Episode 4: Doing the Right Thing
Hugo Slim is a leading authority on the ethics of war and humanitarian action with a career that combines academia, diplomacy and operations. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He was Head of Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from 2015–2020 and Chief Scholar at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue from 2003–2007. He was Reader in International Humanitarianism at Oxford Brookes University from 1994–2003 and has worked as a frontline humanitarian for Save the Children and the United Nations in Morocco, Sudan, Ethiopia and the Palestinian Territories. He is the author of 30 refereed journal papers and several books, including “Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War” (Hurst/OUP, 2007) and “Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster” (Hurst/OUP 2015). He joins us from Oxford, UK.
He speaks to us about:
human rights and human duties
humanitarian diplomacy
working in academia
moral dilemmas
protection of civilians
the Geneva Conventions
the importance of public deliberations
localizing aid
resilience and empowerment
ethical leadership
rich world vs whole world discussions
the COVID-19 pandemic - and much more.
Transcript
Intro: I think a lot of people were having the discussions and talking about the problems. Should the aid agency stay or leave? People were talking about these things. They weren’t necessarily describing them as ethics or moral. They were just saying, you know, what’s the right thing to do? And are we being instrumentalized? Are we being abused? Whatever, whatever. So the conversations were all there, they weren’t necessary labeled as ethical at the time, and a lot of that persists. A lot of these conversations are just hard operational decisions and problems sometimes which people don’t bother to call ethical. You don’t have to call them ethical so long as you’re trying to work out what is the right thing to do?
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I will be your host as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all backgrounds and affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Mr Hugo Slim. Hugo is a leading authority on the ethics of war and humanitarian action with a career that combines academia, diplomacy and operations. He is currently a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He was Head of Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross from 2015 to 2020 and Chief Scholar at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue from 2003 to 2007. He was a Reader in International Humanitarianism at Oxford Brookes University from 1994 to 2003, and has worked as a front line humanitarian for Save the Children and the United Nations in Morocco, Sudan, Ethiopia and the Palestinian territories. He’s the author of 30 refereed journal papers and several books, including “Killing Civilians, Methods, Madness and Morality in War” and “Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Displacement.” Hugo, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Hugo: It is a pleasure, it is lovely to hear you.
Safa: Thank you so much. Could you please begin by telling us a bit about what led you to work in the humanitarian aid field in the beginning and what were you motivated to accomplish or contribute to at that early stage in your career?
Hugo: So I think I would locate some of it in sort of family background and childhood and everything. I’m British, and I come from a family that mixes religious people and priests and ministers and pastors on one side with military people and merchants, both my grandfathers and grandmothers made their lives in the empire in the Middle East and in India. And I think I grew up with that funny mixture of sort of imperial curiosity and the notion of adventure and the world beginning where Britain ends rather than being in Britain itself and a sort of compassionate ethical streak. And I remember when I was seven or something, watching television, I was probably younger than seven, and I was watching in black and white, the first BBC coverage of the Nigerian Civil war in the 60’s, the Biafran war, and I remember seeing white doctors and nurses walking around suffering African people and thinking that’s what I want to do because that will get me out into the world, to do good things and be in the real world, and I think that very early moment was my do something moment. And then, really, the rest of my career was in a sense correcting, making sense of that sort of dysfunctional colonial gaze, a sort of white gaze on black suffering and trying to make a more ethical commitment to solidarity towards people who are suffering.
Safa: And what would you say were perhaps the teachings are the experiences that helped you move forward from that type of thinking or that perspective?
Hugo: Well, I did theology at university. And sort of followed my religious instincts as a young person. And, you know, that was very helpful. Reading a lot of theology, largely Judeo-Christian theology, reading about the history of the church and the social movements and the abolitionists and the slave trade and the great evangelical movements in the 19th century in our country, in Britain, and other places. And that was important to me. And that was really the sort of equipment I set off with when I was very young, I think I was 21 when I became an international aid work and went to Morocco for the first time and then over a year later into Sudan and Ethiopia and the wars in the horn of Africa and the famine there and really it was coming back from there that I then began to read more liberation theology. I started engaging at Oxfam and with the Catholic Church around that time, getting experience and thinking from Latin American priest activists and theologians. And I suppose I gradually developed a much clearer picture of human rights, of solidarity, of empowerment and that kind of ethics and I think human rights helped me think and recognize a profound equality between human beings as well. And that’s really, in a sense, where I began to grow, I suppose, in my approach to humanitarian action.
Safa: Very interesting. In those early experiences in Morocco, in Ethiopia, what were some of the experiences or observations you had that made you think things are not perhaps being done the way they should, or any ethical conundrums you faced in the work that you were doing that kind of stuck with you later on and led you to seek different answers or think of better ways to do the work that you were doing at that time?
Hugo: Well, when I worked in Morocco in my first job, back in 1983, I’m jolly old now, it was a very face to face job in a little school, a residential school of disabled children. So what the great revelation to me there was sort of learning face to face from children and beginning to understand disability. That extraordinary moment when you’re living with disabled people all the time and then suddenly you just don’t see it anymore. And that face to face work was very powerful for me and I learned a lot from children who, you know, who tease you and make you think of yourself as well and forget yourself in other ways. So that was powerful. And I suppose, what I understood there is the old institutional ideas of sealing disabled people off was not what we should be doing. A large part of our work in Morocco at the time, this is with Save The Children, was also trying to integrate disabled children into school and that involved child sponsorship, what we call a cash program today, where we gave families cash every month so their children could get to school, get the equipment they needed, etc so I think I learned really then about inclusion and integration and again, how you realize human equality across different types of human beings. When I went to the sort of front line of humanitarian work in the famine of Sudan and Ethiopia, I arrived at a place called _____ in 1985 where the death rate was about 100 people a day in a camp of about 100,000 people, and this was right on the border where people were just crawling over the border and collapsing in this place. And I think what I learned there is is a couple of things, first of all that when people are really desperate, they do really need the help of others. So what we were able to achieve there was incredibly important in terms of life saving. So it made me realize that, you know, we cannot always be empowered and able and have the agency we need. Sometimes we just have to fall on the kindness and mercy and efficiency of others for a period. And I think that’s incredibly important at this time when we realize we need to localize aid but we also need to make sure that aid is powerful enough to help people when they have nothing. But the second thing I learned, of course, is that people are extraordinary and resilient, to use a buzz word of today, and very soon life came back to that camp, people began to find ways of picking themselves up and working, wanting to organize. And then, you know, what you realize, or I hope what I realized was, you can’t go around being a bossy humanitarian. You have to really mobilize and help empower people to find their own solutions, to recover their agency, and run their own lives again in some way.
Safa: Earlier you mentioned being drawn to human rights processes and theories and how that helped reshape the way you thought about the work. The human rights approach is one approach that aid agencies use, it is one of many, there are different perspectives and ideas about how best to achieve social change or equality. What would you say the human rights approach offers that perhaps other approaches don’t or what do you think makes it so effective or powerful in your experience?
Hugo: I think what human rights does best is to affirm equality between human beings, that we are all equal and that therefore we do all have a right to food and health and education and work and all these things. And I think that’s incredibly powerful and important because I think until a humanitarian worker or development worker can look everyone in the eye and really see them as totally equal, we are going to end up with a sort of paternalist, wrongheaded, charitable approach, a sort of colonial approach, where there are people who do good and people who are objects of their good and I think we have to realize that we’re all subjects and we all have rights and we should all work together to realize rights. I think the problem with human rights that I have felt increasingly over the years is that it is just too one way, arguing endlessly about rights and of course more and more rights, rights are proliferating as we now have a right to technology and digital, mobile phones and rights to, you know, be whatever gender we like, and it’s just an endless cascade of new rights and I think in that process it’s become a sort of project of endless demand, and I think it needs to be corrected in a way by a focus on human duties. So whenever I talk about human rights now, I always want to talk about human rights and human duties or human rights and duties. Because the way the human rights framework has been structured has been claiming rights against the state, and I think the tragedy there is what it has lost is overlooking the duties we have to one another as individuals, as neighbours, as people in power, one over the other. It’s all about the state, and it’s not about us. So I think emphasizing duties is important and one of the interesting things about the COVID emergency in which we’re living in the world at the moment is watching this wonderful stepping up of people all around the world to live up to their duties to their neighbour, to organize mutual care and actually not just sit around and sort of shout at the state and demand rights. This is a wonderful re balancing I think. So I would always, instead of talking about a human rights movement, I would like to talk about a human rights and duties movement.
Safa: That’s very, very well said and as you say this current coronavirus pandemic is really demonstrating how people are coming together and feeling a sense of human duty and responsibilities to care for one another. I’d love to speak about that more in depth later on, but before we do that, I also wanted to ask you, at some point in your career, you decided to transition from working as a front line humanitarian aid worker to academia. Could you just tell us about that transition and what motivated it and what it was like in terms of the new type of work that you were able to do?
Hugo: Yeah, well, I think, I mean, you haven’t met me Safa, so you know, if you met me you’d probably realize that I am probably better at sort of thinking, writing and talking than I am rushing around loading lorries and organizing systems and that sort of thing. And I think that’s what I realized. I was about 27, 28, I’d been abroad for about 5 years, which, of course, is not long now, but it’s very long when you are young, and I suppose two things happened. I kept wanting to think and write about what we were all doing almost more than I want to do it. And so I realized I was a bit more cerebral and reflective. And I should try and pursue that and sort of pick up being a thinker again and a writer and a teacher. And I was also very conscious — that’s why I started this Masters course at Oxford Brookes University with Professor Nabeel Hamdi in 1994 — that I really wanted to design a sort of education I should have had before I started, but had never had, and we did that. So we designed a one year Masters course for aid workers, and I think it was pretty good. And I really enjoyed doing that and I wanted people to know what I thought I should have known before I started. I think the other thing is it’s a life issue, you know, I looked at people who had become expatriates, you know, who were going from one place to the other and living in these rather comfortable houses with servants and that sort of thing. And it looked, you know, attractive in a sort of nice, neocolonial way of living. But I also thought hmmm, a lot of them have one or two gin and tonics too many each night. A lot of them are slightly losing touch with themselves in a funny way, and I decided to go back and put down roots. I’d had quite a mobile childhood, and it always upset me in my life that people would ask me, where do I come from? And I never had an answer because I’d come from a military family, we’d moved around a lot and everything, So I also made a commitment that I wanted to put down roots and I wanted to have a family and have children and when those children were asked, where do they come from? They would just name a place and it wouldn’t be complicated, and I achieved that. So I have two lovely children and if you ask them where do you come from they say Oxford. That makes me very happy.
Safa: You mentioned designing a university course and teaching students the things that you wish you had known before you had started. I know it’s hard to perhaps put all those lessons into a couple sentences, but what would you say where the main points or the main ideas that you had wish you had been taught or they had been shared with you before you had started down this path of humanitarian aid work?
Hugo: Well it was quite simple, in a way. I mean, like all British Masters programs, or most of them, we had a year, so we had to get it across in a year. And I think there was three big chunks. The first big chunk was world politics and institutions. I didn’t know enough before I left, I’d studied theology, I didn’t know enough about world politics, about geopolitics, about the politics of Africa, where I was working. And so we focused hard on a political dimension to that course. I didn’t know anything about institutions I was suddenly bumping into in Sudan and Ethiopia. Things like the United Nations, the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement, the World Bank, Church movements. I just didn’t know what these institutions really were. I’d never read the UN Charter. So it was geopolitics, regional politics, the nature of violence and conflict, that nature of disaster, institutions and then law. I mean, I suddenly remember when I began to teach, I thought, gosh, I better get hold of these things called the Geneva Conventions because I probably should teach them. I had been working in war zones then for about 3, 4 years, never come across them, never read them, they were some sacred text that the ICRC kept in a temple somewhere and shared with military and that was about it. So I ordered a copy of the Geneva Conventions, and I realized I had to read the things and understand them and I needed to teach them and we also needed to teach refugee law. Luckily, Oxford were brilliant at that down the road so Oxford Brooks teamed up with Oxford University and our students went to Oxford to learn refugee law and human rights as well, which they learned at Oxford as well. So it was a lovely combination between Oxford Brookes University up at the hill and then the very old medieval Oxford down the hill. And so the second big chunk was law and international law and the kind of legal framework we were all operating in as humanitarian workers. And then the third was equally simple but of course it is very tricky, how do you work with people? How do you work with communities of people as an outside humanitarian development actor? So then we had the third part of the course really bedded in community development practice, and particularly and urban, we were very early into the urban agenda at Oxford Brookes University. And what does it mean to work with communities and cities? And in displaced camps and these sort of things. So that was about community development. So it was really geopolitics, law and institutions, community development practice.
Safa: In terms of the research work that you were doing for yourself, for your own interest and it eventually being focused on ethics and humanitarianism. Could you tell us about what you were drawn to in terms of the issues you wanted to address in your research and why that has become your focus over the years?
Hugo: Yes, well, when I I arrived I wasn’t an academic. I got hired from Save the Children by Oxford Brookes and I didn’t have a PhD or anything. And I had a, you know, an undergraduate degree in theology. So I suddenly started sitting there and, you know, I knew I worked out how I should be trying to teach people then I thoughts gosh what am I going to write about, what I am going to be a sort of specialist in, and I looked around and there were all these very impressive people, and this is looking around in Britain, you know, there was Mark Duffield, who was a sort of, you know, fantastic anthropologist, political scientist, social theorist and he was deeply in his discipline groove and writing with that skills set. There was Alex Duval, another great anthropologist, political theorist and he was working through his discipline. David Keene, also political scientist working on famine and war and war economies and bringing economics into it all. And, of course, Barbara Harrell-Bond down the road at Oxford, the great aid or anti-aid scholar, whichever way you look at it and anthropologist. So there were all these people with their specialisms and I didn’t have that. All I had was theology, so I didn’t really quite know what to do and I couldn’t suddenly become a political scientist or an economist, so I began to just say, right, I just have to do what I do, And I have to start writing about what is important and values and I wasn’t calling it ethics at that time, and I was just trying to write about humanity and impartiality and these things that were important and what it meant to be a good humanitarian worker, and it wasn’t really until after the tragedy of the Rwandan genocide, which we remember actually today, as I’m speaking to you is the anniversary day of the terrible April of 1994 and after that there was a big international evaluation of the international response to the Rwandan genocide and one man named John Bolton in London, who was leading the humanitarian strand of that evaluation with the Danes and the Swedes, he rang me up, said Hugo we need a paper on moral dilemmas and we can’t find anyone to write it so you should write it. And I said well why should I write it? I don’t know anything about moral dilemmas. And he said but aren’t you a theologian? I said well I did theology at university. Well isn’t that the same stuff as ethics? So you know you gotta do it because nobody else is doing it. So I said, Okay, I’ll try. And so I then wrote a paper called “Doing the Right Thing”, which became quite useful to people. And then people started talking about ethics and humanitarian ethics really out of that Bosnia, Rwanda moment when they had faced so many, what they felt to be agonizing choices.
Safa: Very interesting. Did you feel that those conversations of moral dilemmas or doing the right thing, the difficult decisions that sometimes are made in these conflict situations. Did you feel that those conversations were happening frequently enough, not only in the world of academia but also in the world of international development and humanitarian aid sector? Or is this something that you think over the years it has perhaps grown and become more of a shared discussion?
Hugo: I think a lot of people were having the discussions and talking about the problems. You know, should we stay in Goma? Should we leave? Because the Interahamwe, you know, the ghastly Hutu extremist militia who led a lot of the genocide, who were gradually taking over the camps in what was then Zaire, Congo, should the agency stay or leave? People were talking about these things. They weren’t necessarily describing them as ethics or moral. They were just saying, you know, what’s the right thing to do? And are we being instrumentalized? Are we being abused? Whatever, whatever. So the conversations were all there, they weren’t necessary labeled as ethical at the time, and a lot of a lot of that persists. A lot of these conversations are just hard operational decisions and problems sometimes which people don’t bother to call ethical, and you don’t have to call them ethical so long as you are trying to work out what is the right thing to do. So I think ethics has taken off a bit since then. And, yeah, some people would talk about it, a lot of agencies have ethical committees now. I still don’t feel we’re seeing enough ethical analysis in evaluations of humanitarian action. We’re still seeing rather boring ones about whether they were well coordinated, efficient, effective etc rather than actually did they make the right moral choices about what they were doing?
Safa: When you started to work at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, what was some of the work that was being done there? And do you think that the level of dialogue that was facilitated at that organization was happening amongst different stakeholders and was inclusive? Or what was the work like at that institution?
Hugo: When I joined the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva in 2003, it was tiny, and it still is, and it’s in a beautiful villa right by Lake Geneva, looking over the lake, to Mont-Blanc. But we wee only about 12, 18 people I think and it was really a very small, as it still is, a conflict mediation, peace organization. And it was founded and run by Martin Griffiths with support from people like Sergio Vieira de Mello and the ICRC and others as a sort of conflict mediation, humanitarian access, mediation group. And that’s what a lot of the, you know, there were 4 or 5,6 mediators and they were in different conflicts around the world trying to bring the parties together and sometimes bringing them to Geneva to do that and sitting them by the lake. But I went there in the policy research team because as Martin Griffiths said when we started, he said look, it’s very difficult because we can’t really talk about what we’re doing. So, you know, people ask us what we do and we’ve got nothing to say because it’s confidential. So he said I need something in the shop window, so we need really some policy work as well, so that we’re able to publish things and join the thinking around peace and conflict. So when I was there, I worked on the protection of civilians and I produced a couple of manuals, first manual on humanitarian negotiations and protection of civilians, an Almanac manual. And then I wrote this book called “Killing Civilians” and others were working, setting up the Oslo Forum, which still is a very good network of peace mediators, where they would meet informally and share experiences and still do produce really good reflective policy work on what is good mediation. So that’s what we were doing really, protection of civilians and mediation, to put that in the shop window while 5 or 6 rather brave and brilliant mediators were trying to bring conflict parties together.
Safa: You mentioned the book entitled “Killing Civilians”, could you tell us about the process of researching that and maybe the stories or case studies that you decided to include or use in the book and what that experience was like?
Hugo: I will. So I wrote that book because everyone in the 90’s was charging around shouting, you know, stop killing civilians, it’s wrong to kill civilians, it’s against the law to kill civilians indiscriminately and deliberately in war. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! And of course they didn’t stop it and there was a sort of indignation in the human rights and humanitarian community that these things were in law and people weren’t obeying the law, it seemed incorrect and wrong. And I thought, you know, this is completely wrongheaded because obviously, if people are going on deliberately and strategically sitting around tables and planning to kill civilians, they’ve obviously decided that in their ethics there’s a logic to it, it makes sense, it’s the right thing to do, the law is not the right thing. And there must be reasons why people decide to kill civilians. And so I decided to write that book, I decided to look at the many ways in which civilians suffer, not just the way that they are physically killed by bullets and bombing, but often the bigger things that kill them like disease and famine and starvation and displacement and destitution and failing health services and all these things. So the first part of the book is really, it’s called the seven main spheres in which civilians suffer and die. The second part of the book was reasons for killing civilians. Why people choose, decide and argue it’s the right thing to kill civilians. And there it was pretty horrible, I had to work hard to read texts that were very unpleasant, where people are arguing that one group is inferior and not worthy of life, sort of genocidal thinking and then others which were more about the best way to take power in this country is to, you know, start raping, killing and murdering and cutting off arms and then we will very soon gain terror and control over the whole country and take the capital. So I put together a whole spectrum of what I called anti civilian ideologies which are worked out, owned, assumed ideologies that people take on that the best way to fight and win a war is kill lots of civilians. Because I wanted to name all that, put it out there on the table and say, look, you may think it’s wrong and against the law, but this is why people do it, and it was a pretty distressing book to research and write. And it’s a funny thing, you know, you can have a hard time in real life and working with people who are suffering and dying around you. But you can also have a terrible time in a library when you’re reading all these human rights reports and histories of massacre and genocide and aerial bombardment of cities in World War Two and Vietnam and Korea, terrible individual tales of rape and torture and imprisonment. It’s really grim, and I remember when I had sort of finished that book, I deliberately in that book put quite a lot of violence in it because I didn’t want it to be an academic text that sort of sanitized violence and talked about it in sort of postmodern, clever critical theory ways. I wanted it to be about what people really go threw and what people do to one another, so it’s quite a hard read. And it was quite hard to write And I was very glad when I finished because I hoped it was a contribution, and I really struggled ever since to watch violent films or read human rights reports. I feel like I’ve sort of read enough for a lifetime.
Safa: I can absolutely understand that. In terms of, maybe, because this is an experience that humanitarian aid front line workers also have often — are there tools or practices or resource that have helped you or you would say supported you in times of distress in your work?
Hugo: I think probably two things. First of all, having a family and having my beloved children. They were all very small when I was writing this stuff and I’d be writing and reading it, you know, up until four o’clock when they came back in school or something, and then rushing in and doing tea and dinner or whatever. So they kept me sane and a sort of ebullience of life, which you find in children, which I found in them, and which you can find in the world all around you in any moment is incredibly affirming. And you just know that there is more to life than human rights reports and that’s a terrible side of life but life is a wonderful thing, and human beings are wonderful things. So that family life, that love, that watching children grow, being part of their lives, watching them experience the world for the first time is wonderful. So that kept me going and the second thing is practice, religious belief, you know, as a Christian, we look at a crucified god, a god that was tortured and flogged, and its holy week this week, so it’s quite appropriate to talk about it. So, you know, we see what God is like in the kind of experience that many people have in war and suffering. So yeah, religious experience, religious faith, religious community was the second thing.
Safa: Later on you were working as the Head of Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross. In that kind of your leadership role what were your priorities or what were you really committed to try to achieve or contribute in terms of policy and humanitarian diplomacy?
Hugo: Well, when I got there in 2015, the ICRC was working to a strategy which was to really put policy up on a par with law and operations as a major way in which it could influence the behavior of institutions, states, armies to respect the Geneva Conventions and support humanitarian action. Policy was promoted very strategically by that four years strategy. The Department of Law became the Department of Law and Policy, and they needed to appoint a head of policy to start building that out. So that’s what they did, and I arrived, and we gradually build a policy and diplomacy team to about 24 in Geneva and we also ran the New York office at the UN. So we were charged with getting much more agile, articulate, accessible policy messages out there about everything from migration to weapons to new technology weapons to urban warfare. All these things, to be much more articulate about that policy changes we want in states and others. ICRC has always been very good at that, but they wanted to make it a more strategic effort, and they also therefore realized the way to do that is to really focus on humanitarian diplomacy, which, you know, in many NGO’s will be called advocacy. But because ICRC has this wonderful position, sort of in the society of states, the community of states, we tend to talk about diplomacy more than advocacy. And so we focused very hard on again trying to systematize the way we did humanitarian diplomacy at the ICRC, organizing global networks better and prioritize it is a core transferrable skill across the organization and really increase our global footprint. And one of the reasons that the ICRC very rightly needed to boost its humanitarian diplomacy is that, of course, we live in a wonderful age now, where many states which were previously colonized and treated badly and lost their sovereignty under imperialism, European and American and Russian imperialism, those states are now powerful, successful all over Asia, Africa. A lot of them have very brilliant foreign policy departments that are doing a lot of diplomacy. So the ICRC had to increase its diplomatic footprint over the last few years and, you know, be as big and relevant in Beijing, Jakarta, Addis Ababa, Pretoria, Abuja. We have to really spread out and increase our humanitarian diplomacy around the world with these states who are now incredibly important, relevant and have real influence.
Safa: When it comes to humanitarian diplomacy or working to influence states or governments working together, multilateralism, what would you say have been some of the challenges you’ve had in terms of power dynamics, or just the process of advocating for something that governments themselves are not abiding by or agreeing to or the different opinions that exists? What have been your experiences with all those those types of issues?
Hugo: I think it’s been a really interesting time in the last few years to do diplomacy because, of course, we’ve moved from that uni-polar world of a largely America, liberal consensus to what they call a much more poli-centric. Where there isn’t a uni-polar world. There’s a range of major powers again, often in opposition to one another, so it’s been quite hard to find international consensus, and we’ve seen that over conflicts like Syria and Libya and other places. But on some of the more thematic issues, I think we have been able to make progress. I think we’ve all worked very hard to focus on urban warfare and to really raise that as an issue, which is incredibly important. We’ve worked very hard to try and bring states together on new weapons, and that’s a very difficult thing to do at the moment. But you know, there’s no doubt that with cyber weapons and with new robotic weapons and new possible acts of warfare from outer space and things like this, we have to bring states together to make clear norms and rules and good policies about how these forms of warfare can respect the Geneva Conventions, and that’s been very difficult in the last few years because a lot of states are quite keen to win those particular arms races before they come to the table and negotiate. They want to get ahead and have the best cyber weapons, have the best robotic weapons, etc before they negotiate treaties and rules. That has been a challenge. But I think we have made it very clear that states must come together at some point to create new rules and policies on those areas.
Safa: When it comes to state accountability, or you know, in some cases impunity or the structures or frameworks that exist that are designed or aim to hold countries and leaders accountable. What have been your experiences with how effective they are or not effective? Or do you have any just general reflections when it comes to the mechanisms that we use that perhaps are working or not working in terms of holding countries and leaders accountable?
Hugo: Well, I mean the ones I know best because I’ve been working with them, trying to encourage greater respect for them the last five years are the Geneva Conventions of course and the laws of war, and I think it’s so easy to see probable violations of the Geneva Conventions every day in sort of of indiscriminate bombing in most of the wars around the world today. In indiscriminate attacks on civilians or deliberate attacks on civilians, on obstruction of aid, on the bombing of hospitals, so we can see violations all the time and there’s no doubt that, as I was saying earlier, you go around killing civilians — generally states, armed groups make decisions that somehow they’re fight is so important that they should ignore the Geneva Conventions or the only way to win is to ignore them or whatever. And this has always happened and I think I’m afraid it’ll continue to happen. But the other thing that’s happening all the time, everyday, in every war is that the Geneva Conventions are also being respected in various important parts of them. So medical relief is reaching people. Detainees and prisoners are being visited. Prisons are being improved, food is reaching people. Families are separated but then found and reunited and traced and brought together again. And these are away, you know, rules agreed and set in the Geneva Conventions. So I’m afraid my conclusion is that it will always be a very mixed picture, and very often people will feel that their war is so important, the winning of their war is simple that they will abandon the rules agreed to fight a war in a humane manner and every state I can think of has done that and made that decision at some point. What we have to do is encourage them to respect those laws all the time as much as they can and to come up with ways to say no, you don’t have to break the Geneva Conventions, you can achieve your goals in other ways.
Safa: Earlier we touched on the COVID-19 pandemic and some presidents, for example. Trump he’s referring to himself as a wartime president and this global emergency in some ways, the policy initiatives and the actions and the organization that is taking place in response is being compared to a time of war. Recently, you published an opinion piece in The New Humanitarian entitled “The Age of COVID-19 Demands New Emergency Ethics.” I was wondering if you could speak to us about that piece and what your thoughts and reflections are when it comes to this kind of new time in the history of the world that we are all in and what that implies for ethics in a time of emergency and global cooperation on this issue?
Hugo: Yeah, well, I think we are all in a single world emergency, and it’s extraordinary. I mean, I haven’t known that in my life except for the HIV pandemic, which was the last pandemic we were all in and where people all over the world, rich, poor, famous, not famous, could be dead because of this pandemic. So in HIV, we had that as a global pandemic. And it is a huge emergency and I think what I was arguing is that it will bring around a lot of difficult decisions and that as a society we must deliberate publicly and be ready to live by some new emergency ethics. That actually we are going to have to make rationing, triage decisions in our hospitals. It’s gonna be hard and we are going through this in the UK this week and next week probably, and the US is following this week and next week as well. Choices will have to be made about who we decide to save and how we decide to live. And people will also have to make sacrifices, as we all are now, I’m looking down my street, you know, there’s a couple of people going for their daily walk, but we are all locked in, and I’m sure it’s the same where everybody else is whose listening. This is us, you know, to pick up what we were saying earlier, this is us living our human duties, taking responsibility in our behavior and sacrificing and suffering to insure that others are protected. So it is a time of new ethics. We’re all having to take responsibility and try and reduce this pandemic. The other thing I was saying is that we need very clear leadership and you know, good leaders in these situations are ones who are direct, very honest and open about effects, who are trying very transparently to make the right decisions, who are trying and very clearly articulating what they need from people and what people can do, giving people a sense of agency that there’s something each one of us can do to make a difference and really ethically leading us. And I think, you know, our leaders are all going to make mistakes, because this is a really difficult time and these are women and men under incredible pressure. But I think if we feel they’re acting openly with ethical integrity, genuinely trying to do the right thing for everyone, then we’d be able to follow them better. And I think that’s the new culture we are in and you know you can compare it to war. You know, the war metaphor gets used, you know, we have the war on terror and the war on drugs and now we have the war on COVID, the war on corruption. I think what people are saying is it’s just a time that we are in extremists, that we are having to make difficult ethical choices and change the way we live dramatically to try and secure the common good in an emergency. And that means we will have to discuss how we live. It’s hard, it’s a difficult time but it’s important..
Safa: Absolutely. You mentioned the common good. When it comes to agreeing on ethical codes or coming up with or agreeing to one standard of best practices or ethical duties, sometimes there’s cultural differences, there are disagreements, different points of view. In this pandemic, it seems that generally most governments are following the medical advice of WHO and their own Chief Doctors. But what do you think are some best practices in terms of having discussions, global, international discussions on ethics and making sure that the different voices are heard but that it does lead to some kind of agreement on what should be done in a way that’s best for the common good?
Hugo: Well, two things, I believe very firmly in public deliberations as they say in ethics. Deliberation just means, you know, talking and deliberating the issues, thinking through the problems together. I believe we have to do that in society, and I think my society, British society, tends to do that quite well. I think we’re blessed with the thing called the BBC so there’s a lot of organized, objective, ethical discussion and debate from all channels of the BBC. We have usually in situations like this a responsible press who are going to discuss and debate and this is very important because we have to be involved in the decisions around us, and we have to create a opinion and share opinion and listen to others and agree that we are all generally doing the right thing. And what’s been encouraging in the last week or so is watching greater discussion of what’s likely to happen to the poorest people in the world, to the most marginalized people in the world and to low income countries who don’t have these sort of fabulous national health systems that we have and the ability to print endless money and borrow money and pay it back. And that’s really good to see. Because, of course, we cannot just have a rich world discussion, we have to have a whole world discussion about a whole world emergency. So I am very encouraged that a discussion of the whole world, including these low income poor communities, marginalized people is surfacing and surfacing well, and being taken ethically seriously by policy makers.
Safa: Taking a step in a different direction now, what do you think is the level of cooperation or collaboration that is happening between the academic world and the academic sector with humanitarian aid agencies, international development agencies what have been your reflections or what have you observed in terms of if they work together enough?
Hugo: Well, I mean, I think the answer is sometimes they do it really well, and sometimes they just completely miss each other. You know, it’s been really encouraging in Britain in the last few weeks to watch, academia, business, government really coming together, again if you like on a war footing or on an emergency footing, to really pull their expertise, to put their people in the same room, to really try and find solutions to making ventilators, coming up with vaccines, building hospitals quickly, etc. So, you know, when it works, it works really well and there’s great complementarity between academic expertise and business expertise etc. Very often it doesn’t work because academics are focused on very different outputs and outcomes to a lot of agencies. I mean, it’s extraordinary. I went from academia to ICRC and so I went from, you know, being in Oxford in the university to then going into a large, transnational, fast moving humanitarian bureaucracy. And it’s really hard to find the time to think, reflect. I don’t think I read a single academic report in those five years. I just didn’t really have time. It’s a cliche, but I didn’t really have time to sit down and read an academic book, a major new evaluation. I really was in the sort of, you know, cliche term, I was a one page, two page person. And you know, I could often go to five or flick through ten. And so we just tend to miss, very often, which is going in different paces with different objectives, whereas a lot of academics are trying to come out with very sophisticated, arcane long works and papers which talk to each other. And the objective is to push forward the realms of knowledge further. It’s not about getting something delivered tomorrow. So they often miss. They’re doing different things. And I was surprised how hard it was to retain an engagement with academic thinking while I was flat out in a very busy leadership job of a fast moving organization. I should enjoy it , but actually the books I wanted to read it on the weekend had nothing to do with humanitarianism in war, and I actually read loads of books while I was at the ICRC, but none of them were about or well maybe 2 or 3 of them were about the actual business.
Safa: That’s interesting, because other people that I’ve had on the podcast have expressed a similar sentiment of really just struggling to find time to read more, read differently. So that seems to be a common experience.
Hugo: But you know, the other side of that experience is it is really fun to go from being a long distance runner to a sprinter. So you know, I had arrived and I had just finished a book. And, you know, if I sat down and gave a talk it was usually 35,40 minutes in the university. And if I wrote something I was probably writing and 5–7 thousand word papers etc. I went to the ICRC and I had to do three minute statements for the Security Council, I had to brief in one or two pages busy people all around the world. I had to start tweeting, so 140 characters and then given 280. That was a fabulous skill set to learn, I really enjoyed becoming brief.
Safa: Very interesting. Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely value to being able to present ideas in a shorter, shorter amount of words or space. As we wrap up here I just wanted to ask you if you feel that your motivations have changed over the years or your interests, have they become a bit more focused, or have they altered at this stage of your career and in your life?
Hugo: Well, that’s a lovely question. It is a luxury to be asked that question, and I’ll give you a very honest answer, actually. Which is that almost every day, I think oh I wish I could work on something else than humanitarianism and humanitarian action. I really do feel at one level it’s a sort of ethical intellectual cul de sac, a one way street. And you know, it has the end of the road at all times because some of the problems are perennial, it’s always gonna be hard, and it’s always gonna be wonderful as well. But I want to work on something bigger in my mind. And I have been having a fascinating week, actually, because this phrase repurposing has come up a lot around the COVID emergency because of course, a lot of companies have repurposed to suddenly stop being motor racing companies or energy companies and start building ventilators or exploring how to build hospitals instead of business centers and that sort of thing, so they were repurposed. And I have been thinking, I wonder if I can use this as the moment to repurpose and I would love to have a slightly wider canvas than humanitarianism actually which I have been working on for so long now and I almost feel that I have said what I want to say about it so I’m thinking can I repurpose and perhaps take a bigger view of humanity and the world and find a different area to work on?
Safa: Thank you for sharing that. I think that also is food for thought for listeners and for myself in terms of in this time of global crisis, how can we rethink what we are doing, repurpose our motives and our actions, maybe even our career paths. So thank you for sharing that. I just want to give you an opportunity to touch on anything you think we didn’t bring up or that is important for you to add?
Hugo: No, I think I would just like to encourage everyone — it’s a wonderful humanitarian moment, this terrible COVID emergency, and I hope everyone will try and get involved, either by the passive actions they are very deliberately taking to stay inside, to stop working, to stop seeing people. This kind of passive action is noble and difficult, and it’s part of being involved. And then there’s lots of active action, particularly a lot of young people, but everybody really, just getting involved in neighbourhood humanity. And I would encourage everyone to do that and to be brave and courageous and hopeful in anything they are doing around helping us all to survive and come through this coronavirus emergency.
Safa: Absolutely, thank you for sharing those thoughts and thank you again for your time and your reflections. We really appreciate it and there’s definitely a lot to go back and reflect on and take in and just sit with so thank you again.
Hugo: Great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Safa: Thank you to our listeners. To keep up with our latest episodes, you can listen to us on your preferred podcast provider and follow us on Instagram, where our handle is @rethinkingdevelopment. If you have listener questions that you would like me to ask our future guests, please feel free to email them to us. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all next time. Until then, take care.
