2nd Symposium for Senior NATO/PfP LEGADs (SSL): Challenges regarding Legal Interoperability, organized by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a pleasure to be with you this evening – thank you to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy for your kind invitation.

I am particularly grateful for this rather unique opportunity to exchange views with such a distinguished group of military lawyers.

Let me tell you why: The Yale Professor Grant Gilmore once said that the “function of the lawyer is to preserve a skeptical relativism in a society hell-bent for absolutes.”

That antipathy towards ambivalence is true for any part of society, but perhaps none more so than for the military, where decisions are often enough matters of life or death.

In that context, to resist the temptation of absolutes, to retain nuance and accept uncertainty, is as difficult as it is commendable. It is also a skill that serves well when engaging with more general political questions. And that is why I am looking forward to this exchange. To make it that – an exchange, that is – I will limit my remarks to around 15 minutes and then open it up for your observations.

There is a lot of ground to cover. As a starting point, I think it would be helpful to look at the big picture.

As professionals in the field of peace and security, you could be forgiven for taking a grim view of the current state of the world.

If you look at the map, you see a complex web of protracted conflicts, stretching from Mali, Libya and Somalia to Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. These conflicts are interrelated, as the same fighters go from one place to the next under the banner of global terrorism.

We are witnessing dramatic violations of international humanitarian law, human rights law and refugee law, but guaranteeing accountability is oftentimes impossible, no matter the perpetrator.

As conflicts proliferate and alliances on the ground shift in complex and often contradictory ways, the spectre of grand power confrontation no longer feels unimaginable. And despite recent encouraging signs on the Korean peninsula, nuclear anxiety has not been this palpable since the heydays of the Cold War.

The geopolitical picture is a grim one. But unfortunately not even half the list of concerns. Every conflict pales in comparison to the overpowering threat of climate change, which is crossing tipping point after tipping point, just as our actions to remedy it stall.

Our failure to respond adequately to climate change links to the dark side of globalisation and technology: escalating inequality and with it, growing resentment and mistrust between citizens and their governments. Fraying our social fabric. Fanning the flames of populist outrage. Calling into question the very foundation of our social order, political systems, and – by direct extension – the multilateral order we all serve.

It is not difficult to draw a direct line between social grievance, economic despair, failing institutions, and the eruption of open conflicts.

A little over seven years ago, in a small provincial town in Tunisia, the local police confiscated the wares of a vegetable seller because he had refused to pay a bribe. When he went to the provincial government to complain, he was not allowed inside the building. Humiliated and dejected, the young man, Muhammad Bouazizi, poured fuel over himself and set himself on fire. News of his death sparked mass demonstrations, first in the town, soon all over the country. Within a month, Tunisia’s dictator would be ousted, felling the first domino in the line that triggered the Arab Spring. The drivers of outrage were strikingly similar across the different countries: a lack of trust in institutions at all levels, fuelled by blatant injustice and staggering inequality.

Today, little has remained of the optimism that greeted the fall of dictators. Of the six Arab countries in which massive peaceful protests called for hated rulers to go in 2011, two have imploded – with their central states replaced by warring militias – others are as authoritarian as they were before, and one, Syria, has descended into an abyss.

We are facing a true Gordian knot of conflicts in the Middle East. The failure to achieve meaningful progress towards their resolution has many reasons. But chief among them is the mistaken idea that the international community can deal with each one separately or in succession, and that stability can be possible without addressing root causes such as the failure of institutions or the economic crisis that manifests itself in staggering numbers of youth unemployment. The outrage over social injustices, the persistent distrust in government and the system at large create a dangerous seedbed for discontent. As the Arab Spring has shown, it does not always take a bullet to ignite the powder keg.

So far, so bad. At this point, however, I would count on you to deploy your “skeptical relativism” and question whether another reading – less grim perhaps – of the state of the world might in fact be possible.

The first step in that analysis is looking beyond the headlines and front pages of our newspapers. Front pages are grim for the same reason that Shakespeare’s plays feature a lot of murders. Tragedy is dramatic. Bad things often happen suddenly and telegenically. The closure of a factory; a terror attack. Hardly anyone would read a story headlined “NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY” – even though that has been true for every day in the past 25 years.

Looking at the underlying data, rather than sensationalist headlines, unveils a very different picture – an image not of imminent decline, but of steady, cumulative progress.

The share of people killed annually in wars is less than a quarter of that in the 1980s and half a percent of the toll in the Second World War. During the 20th century, Americans became 96% less likely to die in a car crash, 92% less likely to perish in a fire and 95% less likely to expire on the job. Street vendors in South Sudan have mobile phones whose computing power far exceeds that of the Apollo Space Capsule that landed the first humans on the moon in 1969.

What are we to make of all this? You can paint a plausible picture of the world on the brink of collapse, but you can equally sketch out why we might just be living in the best of times.

I would draw three insights.

First, that the challenges we face are real, existential, and among the most dangerous we ever faced. But nothing – not climate change, not technological disruption, not inequality – is independent of human action. We are the masters of our fate. Our actions matter.

And this means that secondly, we have the ability to resolve them. The point of the incredible stories of progress in our recent past is that we have reasons to be optimistic. Not blind optimism, but hard-earned optimism, rooted in very real progress.

Thirdly, any action must be global and universal. We simply cannot successfully deal with the multiplicity of challenges we face either sequentially or in isolation. For every challenge can swiftly become crises faced by all – carbon emissions know no boundaries, distant conflicts lead to refugee flows and weak healthcare systems in a remote island state can lead to worldwide pandemics. This interrelation of challenges produces intricate causalities: public outrage over social injustices or a lack of trust in institutions can prove just as explosive as more conventional triggers for military conflict. To prevent conflicts, we need a holistic approach focused on root causes.

These three insights are at the core of why I am such a strong believer in the power and promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Goals.

The Agenda is the logical conclusion from the three insights – human agency, optimism, and universality.

A crucial aspect of the Agenda’s importance is the ways in which it has given new unity and direction to our work across disciplines, organizations and geographies.

The universal and integrated nature of the SDGs challenges us to work in a more horizontal and collaborative manner than we have ever done before. It really has become our common roadmap.

In that way, the Agenda has become a blueprint for – and this brings me to the topic of your seminar – improving interoperability.

The good news is that this collaboration increasingly happens organically. Just as legal interoperability facilitates integration across different geographies, so too does the integrative momentum of the SDGs break down anachronistic divides between organizations.

This is particularly true for Geneva, the operational hub of the international system. Home to over 100 international organizations, some 400 non-governmental organizations, representatives of 175 states, a vibrant private sector and world-class academic institutions – Geneva is a unique ecosystem for collaboration and partnerships, whose impacts are felt across the world.

These impacts are by no means abstract. They are felt in a very direct way, by every person on the planet, in any 24-hour period.

I mentioned earlier how Americans today are 96% less likely to die in a car crash. Well, behind this tremendous statistic lies the work of the Sustainable Transport Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe here in Geneva, which in the 1950s established a working party of experts on technical requirements of vehicles that wrote global rules to ensure the safety of cars.

You can make a similar connection between the cellphone of the Sudanese street vendor I mentioned before. The World Wide Web, which opens up the entirety of human knowledge on this single hand-held device, was invented down the street at CERN. The dialling codes for international calls are allocated through the International Telecommunications Union. Health risks are monitored by the World Health Organization. The rights of workers of who assembled the phone are protected through the International Labor Organization.

Many of these actions are technical and low-profile, but they accumulate to produce incredible progress for all of humanity. They are also powerful evidence of the value of the embattled multilateral system.

As blind nationalism and the pursuit of narrowly defined national interests threatens to fracture our world, we do well to remember the value of pursuing the common good.

Which brings me to my final point – namely connecting everything I said so far and applying it to our priorities for the years ahead.

The first relates to the grim geopolitical picture I painted before.

Today, the Charter’s Principles – non-use of force, peaceful settlement of disputes, non-intervention, self-determination and the sovereign equality of Member States – remain the foundation of international relations.

The values it proclaims – equal rights, non-discrimination, tolerance and good neighbourliness – remain guideposts for global harmony.

However, the challenges we face have evolved, the drivers of conflict have become more complex and the consequences of instability now flow far beyond their source.

So, while the Charter’s Principles are as relevant as ever, we must continue to update its tools.

That work starts with prevention.

In the past ten years, the international community spent $233 billion on humanitarian response, peacekeeping and hosting refugees.

And if the financial cost is unsustainable, the human cost is unbearable.

Here then is the priority: Instead of responding to crises, we need to invest far more in prevention. Prevention works, saves lives, and is cost-effective.

A recent study by the UN and World Bank estimates that better funded, more focused preventive action could have saved the international community between $5 billion and $70 billion per year.

Preventing crises is primarily the responsibility of Member States. Chapter VI of the Charter describes the tools that are available to them for that purpose.

Negotiation. Enquiry. Mediation. Conciliation. Arbitration. Judicial settlement – in particular through the International Court of Justice.

The word peacekeeping does not appear in the Charter. But this flagship UN activity is firmly rooted in the Charter’s ideals – and demonstrates the Charter’s flexibility.

Peacekeeping has a solid record of service, but faces major challenges. Increasingly, peacekeepers are deployed indefinitely in dangerous environments where there is little peace to keep, where there are no political solutions in sight, where there are multiple armed groups and where casualties are rising sharply from attacks on peacekeepers.

For these and other reasons, the United Nations ends up serving as what our Secretary-General called a “crisis baby-sitter”, or focus on simple containment – and this is simply not sustainable.

In response, we are working to better integrate peacekeeping across the political, humanitarian, and development efforts on the ground.

Because effective prevention also depends on advancing sustainable and inclusive development. This is why the 2030 Agenda – with its integrated framework for addressing the economic and social drivers of conflict, and for building stable societies through a focus on the rule of law – is an essential tool for prevention.

Chapter VIII is also important in this regard:

Even before most regions had created regional or sub-regional organizations, the drafters of the Charter recognized the value of regional arrangements and agencies as a first resort for the peaceful settlement of local disputes.

Regional perspectives are critical in understanding challenges. Regional capacities are crucial for rapid deployment. And regional ownership is essential for solutions to take root.

Through our focus on prevention, we can hone this comprehensive, integrated perspective, and deepen the links between partners operating on the local, regional and global levels.

This will serve us well as we tackle the conflicts of today. And it will be indispensable in dealing with the threats of tomorrow.

Cybersecurity, for instance. As military lawyers, I believe this is a concern that you will be intimately familiar with.

NATO now recognises cyberspace as an ‘operational domain’ – just as land, sea or air. We have seen how algorithms can be as powerful as tanks; or bots as decisive as bombs.

Technological advances in cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence – much of it commercially developed by the private sector – are fuelling a global arms race.

But a serious discussion about the international legal framework in which the use of advanced technologies as weapons of war takes place is still in its infancy.

I don’t have the answer to the challenge, but I know that our approach must follow the same playbook on partnerships and multi-stakeholder involvement that I outlined previously. If new technologies are essentially private property, it’s inconceivable to ignore input from the private sector; or to shut out the voice of civil society; or to ignore the insights from academics and scientists.

The United Nations does not necessarily have to take a leadership role in regulating these new technologies, but it is the neutral platform for all actors to come together. The end-result might not even be regulation, but it should at the very least involve basic protocols to ensure the ethical values that are necessary to defend against the dangers of wrongful use.

So as I said at the outset, a lot of ground to cover – from the geopolitical state of the world, to the promise of the 2030 Agenda, the importance of prevention, and finally, the threat from rapid and unregulated technological innovation.

To start our exchange, let me stop here and open it up for your comments and observations.

Thank you.