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Security Through Peace with Justice

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Security Through Peace with Justice Security Through Peace With Justice A possible contribution to ACFID’s Australia Ahead of the Curve: An Agenda for International Development to 2025 John Langmore An illuminating perspective for analysing international development is through the vision of security for all. Security is a word which encapsulates many of the fundamental goals of development: freedom from fear of poverty, danger and debilitating anxiety. The goal of security for individuals, communities and nations is equivalent to seeking wellbeing for all. When a member of parliament I concluded that the quality which most effectively summarised what voters wanted from government was security. It includes economic security – employment, adequate income, accessible good quality services; local, national and international order and safety; and environmental security – ecological protection and restraint of climate change. Security is a fundamental human need. To flourish we all seek the loyal love of relations and friends. Flourishing also requires that we give loving care to family and friends, colleagues and clients, neighbours and strangers. Human development requires inclusive, secure communities of equitable respect, recognition and support: it takes a village, as the next US president has written. Aiming to strengthen security is a foundational vision for the process of development. Individuals can’t truly prosper unless collective wellbeing is assured. Similarly Australia cannot be secure unless the countries in our region also feel secure. So, it is essential for Australian security that we seek ways of contributing to the justice and peace of the regional and global systems. Australia’s national interest requires that we seek systemic change which increases the capacity of countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Their security, as ours, depends on strengthening capacity for improving the wellbeing of their peoples. This note reflects on a few of the top priorities which the SDGs suggest for Australians concerned about security during the next decade, and concludes with discussion of a powerful but relatively neglected national goal: seeking and contributing to peace with justice. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals was an astounding global political achievement. After three years of intellectual and political debate the UN General Assembly adopted the 17 goals and 169 targets in September 2015. This provides a politically authoritative framework for setting both national priorities and selecting effective means of supporting international development. Their emphases on equality, environmental responsibility, meeting needs for food, housing, clean water, accessible, quality health and education services and so on are signposts for supportive strategy. Three of the most obvious next steps for Australia’s international engagement are reversing the aid cuts, increasing the refugee intake and rapidly expanding the means for production of renewable energy in Australia and developing countries. Clearly Australia’s astoundingly mean-spirited and destructive aid cuts must stop and the volume of disaster relief and development assistance be rapidly and dramatically rebuilt. The greedy, partisan neglect of the Australia’s national interest, through failing to build cooperative international relations which these cuts involved, must be repudiated. The utter hypocrisy of advocating humanitarian relief for Syria in the UN Security Council while slashing Australia’s capacity to contribute shrieks for apology and change. It is vital too to restore and increase financing for UN funds, programs and agencies which are working for sustainable human development and peaceful conflict resolution. Not only must budget aid be dramatically increased but innovative sources of finance for development introduced. For example, establishment of an innovative, equitable new form of revenue raising could eliminate the fiscal restraint on renewing aid. A currency transaction tax (what used to be known by some as a Tobin tax), which was successfully introduced by South Korea in 2011 to increase economic stability, would be ideal. Rapid expansion of the intake of asylum seekers to say the 60,000 a year proposed by the Uniting Church would allow Australia to make a useful contribution to providing new homes for refugees, as well as strengthening the Australian economy. Targeted support for new and expanding solar and wind-power enterprises in Australia and developing countries could be cost-effective methods of stimulating reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and increasing employment. Such policies are obvious to anyone concerned about achieving the SDGs. They may be less difficult to achieve than some imagine since support for aid, refugees and preventing climate change remain strong and are growing. However, sustained, determined advocacy to the community, the major parties and parliamentary cross-bench members and to the small-minded News Ltd papers, television and radio stations is essential. Less equivocal and more self-confident advocacy would be more effective. There is another area of national life and strategy which might valuably receive much more attention: the potential contribution of conflict resolution to strengthening security and providing a cost-effective means for Australia and other countries to end the arms race into which they are tending to settle. Attempting Peaceful Conflict Resolution Violent conflict is one of the greatest impediments to economic, social and sustainable development. Ban Ki-moon reports that between 2008 and 2014 the number of active civil wars almost tripled, from four to 11. This reverses the declining trend of violent conflict since the end of the Cold War. Civilian populations have been increasingly targeted, often through brutal atrocity crimes, frequently involving sexual violence against women and children. Antonio Guterres said in 2015, while UN High Commissioner for Refugees, that ‘There has been a staggering escalation of forced displacement’. In 2010 11,000 people a day were displaced by conflict. In 2014 this had risen to 43,000 people a day. So there are now around 60 million displaced people, higher than has ever been recorded before. What this means, he went on to say, is that ‘we live in a world in which the capacity to prevent conflicts and to resolve them in a timely fashion is practically non-existent.’ In Number 16 of the SDGs all member states of the UN accepted responsibility for promoting ‘peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development’, and for providing ‘access to justice for all … ‘. The first of the targets under this goal is to ‘Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere’. So we share in the global commitment to seeking and implementing more effective means of peaceful conflict resolution. We already had that commitment because of our membership of the UN. The United Nations was established principally and centrally ‘To maintain international peace and security’ (UN Charter, Article 1, paragraph 1). The Charter continues that every member state is required ‘to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace … and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes …’ The Charter gives primary responsibility to the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security. However, in Article 33 it requires the parties to any dispute to seek a solution through ‘negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice’. So all UN member states have responsibility for developing the capacity for seeking conflict resolution through peaceful means and of implementing those mechanisms whenever addressing a conflict. The Charter does not suggest that such mechanisms will always be effective but it does require that all members attempt to use them. This principal requirement of UN membership has been very unevenly implemented, including by Australia. Effective implementation requires the committed action of every member state. Yet though the 2016 Defence White Paper acknowledges that ‘Australia’s security and prosperity relies on a stable, rules-based global order which supports the peaceful resolution of disputes’, other than mentioning the value of trade, this report had nothing to say about how to contribute to peaceful conflict resolution. Even peace-keeping was only cursorily mentioned. The purpose of peace processes is to take all credible and potentially effective action to avoid ‘the scourge of war’. Not only does this include minimising the destruction of human life and physical assets, but it could also contribute to enabling reduction in the astonishing cost of Australian military ‘preparedness’. In 2016 – 17 defence expenditure is budgeted to total $33 billion, which is $89 million a day. It would be timely to rigorously analyse whether Australia’s security is most effectively maximised by such huge military spending, while cutting aid and starving the diplomats and Australian Federal Police of adequate funds. Is it really responsible to plan to order 12 new submarines, each of which is likely to cost in the region of $3 billion, which is more than twice Australia’s total spending on diplomacy? When Australia announces
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