Taking one for the team

Problems, threats and challenges for peace and conflict resolution, 2021

Most texts about peace, war, and youth are written by adults; whereas the purpose of this chapter is for young people to produce their own reflections on their experience of peace and war. Using the words and ideas of young people, the chapter offers personal reflections on peace and war from the U.S., Kenya, Colombia, Russia, and India. The analysis centers on the main opportunities and barriers for building peace in the said contexts and what steps might be taken to move us toward a world beyond war. This chapter emerges from a collaborative venture with young people from different parts of the world as part of a larger youth-led, intergenerational, initiative led by World BEYOND War. The point of departure for the ideas in this chapter is that all voices matter in the global discourse on war-to-peace transitions, and that more attention needs to be given to supporting young people to produce their own accounts of peace, war, and related issues. Keywords: Peace and Conflict Studies, War Studies, Security Studies, Youth Studies, Youth

Sine Zine, V. 3 No. 8, 2023

Knappenberger, stop complaining! We are the best army in the world, we do things as well as they can be done." So said the commanding officer of my company in 2006 in a plywood shack in the middle of Iraq.

Transitons

https://tol.org/client/article/hard-earned-lessons.html Last month, in Taiwan, it was a struggle to get used to the noise of jet fighters waking me up in the morning. I asked my friend whether this was normal. “Not normal, but still fine” was her answer. I wondered what it must be like to live every day with the thought that your country might be invaded. A week was enough for my nerves. I was not keen to repeat my last escape from a war zone. It turned out it was just a signal to China, whose planes were then trespassing into Taiwanese aerospace, that Taiwan was ready to rebuff them. But how much did this “signal” cost? Were it not for the threats, perhaps an equivalent amount could be used to build roads, modernize hospitals, upgrade schools? Humans seem to be willing to spend money to identify solutions for problems that they have themselves created out of nothing. Apart from politicians boosting their egos, and a few businessmen hoping to upgrade to billionaire (from modest millionaire), would the average Taiwanese, or Chinese, gain if this island “moved” into China? Another disturbing thought struck me. Those concerned with climate change (and I include myself) sometimes engage in a perverse exercise of gently blaming one another for their CO2 emissions to try and make themselves feel less guilty about their own footprints. I bike everywhere, my neighbor goes vegan, and so on. But how much would I need to bike to compensate for a single supersonic jet ride in Taiwan or the umpteenth rocket that Putin distractedly drops onto the next Ukrainian building? So here we go, enjoying the sound of supersonic jets in the early hours or alarms telling Ukrainians to run to the metro station, all because of someone’s desire to decide what country deserves to live, which people deserve to be free and which do not. (continues in the text)

Today’s human population is history’s youngest. About half the world’s people are under age twenty-five. A billion and a half of them are youth, and 86% of youth live in the developing world. While this situation has created an unprecedented set of challenges for those addressing development issues, the situation is still more pressing in war-torn nations, since virtually all wars in the world today take place in unusually ‘young’ nations and enormous youth cohorts directly challenge efforts to rebuild governments, societies and peace in those nations. ‘Youth & Conflict’ will consider some of the dimensions of the youth challenge in conflict-affected contexts, probe the views and experiences of youth who have endured wars, and explore possible responses to these challenges. Among the topics that will be addressed are: how, why and whether war-affected youth can become adults; gendered experiences, priorities and possible solutions to youth needs; sexual violence; and child soldiering and returning ex-combatant youngsters to civilian life. Given the enormous and diverse challenges that vast numbers of war-affected youth present, students of this course will be pushed to consider both youth concerns and the colossal program and policy issues they create. Particular attention will be paid to African context.

Do people think of the value of all human lives as equivalent irrespective of age? Affirmations of the equal value of all human lives are culturally prominent, yet much evidence points to the fact that the young are often prioritized over the old in life-and-death decision-making contexts. Studies 1–3 aimed to reconcile this tension by showing that although individuals are seen as more equal with respect to negative rights not to be harmed or killed (though not completely equal), they are seen as less equal with respect to positive rights to be aided or saved. Age exerts a large and systematic impact on decisions about who to save and about whose death is more tragic, suggesting that individuals are seen as possessing differing amounts of contingent value. These initial studies also yielded the novel finding that, although children are prioritized over adults, older children are often prioritized over younger children. Study 4 replicated this finding with a think-aloud methodology; the study showed that the preference for older children appears to be driven by their having had more invested in their lives, their better developed social relations, and their greater understanding of death. Studies 5a–5c demonstrated the independent causal effects of each of these variables on judgments of life’s value. Finally, in Studies 6 and 7, mediation methods were used to show that older children’s more meaningful social relations primarily explain the greater value of older than of younger children. These findings have implications for bioethics and medical policy.

2022

[T]here is nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat than in Tigray. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus WHO Director-General Geneva, 16 March 2022 At the world’s opposite ends two genocidal-scale wars now rage, one in the global South, and the other in the global North. In Ethiopia the Amhara-dominated federal government pounced on the country’s autonomous region of Tigray on the fateful Tuesday of 3 November 2020. A year and a half later, on the Thursday of 24 February 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine. Seemingly these two conflicts have nothing to do with each other. So differently alike wars It is a myth. The West’s myopia and the European Union’s overconcentration on its own interests that blind decision-makers and the world public opinion to the obvious commonalities, which these two conflicts share. First of all, in both wars it is civilians who do most of the dying at hands of the attacking armies. Second, the underlying causes and the ‘logic’ of ethnolinguistic nationalism that prompted the Ethiopian prime minister and the Russian president to order the respective onslaughts have more in common than immediately meets the eye.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement

Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases highlight the importance of integrity, or living up to one’s commitments, in meaningful living, or dying, as it may be, as well as the risk involved in commitment, since if you die for a bad cause, you have only harmed yourself. However, if leading a more rather than less meaningful life benefits rather than harms you, there are possible scenarios in which you yourself are better off dying for a good cause than living a longer moderately happy life. This presents a version of a well-known puzzle: what, then, makes dying for a cause a self-sacrifice, as it usually seems to be? I sketch some possible answers, and try to make sense of relevant work in empirical psychology.

2022

At the world’s opposite ends two genocidal-scale wars now rage, one in the global South, and the other in the global North. In Ethiopia the Amhara-dominated federal government pounced on the country’s autonomous region of Tigray on the fateful Tuesday of 3 November 2020. A year and a half later, on the Thursday of 24 February 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine. Seemingly these two conflicts have nothing to do with each other.

Brown, J. (2019) Deciding who lives and who dies: a moral framework for the apportionment of lethal risk in just humanitarian wars. Birkbeck College, University of London., 2019

The Just War Tradition has evolved over time to reflect the differing forms of war, and the sovereigns involved in it. Throughout this tradition, risk has played a key role as the mechanism that allows a non-combatant to be come a combatant and use lethal force. In the modern day, Western states are increasingly accused of engaging in "risk-transfer" warfare, through which they transfer risk away from the own soldiers and onto enemy soldiers and local civilians. Commentators such as Paul Khan, Gregoire Chamayou and Martin Shaw have argued that this undermines the moral right of Western soldiers to use lethal force in the first place. This piece builds a history and moral narrative of the Just War Tradition to date, then advances a version of JWT to apply to the modern humanitarian intervention. It builds a comprehensive understanding that risk plays in the moral framework, then critically disassembles the risk framework, arguing instead that risk cannot be the legitimator for lethal force. Instead, it must be causal liability and self-defence that act as the legitimator for lethal force, and this piece builds a new framework for how this should look.

Postdigital Science and Education