just say the Kurdish state since we're already on states putative ones or otherwise and the Chagos islanders one very quickly though don't worry David, it'll be a very brief response because we've still got more to do what was the question about the other state which state was it oh yeah the Kurdish state Kurdistan, should there be a Kurdistan what presumably incorporating the bits of Iraq bits of Syria and bits of Turkey bring them all together, is that what you mean and Iran all of them, okay so it sounds like it's not just the northern part of Iraq that this question is about but the Kurds wherever they exist in these four countries, neighbouring countries I'll just say something very quick I was just in Erbil last month and that's not part of the discussion among the Kurdish leadership in the Kurdish region of Iraq at the moment and so it's not something that seems to me to be a politically active question, in fact there's a gigantic rapprochement underway between Turkey and the Kurdish region of Iraq and Iraq more generally as there is between Iran and Iraq and a variety of other reasons and for other purposes so it doesn't seem to me to be a question that is the horizon for answering the question would demand a kind of prognostication and that's beyond what one can see now okay Stephen Tender want to respond on that Kurdish state very briefly just to agree with David Kennedy I think that's quite right I mean provided the rapprochement is well managed for a long time to come and all kinds of developmental benefits keep flowing to this region not just in terms of Turkey and Iraq but also all the other countries that have as it were some interest there as well yes the position can be kept stable now having said that it's also one of these positions that could quite easily become inflamed in the future so just because there's some stasis there now and the situation is manageable now doesn't mean that this question can then be left to posterity it may return to haunt us sooner rather than later so this one does demand a watching brief Yti, do you want to make a comment on this? Well I think I agree with that I think that a lot of the Kurdish nationalists have actually settled for fighting for more autonomy within the states that they're in and what's interesting about Iraq is that the Kurdish region has really served as a beacon of relative peace I mean the women who are active over there are embattled with their own regional authority but they have a much better situation than women in the rest of Iraq and they've actually led the way in terms of holding discussions and changing the law and a number of things I mean it's a complex picture but it's an interesting example of a region that's historically felt hugely done down which has had genocidal policies pursued against it but it has recovered to be able to actually create a leadership role within the country David Miliband, Kurdish state either within Northern Iraq I was asked to write on Cheygo's Island there was a grave injustice done in the 50s and 60s for which successive British governments have offered profuse apologies and for which compensation was paid there are still issues going in front of the European Court of Human Rights for the right of islanders to go back and that's perfectly legitimate that they should be able to pursue those through the courts I think on the one of the most remarkable things in my time as France secretary was the change in the relations between Northern Iraq and Turkey and I spent some time of my own working for that and it's very very significant and the latest discoveries of gas in Northern Iraq will only serve to promote the sort of cooperation across state lines that I think is very very beneficial to both sides Didn't they hear we are as so as I'm sure some history Professor can tell us I mean after the Ottoman Empire was disbanded at the end of the First World War the Kurds were all brought together I think in London weren't they asked if they wanted a state and they couldn't agree amongst one another because they're all a bit different aren't they the Turkish Kurds and the Iraqi Kurds a different language almost I think in many cases am I right in saying that yes good okay very quickly and then we need to move on Sorry my name is Nadia Lali and I just wanted to come in I agree that it's not a political issue right now on something that's you know fought for but I think on the level of ordinary Iraqi Kurds certainly they think of themselves as Kurdistani right now and I think there's an increasing problem that there's a tension between the political leadership and people on the ground who are increasingly getting frustrated you know politicians who are part of the liberation movement who are now doing real politics and the Iraqi Kurdish population do not feel represented by them anymore. And that's the other side of the question on the Twitter which is just that Northern Iraq part and of course if the president of a united Iraq is still our telebani occurred himself then we take your point okay a question professor Nadia Lali, professor of gender studies and chair of the centre for gender studies right on cue again lots of professors at this thing isn't it I feel quite outnumbered I have to go a bit closer to you David Miliband this side Okay on January 1st 2011 UN Women which is a new body UN body dedicated to gender equality and women's empowerment officially began its work and according to the world health organisation gender based violence continues to be massive health and human rights issue throughout the world so I'd like to ask the panel what should we do to fight gender based violence globally Okay Gita a very important thing of course GBV what can we do about fighting it globally A lot of my friends were involved with arguing for this new entity and I must say that I've always been very skeptical about whether having a more powerful entity is really going to make much difference on the ground the reason for this is not that it doesn't do good work it obviously does support women's organisations in various places different branches of the UN do in combating gender based violence and changing the law and so on but I think there are the two larger questions where parts of the UN parts of the international financial institutions are actually doing things that are detrimental to women's rights and therefore to reducing gender based violence and there are two broad things one is the infrastructural issues that we talked about earlier that states are basically being told to dismantle such infrastructures they have and as we are as you said David we are discussing in Britain at the moment where everything can be run by the voluntary sector I think the possibility of a state deciding on some kind of social democratic solution where it ensures basic rights for its people has really diminished and I don't think women's rights can be seen as separate from that so there is a large infrastructural question the other one is this issue of international financial regulation because marching alongside that and virtually unnoticed the World Bank some years ago had a commission called legal empowerment for the poor and one of the things that they basically decided to do and I'm going to give you a very crude account of it but I think it is almost that crude what's going on is that a lot of the rule of law projects and there's some very good ones which are about improving the functioning of courts and so on but one large part of the functioning of courts is about getting poor people and family law and women basically out of the court system so that they don't clog up the courts with litigation and divorce and custody and various other issues and all this is to be put into something called ADR alternative dispute resolution or alternative systems or strengthening and the UN is doing some seriously dangerous work working with Jirgars and other things to strengthen their human rights capacities but actually completely against what local human rights advocates are fighting for that's a really really dangerous long-term development because at the same time governments have also allied with fundamentalists in various ways and I'm talking about western governments promoting them abroad including the Labour Party during the Labour administration in Pakistan, Afghanistan Bangladesh and so on precisely because they really believe that if you're going to contain terrorism that you have to put some sort of fundamentalist in charge to keep most of the Muslim population in check and so at the same time as doing these rule of law projects you're actually getting forces in who are promoting blasphemy laws and so on and so on and in the UN itself is being undermined for within with resolutions on defamation of religion and so on I think these things are not usually taken into account when you're looking at gender-based violence and what's happening to women's rights generally these things are seen as separate from women's rights and they're absolutely central to whether women's rights can be achieved within a structure where women are actually subjects of human rights and actually citizens, full citizens of their countries You have to find a way of mobilising political leadership in some way making sure you've got the right leadership to try to address I think these things have been put into completely separate boxes of discussion and I think they need to be brought together Running short of time so can I ask you to keep your comments relatively brief sadly on such a key issue but Stephen Chan I think the issue is very very much want to do with citizen rights not something which can be compartmentalised very very easily but something which is very much to do with the rights of all people irrespective of gender or any other kind of demarcation it's very key and the constitutionalised rights of all citizens which demands some kind of state of this as well I think that's an expectation that everybody should have I think it's an expectation my parents had when they were refugees wandering the world looking for a constitutionalised location in which they could settle and bring up their children it's something which is an expectation I think of hundreds of people here at so has and I really do feel a bit tired sometimes of grand universal declarations I think there are all kinds of myriad problems at local levels that demand all kinds of very very detailed local ways of addressing them but all very much within the rubric of your rights as a constitutionalised citizen Davie Kennedy what can we do about GBV and we have to address this climate of impunity and get women to seek redress to this kind of violence certainly but I think the idea that when the UN has taken up the issue we should feel something's positive is not one that I find often seems correct I think we miss two important points when thinking about gender violence as something that can be internationalised and legalised in that way either from an administrator or from a normative point of view the first is that a very particular idea about gender justice and a particular idea often a criminalisation idea about gender violence is what has been taken up by the international public legal order in the name of addressing gender violence in our own societies we know that that's a component of a much larger set of issues and a much larger set of policies that needs to be considered together with other things so very often when things get promoted to the international level they get reduced to something particular kind of intervention that may not be the most wise and the second is the point that I think very importantly put on the table international law has a puzzling way of imagining that all the norms that have to do with women have the word women in them and that's just not right the most important normative structures affecting the status of women and the possibilities for women in the world are not written in codes about women they're written in financial regulations and in a variety of different other forms of law and forms of political life that people with economics phobia and math phobia still tragically need to find out about and so I would encourage those who care about gender justice to become engaged across a wider range of issues and to become engaged across a wider range of tools than those that are customarily available at the UN and international public law level I mean you say that I mean it is critical of the fact that Michelle Bachelet has been set up as this new UN Supremo for Women and Margo Wallstrom the UN Special Envoy to increase recognition of the fact that sexual violence is used as a tool and consequence of conflict I mean surely that's a good thing isn't it I mean that that is being done it's not sufficient it's not sufficient but I mean isn't it good to just increase recognition of this but anyway David Miliband you're responsible this is a massive issue Hillary Clinton put out a statement of many speech last year in which she said that 3 out of 10 women in the world would suffer violence in the course of their lives I mean that is an absolutely staggering statistic I'd say two things about it one the question I talked about fighting it globally I wonder if that's right I think we're better off fighting it locally and maybe that speaks to this UN point the violence that's suffered in the eastern, in the Kivus in the Democratic Republic of Congo you can pass as many resolutions as you like at the UN but unless sexual violence is fought locally it's not going to change and I think that it's only through local engagement where there has been progress Hillary cited this in her speech last year has been places where men as well as women have taken on the task of tackling it and I think that's quite important the second thing is I wonder if it's right to say that women's rights should just be subsumed in wider citizens' rights and I say that as the only politician on the platform in the following sense this is partly a political issue fighting for attention, fighting for priority, fighting for funding and all sorts of academic arguments that I'm not aware of about why women's rights should be subsumed in a wider constitutional order of citizens' rights or civilian rights but as a politician I would say to you I would think that is probably a bad move the statistics and the lives that are being distorted by this violence the numbers are so great I would I think we're going to make more progress if we keep its specificity and its singularity rather than subsuming into a wider set of citizens' rights arguments that's just my political judgment because we're running short of time do you want a very quick response to that? I agree, you've changed your mind that's quick no no, I think that from a political point of view one wants to keep the question of gender justice alive and its specificity but one wants to address it in a way that's broad gauge and that doesn't isolate the remedies or globalise them in a very differentiated and local way so I see myself as agreeing both with a diplomatic person you are a very briefly response one more question I wish David would have said the thing about local not global when it came to women's rights in Afghanistan and Iraq because I think there when I ask the question I'm thinking I'm very conscious of the fact that actually global intervention in terms of women's rights and gender empowerment has actually created a backlash against women's rights and empowerment and from what I've studied and seen in Iraq has actually created a backlash in greater gender based violence and I also think that the UN I mean I'm asked this question because I personally think that in context like Palestine and Iraq where the UN has been so discredited of course the UN is not going to be able to make any kind of positive impacts where women's rights are concerned very briefly final question Croft and Black secret prisons and extraordinary renditions investigator for reprieve human rights organisation that uses law to enforce human rights of prisoners where are you? Does the panel agree that we are safer as a result of the use of torture in counter-terrorism operations in recent years? Let's just vote Let's just vote a sentence Are we safer? I mean waterboarding George Bush admitted using that on Khadir Sheikh Mohammed the mastermind of 9-11 so-called mastermind that kind of thing okay I don't know but my intuition is certainly not Stephen I don't think we're safer I think it just reads far far greater discontent and resentment we're asking for trouble Eda I very much doubt we're safer and in any case we all know there has been a huge unjustified fight back to against the attack on the absolute prohibition on torture and I think that was a very important fight back but I do think that one of the main issues that has really been left largely unaddressed is that because people were dumped in a law-free zone in Guantanamo and many other detention centres they weren't put before proper court and we don't have proper accountability for many people who should have been in front of a court like Khaled Mohammed Sheikh have not yet been in front of a court and other people have been treated as martyrs and as perfect victims when actually they should have been put in front of a court that doesn't justify the torture No the answer is no, torture is abhorrent it's illegal and it's perverse in its effects I don't think it's a difficult question to answer I don't think it's a very easy one I've got much time, quick final question from Katrina Drew from this centre the director of this centre this centre Shall I spell it out Thank you Students who come to SOAS famously want to change the world which of the panellist's career paths would most allow them to do this and why Okay so just very briefly I'll work my way down Well I couldn't even change Amnesty International so I've significantly failed to change the world I think being a filmmaker is probably the most useful thing that I've done in terms of a huge widespread impact on hundreds of thousands of people millions of people Well for instance my film on war crimes in which we investigated three British Bangladeshis some of whom had many breakfasts with the prime minister and so on who became partners in the war on terror but we investigated them for very serious allegations David Milligan My first career aspiration was to be a London bus conductor and they don't even have bus conductors on London buses anymore I would strongly defend the integrity of politics as a fundamental way in which to change the world politics is an honourable and vital vocation and it's a vocation that needs people of all ages backgrounds and views and I think that when the political realm loses its sense of vitality and integrity then our societies have no chance of improvement So you're not moving to the BBC then No Is that Is that right? You're staying a politician are you? Absolutely I've always said I'm going to serve my constituents in South Shields But you might moonlight a bit Moonlighting That's a rather derogatory way of putting it I think some people might consider me moonlighting now rather than voting on the European Union Bill which is going through the House of Commons just as we speak So you don't want my job that's good I could never do your job as well as you do David Kennedy It's when you try and do my job that the trouble is found David Kennedy Well I don't think we need to choose just one So I think one of the things that's come out in the course of the evening and the very interesting kinds of discussions that are organised by the centre here are the variety of ways in which people can try to become effective I had the idea early in my career to be Henry Kissinger for good and that didn't work out so well and I became convinced that changing ideas is an important way in which the world also changes but I think being an agent of change is not about finding the right slot it's about finding the right passion And final word to our very own so as Professor Stephen Jan Well sometimes I think my life has been a complete failure I've been involved in many things in my life I began life as a diplomat and as a peacekeeper I then came on to being an academic I'm not sure I've changed anything at all but some small things sometimes do give as it were interim satisfaction and I suppose I could conclude with some of the small things I mean when set up and David Miller band and I were in Trinidad at the end of 2009 at the commonwealth conference I took a day off and went down to the slum areas and wound up financing the slums Christmas party which we've done again this year this last Christmas just gone by it's a small gesture it cost almost nothing in our terms in terms of British currency brought a great deal of happiness I'm not sure whether that's brought peace to anybody these are violent areas sometimes I think that if you can leave as it were at least a smile on people's faces even for a short time it's better than nothing otherwise it's very often nothing thank you very much I'll just button up the evening for you now Stephen Chan, David Kennedy, David Millivan Gita Seigel, thank you all very much and thank you to you too, bye bye