At the end of June, I spoke to European peace activists in a meeting organized by the International Peace Bureau, as part of its ongoing initiative on Common Security. The following is my presentation, edited to include sources and minor updates.
I will talk today about how we need to speak honestly and openly what happened over the last 30 or 35 years, and what brought us to this current moment, so we can begin to have a different conversation, about Common Security.
I’m going to start with how I realized this while working in grassroots activism, in marginal places that are worst affected by armed conflict and other forms of violence and oppression. Like Chechnya and the North Caucasus, or eastern and southern Ukraine, or Belarus. I’ve worked with activists in these communities for over 20 years. I had long had a vague feeling that civil society and particularly peace and human rights movements were being twisted into instruments of donor countries’ foreign and security policies, which they were wielding to the detriment of their opponents (of course back then we didn’t refer to them as opponents). I had no words to describe this then, but I do now.
But I also thought that if we did everything right in grassroots civil society, according to the best practices from graduate school courses and UN manuals and the like, we could resist this harmful trend. And then we could still get towards peace, democracy and justice on our continent, and of course elsewhere, too.
Over the years of working with grassroots activists, though, I watched how our spaces and our work were being manhandled, distorted and eroded by Western foreign policy and especially bilateral foreign aid agencies, the latter in turn following agendas developed by foundations acting as a sort of vanguard of ideas. And of course, in many post-Soviet countries and not only there, domestic security services and governments also exerted more and more pressure on activists, and worse, though this was often to a significant extent in response to the prior instrumentalization of activists by foreign actors. Between the geopolitical agendas of Western governments and the suspicion and repression of local governments, genuine grassroots mobilization was undermined.
The unipolar moment was many things, but it was also the era in which foreign-funded NGOs became a thing, a big thing: they exploded in numbers and resources. In my work, that was mostly Western-funded NGOs inside the former Soviet Union, but it played out along similar lines elsewhere in the Global South.
In the 1990s, NGOs were all the rage. They were supposed to somehow, miraculously, solve the problems which governments, diplomats, international organizations had not been able to solve. Already then, wise people started diagnosing something called NGOization: instead of movements borne by citizens and accountable to them, instead of para-political institutions that socialize society, we got freestanding social entrepreneurs and technocratic managers, who formed elites powered by foreign money and whose ideas and activities were often out of sync with their communities.
The dysfunction and harm that has come from this is well-known. This NGO industry, this specific form of soft power projected by the West into the rest, is facing a crisis moment. Last fall, even Foreign Policy Magazine put out an issue with a lead article, by Adam Tooze of all people, provocatively titled “The End of Development”. By this, he means the end of development aid as a practice and a form of politics as we have known it for decades and especially in the post-Cold War period of High Technocracy. In the same issue, another article, “Why the world turned on NGOs”, describes how NGOs were once the golden child among foreign policy actors and are now pariahs.
Let me explain with the story of a field I know intimately - feminist peace activism. Feminist anti-war movements developed a sophisticated understanding of women, war and peace over more than a century, until they were finally able to pour it into the Women, Peace and Security agenda adopted by the UN Security Council 26 years ago -as resolution 1325.
And then this agenda was turned on its head: it became about putting more women in uniform and tanks, about how women can help make armies more “lethal”. It became about women piloting drones and launching missiles. It sidelined actual women peace leaders. It took away the few resources women’s movements have and gave them to men and to militarism. Organizations like NATO can simply buy themselves the feminist label and agenda, because they can easily put on conferences and sponsor other flashy public-facing events, while feminist activists are penniless and silenced. This causes enormous harm to women activists and even more to all women affected by war.
If we zoom out from the NGO industry and civil society to a higher level of international relations, there is a book titled “The Cunning of Gender Violence. Geopolitics and Feminism”, which argues that in Western establishment discourse, our opponents are written off as patriarchal and misogynist so they can be targeted with war. We have all witnessed this. “Men oppress women and girls in Afghanistan, Iran or Gaza, therefore we should bomb that country, including, unfortunately, the women and girls in it, but it is ultimately for their own good.”
There is even a cottage industry trying to draw Russia as the antidote to Western women’s rights and equality and tying this to the current war between Russia and Ukraine, as if escalating the war to somehow defeat Russia was the feminist thing to do.
What does all of this have to do with Common Security? A lot!
If we rebuilt our international relations along a Common Security model, civil society activism would no longer be captured, distorted and discarded in the pursuit of zero-sum geopolitical competition. The spaces needed for liberation, representation and solidarity could open up again, oxygen would flood back in. Our ideas and labor could no longer be instrumentalized for their tawdry opposites. Real civic mobilization, incidentally the only thing that can ever halt militarism, could then begin to revive.
In the outline for today’s conversation, there is a diagnosis that we are witnessing “the decline of international law and transactional power politics, the new arms race and the collapse of the disarmament regime, the dangers of a possible escalation of the war in Ukraine and the catastrophic consequences of the wars raging across various continents, climate change and the growing gap between rich and poor, as well as the expansion of nuclear arsenals”.
But this didn’t happen because leaders became forgetful, didn’t study history, or simply as a result of a series of unfortunate, but entirely coincidental, events. It happened because of the pursuit of specific grand strategies by the West. And also by others, although the latter arguably in response to the grand strategies the West pursued. We have to name these grand strategies, describe them, acknowledge that they are ruinous for all of us and the world, so that we can dismantle and reject them and devise new grand strategies that return us to arms control and disarmament, deescalation, ending wars, making diplomacy the default and the norm and that enable us to tackle the great challenges of our new era, namely climate change and oligarchy-level inequality.
I don’t actually like talking about grand strategy. It is such a pompous term. The kind of people who talk about it a lot are usually not very nice. But a grand strategy is basically the answer to the question “who do we want to be in this world, and which means will we use to that end?” A Common Security approach isn’t just an operational handbook for day-to-day international relations, it is in fact a grand strategy. Therefore, if we want Common Security, we have to relinquish the grand strategy we are pursuing to date.
So let’s name the grand strategy that has brought us to this brink: Western primacy (or US primacy that is vicariously enjoyed by Western allies); the end of history; unipolarity or the unipolar moment; the Wolfowitz doctrine of global US hegemony; the empire; predatory hegemony as Stephen Walt has recently termed it. These past days, I have come across variations of those terms that reverberate with the naked, heightened stakes of our specific moment: “rich-country militarism”, “white nationalist End of History”, “Western hegemonic anxiety”.
Attendant features of this order are - or until not long ago were - a global economic and financial order that heavily benefits rich, industrialized and technology-hoarding nations; hegemony of Western political and economic ideas, culture, corporations etc; quasi-colonial regimes in a number of regions, such as the Middle East, West Africa, but also, closer to home, Bosnia and Kosovo; the capture of multilateral institutions by Western geopolitical and ideological agendas, for example many of the UN development agencies or - since we are talking about Olaf Palme and Common Security - of the OSCE - rendering these institutions tainted and (at least in the eyes of those opponents with whom we must find a way back to peace) beyond redemption.
If we want Common Security, we must get to a politics that rejects the pursuit of dominance - military, economic, ideological. We must be honest with ourselves about how Common Security isn’t just a different technique that gets us to the same outcome as zero-sum geopolitical competition: to primacy, or the end of history, where all other states become like us, but also accept our dominance. Common Security gets us to a different outcome, one in which other states and regions have interests and can thrive and where their sovereignty is respected.
An outcome where the West is no longer the leader in everything, so that everyone can feel secure. As Anton Jäger late last year described it as “After a century in which Europe was in charge, with highly ambiguous results, [such a relative decline] might free Europeans of the burdening neurosis of mastery.”
Interesting article - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/breakdown-in-pakistan?r=6ba8w&utm_medium=ios