Diplomacy & Crisis News

Children in the Central African Republic (CAR) have suffered a spike in grave violations since the end of 2020, according to a new UN report on the situation in the country, issued on Monday. 

A nuclear Iran would pose serious challenges to the United States and such an outcome should not be accepted as inescapable.

Dual test kits, which cost less than $1, are now available for pregnant women to stem mother-to-child HIV and syphilis transmission, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Monday.  

Une bande de copains joyeux, fauchés, un peu provocateurs, prêts à s'inventer un autre avenir que celui des bons bourgeois : la bohème avec ses légendes, héritée du XIXe siècle, fait si bien rêver que le XXIe n'en finit pas de la recycler. Romantique, insolente, est-elle un geste de liberté ou un (...) / Art, Capitalisme, Culture, Histoire, Idées, Intellectuels, Littérature, Mouvement de contestation - 2016/10

Haiti has a long history of natural, political, and human catastrophes. What do Haitians do now?

The Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel Air. Photo credit: Marcello Casal, Jr., Agencia Brazil, CC BY 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EscombrosBelAir7.jpg

A State Department warning to Americans to avoid travel to Haiti follows the kidnapping of 17 foreign aid workers and family members in a long line of tragic stories from Haiti in 2021. Beginning decades ago but accelerating this year with political unrest, natural disasters, and economic and social problems, any prospects for progress in Haiti seem to be demolished by the next catastrophe.

The political earthquake of the year was the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moïse replaced an interim president in 2017, who had replaced a president who stepped down for constitutional reasons, who himself came to power after 2010 earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians and left more than a million homeless. The fallout from this summer’s assassination of Moïse continues, with the arrests of Columbians and former Haitian police officers, questions about former Ministry of Justice official Joseph Badio, and the current interim prime minister’s connections to Badio.

In August, Haiti suffered an actual earthquake, a 7.2 magnitude quake that killed more than 2,000 people and left more than 650,000 people in need of humanitarian aid.

This natural disaster built on years of similar ones. A partial list includes historic storms in 1935, 1954, and 1963, a series of devastating storms in the 1990s, four major storms in 2008, and Hurricane Matthew that destroyed 200,000 homes in 2016. Weeks after this summer’s assassination of Moise and two days after the earthquake, Haiti was hit by Hurricane Grace. Damaging flooding and landslides also hampered relief efforts for earthquake victims.

These political and natural disasters amplified the ongoing economic and social problems in Haiti. USAID assessed that more than one-third of Haitians live with “severe acute food insecurity.” Even before 2021’s troubles, the World Bank called Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world, with a negative growth in 2019 and 2020. Sixty percent of the country live in poverty and nearly a quarter in extreme poverty.

Together, these conditions have facilitated the rapid growth of violent gangs in Haiti. Gangs are not new to Haiti, but they are alleged to act with unofficial “governing powers” in some regions and with extrajudicial violence with the cooperation of government officials.

Drack Bonhomme is founding director of Haiti’s international relations think tank and graduate school, L’Ouverture Institute for Diplomacy & Global Affairs (LIDGA). Bonhomme spoke about these natural, political, and social crises at The Catholic University of America’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR).

“The kinematics of Haiti are catastrophic, the picture is really disastrous,” Bonhomme began. The indigenous people called the island Haiti, meaning mountainous land, and now “the problems are like mountains.”

Bonhomme described natural disasters – especially Hurricane Hazel in 1954 – as devastating the economy. Hazel damaged sugar and coffee production as well as tourism. In subsequent decades, disease and natural disaster, including HIV/AIDS and the 2010 earthquake, have had a continuing series of negative impacts.

Haiti’s political troubles also have deep roots, including the family dictatorship of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. Haiti today faces an “unprecedented constitutional crisis,” said Bonhomme, where “the three branches of government are non-existent.”

Bonhomme believes the limited international responses to Haiti’s current problems are worsened by the all-consuming nature of the Covid-19 pandemic. The international community is too busy with the pandemic, Bonhomme said, to focus on more traditional questions like natural disasters and political crises.

But he believes there is more that Haiti can do to help itself. First is working with donors and aid agencies to help Haitians figure out a way forward themselves – as the Marshall Plan offered reconstruction aid in postwar Europe based on what each country’s own plans were. Second is to draw more from the successful diaspora. The Haitian constitution limits the ways diaspora can contribute, other than remittances, to the re-development of the country.

But Bonhomme is optimistic. “The Haitian people are very resilient, a religiously spiritual people,” he concluded. There is a “hope within the soul of the Haitian people, they keep looking for the light…and that sense of hope is still shining inside of them.”

Watch Drack Bonhomme’s full presentation

As the humanitarian crisis grows in Ethiopia’s conflict-affected north, the UN announced on Monday that $40 million in funds have been made available to scale up emergency operations. 

More than 45,000 boys and girls were released from detention during the COVID-19 pandemic, proving that child-friendly justice solutions “are more than possible”, according to new data released on Monday by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). 

/ Chine, France, Mondialisation, Matières premières, Forêt, Environnement - Environnement - Forêts / Chine, France, Mondialisation, Matières premières, Forêt, Environnement - Environnement - Forêts

Is Beijing building a rival alliance system?

Couvrant près d'un tiers du territoire, la forêt française constitue un fabuleux trésor. Mais il y a loin de l'arbre brut au bois travaillé : faute de politique industrielle concertée, la sylviculture est devenue le deuxième poste du déficit commercial. Plongée au sein d'une filière saccagée, entre (...) / France, Entreprise, Industrie, Mondialisation, Mutation, Matières premières, Forêt, Environnement - 2016/10

After extending the COP26 climate negotiations an extra day, nearly 200 countries meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, adopted on Saturday an outcome document that, according to the UN Secretary-General, “reflects the interests, the contradictions, and the state of political will in the world today”.

Climate action can be the driver for a green and equitable future for all, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed has said at the TED Countdown Summit, urging people everywhere to demand that leaders deliver on their promise to limit global warming. 

Le catch mexicain — ou « lucha libre » — inspire et fascine bien au-delà de son pays d'origine. La popularité de cette « comédie humaine » apparue au début du XXe siècle s'enracine dans la culture, l'histoire et la vie politique mexicaines, dont elle révèle des aspects inattendus. / Amérique latine, (...) / Amérique latine, Mexique, Culture, Exclusion sociale, Histoire, Identité culturelle, Industrie culturelle, Intégration sociale, Médias, Mutation, Politique, Société, Sport, Travail, Amériques - 2016/10

Growing up in 1970s New York, Mindy Howard received no encouragement at home and was ridiculed at school for her dream to become an astronaut, it was a time when only boys were supposed to have such aspirations. 

L'assassinat de Berta Cáceres le 3 mars dernier au Honduras a suscité une vague d'indignation. Ce meurtre s'ajoute à celui de nombreux militants amérindiens et écologistes opposés aux barrages hydroélectriques qui prolifèrent en Amérique centrale. / Amérique latine, Eau, Écologie, Énergie, Amérindiens, (...) / Amérique latine, Eau, Écologie, Énergie, Amérindiens, Mouvement de contestation, Violence, Amérique centrale, Honduras, Environnement - 2016/10

Le Congrès américain est composé de 435 représentants et 100 sénateurs. Si les premiers sont répartis suivant la population de chaque État — ce qui n'empêche pas certaines disparités —, les sénateurs sont toujours au nombre de deux par État. Ainsi, un sénateur californien porte la voix de 19 millions (...) / États-Unis, Démocratie, Élections, Femmes, Minorité nationale - Amérique du Nord

There is no planet B

When Congress makes a mistake in determining important economic policy like setting the tax rate or implementing a new trade policy, the results can be pretty awful. Unexpected inflation might take place, jobs might be lost, and personal savings might crumble. In the most severe cases, these disruptions might result in economic recession, or worse, a more sustained depression. It goes without saying, this can be devastating- on a personal, national, and even global level.

However, in the aftermath of even the most severe of these crises, individual people have proven resilient. We “Keep Calm and Carry On”, as the saying goes. Even when the most sensitive economic policy goes awry, the consequences are usually constrained to economic matters. A mistake in tax policy can certainly cause suffering, but it cannot result in the end of the world.

This principle applies for many of the most important matters in the American political landscape. Immigration, education, healthcare, and of course economic policy are critically important, but our collective resilience allows for politicians to gradually tweak policy to match the nation’s needs and mood. The American political system is designed to process these sorts of changes incrementally at the national level while giving local decision makers the ability to implement policy in a way that suits their constituencies. Put another way- for most things in American political life, policy makers have the opportunity to “muddle through” policy making decisions, honing and (hopefully) improving policy over time.

However, there are some policy matters where tinkering around the edges or “finding the middle ground” simply will not do. Climate change is perhaps the most obvious and most pressing of these. There is a strong scientific consensus, backed by the United Nations IPCC report, that in order to avoid reaching the point where climate change becomes self-reinforcing, the global community must become carbon neutral by the year 2050. This is only twenty-eight years away.

To the extent that the world’s governments and the individuals that they represent ignore these warnings, we are gambling with the fate of the whole of humanity. The idea that we can be protected from the worst consequences of climate change by making only incremental adjustments does not fit with intellectually honest political discourse.

Of course, there is still plenty of room for debate regarding the best course of action to address climate change. It is entirely reasonable to debate if the bulk of the responsibility for addressing climate change falls on nations that have emitted larger total sums of greenhouse gases over time but have already begun to reduce their harmful emissions, or if it lies with nations that are currently the world’s chief greenhouse gas emitters. In either case, it is appropriate to shame Russia and China for failing to attend the COP26 climate conference, and it is reasonable to question the follow-through of leaders like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he pledges that India will be carbon neutral by 2070 despite currently working to expanding coal mining operations.

More than that, it can be wise to weigh the virtues of a carbon tax against those of a cap and trade system in our own country. Local decision makers will know far better than distant bureaucrats if subsidies for solar panels or a heightened focus on local agriculture suits your local community’s needs better.

These questions, however, ask which actions and policies are best suited to address climate change- they are elevated beyond the basic question of whether or not drastic action is necessary in the first place.

This is what separates climate change from the other important issues in American life. A failure to address growing inflation is bad, while a failure to appropriately address climate represents a potentially existential threat. More than that, the action that appears necessary to avert the worst of the harm done by climate change remains fully outside of the Overton Window. Forget actually curbing emissions, the United States gives something to the effect of $14.5 billion in subsidies and tax breaks to oil and gas companies- those subsidies outnumber investments in the renewable sector by 7 to 1.

Democrats and Republicans alike need to make dramatic progress in their willingness to take on climate change if they are serious about the current administration’s stated goal of achieving carbon neutrality by the year 2030. Additionally, American political discourse needs to commit itself to curbing climate change regardless of other important policy making, and regardless of our confidence in the follow through of other nations that are sometimes untrustworthy. Without the United States on board, there is little hope for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. This is true for the United States even as it is true for Russia, India, and China- however, a failure by any of those nations to fulfill their responsibility does not excuse failure by the United States.

The time is now for us to fully shift the conversation from “do we need to address climate change” or “under what conditions should we make a full commitment to addressing climate change” to “what is the most effective way to address climate change”. Despite this somewhat liberal sounding call to action, this sentiment finds roots on both sides of the aisle. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, “the [global warming] debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat, and we know the time for action is now.”

The time for action is now.

—

Peter Scaturro is the Director of Studies at the Foreign Policy Association

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Les investissements français en Chine sont six fois plus importants que les investissements chinois en France. Tandis qu'à Pékin personne ne s'inquiète d'une invasion hexagonale, les convoitises de l'empire du Milieu effarouchent nombre de commentateurs à Paris. Cet afflux de capitaux étrangers (...) / Chine, France, Économie, Entreprise, Finance, Industrie, Multinationales - 2016/10