Nothing Found

On Wednesday in New York, the UN Security Council held its annual open debate on women, peace and security (WPS). The theme of this year’s debate was ‘from theory to practice’. The first of what are now 10 Security Council resolutions on WPS was passed more than 20 years ago, but there remain ongoing issues with translating them into concrete results. In the 2016 debate, the German representative eloquently articulated the problem, saying: ‘The shortcomings in the implementation of the women and peace and security framework are due not to a lack of words, but to a lack of action.’

In his remarks to the Security Council this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke soberly about international regression on the WPS agenda:

Conflicts are raging. Tensions are rising. Coups are erupting. Authoritarianism is on the march. The nuclear threat has mushroomed. Climate chaos is inflaming security challenges. And mistrust is poisoning global politics—weakening our ability to respond.

The figures speak for themselves on the dire state of our world … The grim backdrop gives renewed urgency to efforts to ensure women’s full and meaningful participation in peace and security. Twenty-three years after this Council adopted resolution 1325, women’s participation should be a default, not an afterthought.

But that is not the case.

Australia waited several years for the release of its second national action plan on WPS, a whole-of-government policy document with implementation responsibilities for the Department of Home Affairs, the Department of Defence, the Australian Federal Police and other agencies. Although the first plan was produced by the Office for Women, in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the second one came from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, perhaps because it was released at a time when the minister for women was also the minister for foreign affairs and trade.

During the second plan’s development, its monitoring and evaluation framework received extensive criticism from civil-society organisations, but the final version was unchanged. Regardless, two years on from the delayed release, there has been no public reporting on the plan’s implementation.

Defence’s implementation plan was developed some time ago and is overseen by a passionate and well-trained cohort of gender advisers and gender focal points across the organisation.

As part of the 2023 defence strategic review, Defence’s Gender, Peace and Security Directorate moved from the Joint Capability Coordination Division into the newly formed Defence People Group under Lieutenant General Natasha Fox’s leadership. But as the organisation’s gender advisers and gender focal points know, WPS is not just a people issue. The issues raised in the culture reforms bought about by the Broderick reviews are often confused with WPS and the tasks specified in the resolutions, such as having a gendered understanding of conflict, protecting women from conflict-related sexual violence, and including local women in security sector reform; disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration activities; and peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction.

The Security Council, which promulgates the resolutions, is not the UN Human Rights Council; it is the premier organ of the UN that discusses matters of international peace and security. The WPS agenda is a matter of international security that needs to be addressed in Defence’s joint preparedness and operational cycles, regardless of any overlap with gender equality and human rights.

The defence strategic review has shifted the geographic focus of national defence. It explains that the primary area of military interest is the Indo-Pacific, ‘encompassing the north-eastern Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia into the Pacific’. While some analysts have been occupied with discussions that focus on the need to increase air and maritime assets within the limited resources described in the review, it also placed significant emphasis on the need to continue to strengthen whole-of-nation efforts, which has long been the space in which WPS sits.

In Ukraine, we have seen Russia’s extensive use of sexual and gender-based violence against Ukrainian women from 19 to 83 years old. I predicted such behaviour when analysing the decriminalisation of domestic violence in Russia with Valerie Hudson, several years before the war with Ukraine began. That’s because, internationally, women’s security is the best indicator of national security. Ukrainian women’s organisations have been using the WPS agenda to improve implementation, including by increasing diverse women’s participation in the decision-making process in the security and defence sectors.

The Ukrainian experience should prove that the deployment of Australian gender advisers to the non-international armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will have transferable lessons in international armed conflicts and regions outside the Middle East.

Many countries in the Indo-Pacific have incredibly gendered societies, where different sexes have very different roles in society, gender inequality is rife, and sexual and gender-based violence may be used as a tactic of war. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and our own Criminal Code, Australia has legal obligations to report instances of sexual and gender-based violence when it is being used in a widespread and systematic way, to enable investigations and prosecutions for crimes against humanity and war crimes to occur. This needs to be incorporated into operational design and conduct.

As the Australian defence organisation refocuses to address increasing ‘economic, military, strategic and diplomatic’ competition ‘interwoven and framed by an intense contest of values and narratives’, the WPS agenda must not be relegated merely to the personnel unit. Bringing WPS from theory to practice is about ensuring that the tasks specified in the Security Council resolutions are included in all aspects of defence preparedness, planning and operations.

On 29 September, member states of the International Telecommunications Union voted to elect Doreen Bogdan-Martin as the organisation’s next secretary-general. Bogdan-Martin—a US national who’s served in the ITU since 1994—was in contention for the top job with Rashid Ismailov, a former Russian deputy minister and executive at Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson.

The election was overshadowed by Russia’s ongoing collision course with the international rules-based system. And the outcome largely reflects the amount of goodwill Russia still carries among the UN membership. The Russian candidate received 25 votes, while Bogdan-Martin won with 139 of the total 172 votes cast. When she takes office on 1 January 2023, she will be the ITU’s first female secretary-general.

Framing the election in terms of geopolitical symbolism, however, does an injustice to the winning candidate’s expertise and competence. It also miscasts the role of the ITU.

In recent years, a sentiment has emerged that China is outpacing the US, Australia and like-minded countries in efforts to set international standards for emerging technology.

Much of the recent commentary has placed the election of ITU secretary-general in the context of internet governance against the backdrop of technology decoupling and the alleged emergence of various internets. Multi-stakeholder governance is pitted against authoritarian control, with the principles of an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable and secure internet at stake. Russia and China want the ITU to take up a role in internet regulation, whereas the US and its partners prefer to keep this policy area out of the organisation’s remit. But this is too narrow a spectrum through which to see the ITU’s role and capabilities.

The mandate of the ITU is to set regulations and technical standards for telecommunications: in the late 1890s, it did so for postal services, later for telegraphs and telephones, and today for the interoperability of internet-based communications. The organisation facilitates the global management of the radio-frequency spectrum and satellite orbits, oversees the development of standards for information and communications technologies with an eye to interoperability, and delivers capacity building to help close the digital divide and drive digital transformation in the global south.

To properly assess the impact of the ITU’s work, and in particular the issue of interoperability, it’s important to understand its internal processes. Initiatives for standards are not dictated by the praesidium. Although they require the secretary-general’s consent to proceed, they are generated bottom-up through proposals by member states, in consultation with private industry. Successful proposals are typically years in the making and involve deeply technical debates among experts, and there are many procedural steps and consultations before a consensus agreement is reached.

While Huawei’s proposal to the ITU in 2020 for a new internet protocol definitely rocked the boat, many in the technical internet community don’t expect it to come to fruition. Significant uptake of any proposed standard is dependent on broad global support. When consensus is reached, however, agreement texts are set in stone, and it will be costly to change or refrain from observing them.

If there’s genuine concern about the direction the ITU is taking or the direction of internet governance more broadly, liberal democratic countries, Australia included, may need to change course altogether.

They will need to foster a proactive rather than defensive agenda that includes more concerted participation of public- and private-sector representatives in the ITU’s technical working groups.

Also, Western states’ preference for internet, cybersecurity and technology standards to be managed through alternative forums, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (which tend to be more industry driven), means they have to make a greater effort to be inclusive and ensure these forums tangibly benefit those in emerging economies too.

Simply dismissing and pushing back against an ITU role in internet, cybersecurity and tech governance won’t cut it. The ITU is a known and generally trusted entity in the global south.

Unlike in countries such as Australia, cybersecurity, internet governance and emerging technology professionals in developing nations have largely come from the telecommunications sector. This includes countries such as India—a close Quad partner—and most Pacific island nations. Many have personally benefited from the ITU’s capacity-development work.

More strategically, the ITU is a forum in which all member states have a vote—by default. This means government departments don’t have to compete for a seat on the table and invest time and scarce resources in other, potentially seen as parallel, forums. Across the board, emerging economies tend to prefer a stronger lead role for the UN secretariat and UN agencies in supporting digital development and cybersecurity.

Is the election of Bogdan-Martin irrelevant, then? The reality of managing international organisations is that a secretary-general is more of a secretary than a general. They have influence over agendas and processes—which is important—but they will have to work through an administration with seniors representing all geographic areas. More than that, no leader of an international organisation can allow themselves to be seen as favouring national positions; that would instantly undermine their credibility. The same has applied for the outgoing secretary-general for the past eight years, China’s Houlin Zhao.

In her first statement as secretary-general-elect, Bogdan-Martin expressed her belief in ‘the power and potential of connectivity to drive economic growth and transform healthcare, education, employment, gender equality and youth empowerment’ and refers to digital technologies as ‘crucial to efforts to meet’ the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This may be a first sign of her priorities and interests and reflects her recent experience directing the ITU’s development work.

Her election can become a significant milestone if it serves as a turning point for reigniting the enthusiasm of the US and its allies and partners for the ITU’s work. However, significant efforts by US President Joe Biden’s administration will be required to instil lofty ambitions, such as those articulated in the Declaration on the Future of the Internet, into the proceedings of the various ITU-run technical working groups and to get stakeholders in the telecoms, cyber and technology industries sufficiently interested in articulating, promoting and advocating liberal norms and democratic values.

As the nature of war has changed in recent decades to involve proportionally more civilians, and internal conflicts continue to tear nations apart, we cannot achieve sustainable peace without involving women more closely in preventing and resolving violence.

That means addressing gender inequalities.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security.

Unanimously adopted on 31 October 2000, resolution 1325 reaffirms the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, humanitarian responses and post-conflict reconstruction. It also stresses women’s ‘equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security’.

The resolution was born out of the recognition that in the second half of the 20th century the nature of conflict was changing. Conflicts increasingly involved civilians as well as combatants, and intra-state and communal conflict became more common. We also learned that women were disproportionately affected by violence, including sexual violence, in conflict situations. Women’s vital role in peace negotiations wasn’t recognised and there was little consideration of women’s participation and decision-making being critical to recovery in a post-conflict settings.

The UN secretary-general’s most recent report on women, peace and security highlights that while the WPS agenda has evolved over the past 20 years, there is still much to be done.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres observes that we live in a world where women still face exclusion from peace and political processes; where attacks against women, human rights defenders, humanitarians and peacebuilders continue to rise; and where the impacts of Covid-19 risk undermining progress made towards gender equality. Also striking is the report’s recognition that there is a strong correlation between gender inequality and conflict risk.

We know that when girls have access to quality education, when more women are in positions as key decision-makers and participants in all stages of political processes, and when women are economically empowered and live without threats of violence and harm, their communities are more economically prosperous, stable and secure.

Put simply, we cannot achieve sustainable peace and security for all without addressing gender inequalities.

In places with ongoing conflict, we must also redouble our efforts to engage women. The Council on Foreign Relations’ recent report Women’s participation in peace processes notes that between 1992 and 2019 women constituted, on average, 13% of negotiators, 6% of mediators and 6% of signatories in major peace processes around the world.

While these statistics are sobering, the counter-factual—what happens when we include women in peace processes—is worth reflecting on, not least for the hope it offers.

The International Peace Institute has found that when women participate in peace processes the resulting agreements are 35% more likely to last at least 15 years. When there’s participation by civil society groups, including women’s rights organisations, peace agreements are 64% less likely to fail.

Here in the Indo-Pacific region, we have seen an increased focus on the WPS agenda as a framework for addressing drivers of conflict and instability, as well as new and emerging threats to security.

In Australia, we introduced our first national action plan on WPS in 2012 and we’re in the process of developing our second. In addition to the action plan, we have increased our focus on WPS through enhanced coordination across defence, foreign policy, humanitarian and development programs. Our defence force has worked to increase the number of women in its operations and provide training for gender advisers. We can be proud of Australian women like Major General Cheryl Pearce who commands the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus.

Australia has recognised the importance of building a deeper understanding of what drives radicalisation to violence, and of the role of women and girls in terrorist organisations. We have played a leading role in mainstreaming gender into policies for countering violent extremism through the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum. As co-chair with Indonesia of the CVE working group, we have developed practical guidance to inform effective policy and programming.

ASEAN issued its first joint statement on WPS in 2017 and has been making important progress on advancing its commitments ever since. We are encouraged by interest in developing an ASEAN regional action plan and look forward to opportunities for furthering regional collaboration and learning.

Australia is committed to hosting the second ASEAN–Australia WPS dialogue as soon as possible. This will build on the successful dialogue held in 2018, when regional stakeholders came together to share lessons and enhance cooperation on implementing the WPS agenda.

Now, of course, our region is confronting one of the greatest challenges, in Covid-19, to our shared prosperity, stability and security in over a century. As Guterres remarked, Covid-19 has exacerbated inequalities, including gender inequalities.

But continuing inequalities are by no means inevitable. We have evidence of what works to safeguard women’s rights in the aftermath of a crisis. Indeed, the four core pillars of the WPS agenda—participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery—provide an important framework for addressing the challenges of Covid-19.

In responding to the crisis, Australia recognised immediately the need to maintain a focus on gender equality and that the WPS framework is a practical tool to enhance our response.

Under the Australian government’s Partnerships for Recovery Strategy, we provided additional support to UN Women for its Global Facility on Women, Peace and Security to maintain activities on countering violent extremism, supporting women in peacekeeping operations, strengthening leadership of young women, and promoting cooperation and knowledge-sharing among diverse stakeholders on the WPS agenda.

Adopted in 2000, it was the first international collective statement to recognise the disproportionate impact of conflict and crises on women and the importance of their role in maintaining peace, stability and security. Now, 20 years later, in the midst of this current global crisis, we need to remember why an inclusive approach to sustainable peace and security is important and apply whole-heartedly the lessons learned from the last two decades of implementing this agenda.

For Australia’s part, we are committed to working with others to drive greater awareness of the agenda as a relevant and practical tool in our efforts to ensure a prosperous, stable and secure region.

The international community urgently needs new tools, ideas and initiatives to meet the common threats and challenges faced by the United Nations’ 193 member countries. The world body’s 75th anniversary, marked on United Nations Day on 24 October, presents an opportunity to chart a path to the partnerships we need to meet the challenges we will face in the years and decades to come. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—the costliest and most far-reaching crisis since World War II—the need for institutional renewal and recovery is obvious.

Among the most ominous threats and challenges, beyond pandemic disease, are a rapidly changing global climate, violent conflict and large-scale displacement in fragile states, and sophisticated cyberattacks. What these challenges have in common is that they are beyond the ability of any country to resolve on its own. International cooperation is crucial, but that cooperation is being jeopardised by a resurgence in nationalism which threatens the very structure of the international order built three-quarters of a century ago.

Rising nationalism raises a significant risk that the UN system’s structure and institutions, essential but in need of repair and rejuvenation, may instead be left to decline, decay and even collapse. Such an outcome would be tragic, not just for those institutions but for all of humanity.

We believe there is another path. To help promote cooperative responses to today’s most pressing global problems, we are delighted to lend our support to the Roadmap for the future we want and UN we need, presented last month to the president of the UN General Assembly at the UN75 Global Governance Forum. Having defended our countries’ foreign policies as their representatives in New York, and having shaped them at the helm of our respective foreign ministries, we know from experience that original ideas from external stakeholders can help move complex multilateral organisations towards positive-sum outcomes.

Individuals and organisations from across global civil society have an opportunity, during this year’s commemoration of the UN’s founding, to help create ‘The future we want, the United Nations we need’, the anniversary’s umbrella theme. The secretary-general’s Global Conversation has already engaged over a million people worldwide through surveys, formal polling and hundreds of dialogues. Such discussions and debates serve as a reminder that the UN system has, over the past several decades, offered lifesaving support to vulnerable people, safeguarded basic human rights, advanced sustainable development and prevented a Third World War.

If all member states act upon the UN75 Declaration properly and with the support of global civil society, they can nurture a renewed spirit of international cooperation with two mutually reinforcing goals: institutional strengthening and a robust, ‘green’ recovery from the pandemic.

In particular, we, alongside other partners, call upon world leaders to raise the ambition of the declaration’s 12 commitments. They should agree to augment each with carefully developed proposals and action plans to bolster institutional capacity, improve policy and strengthen public–private partnerships, all of which will be further developed in the follow-up report from the UN secretary-general mandated by the declaration.

We also advocate a world summit on inclusive global governance, as called for in the Stimson Center’s recent UN 2.0 report. To be held by September 2023, the summit would seek to upgrade and equip the global governance system to address major issues facing the international community, and to usher in a new compact with citizens to enhance and rebuild confidence in their multilateral institutions.

In the lead-up to this 2023 leaders’ meeting, two G20 summits, akin to those held in London and Pittsburgh to chart a way forward from the 2008 global financial crisis, should be convened in 2021, focusing on coordinated macroeconomic, social and environmental policies to promote a durable recovery from Covid-19. These discussions among the leaders of the largest economies should be synchronised, in turn, with a broader Covid recovery strategy that seeks the endorsement of all 193 UN member states and support from international financial institutions, the World Trade Organization and other global and regional bodies.

In 2015, when our Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance presented its UN70 report, Confronting the crisis of global governance, both the headlines and trendlines foreshadowed the return of virulent nationalism, fuelled by surging migration, economic inequality and leaders who dehumanise others and seek to divide rather than unite. Five years on, enlightened leadership is needed more than ever, supported by ideas and political pressure from civil society worldwide. By reviving cooperation to meet today’s many challenges, we can ensure that ‘the future we want’, for today’s younger generation and all future generations, becomes the future we get.

Watching mob violence in the streets of America, I recalled an encounter in Kosovo in 1999. Driving through the country one day in a UN vehicle, I stopped at the house of a man who, some months before, had been dragged from his house by Serbian paramilitaries and made to kneel on the dusty road and was poised for execution in front of his seven daughters.

It was at the height of the civil war in Kosovo, and the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian authorities were embittered foes. The shrill politics of extremes and the whip of war had already unravelled most of former Yugoslavia. Kosovo was the last chapter, and both sides were exacting revenge. Some of the same Serbian paramilitary groups that had committed crimes in Bosnia were marauding in the restive Yugoslav province.

A jeep-load of regular Serbian soldiers rounded the corner. An officer dismounted, arranged his men gun to gun against the paramilitaries and arrested the would-be executioner. ‘That soldier saw me for who I am’, said the man, while his daughters listened on. The Serbian officer hadn’t seen him as an Albanian, but as a father, a farmer and a man. That simple statement sits in sharp contrast to the multiplying tribalisms of pre-election America in 2020.

Moreover, the sentiments of this discreet scene are reflected in and magnified by the 20th century’s most edifying and vital document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the founding ethical and legal tenet of our times. International law that has flowed from the declaration has served as a guarantor of safety and peace for billions of people, despite regular flouting by dictators and génocidaires. Our first rule, the foundation of the modern life, is that we see each other as human.

Australia was one of eight nations that negotiated and drafted the declaration under our chief negotiator, H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt. There were also a Lebanese, a Chilean and a Russian (72 years ago, it was all men). China’s negotiator, Peng Chun Chang, believed that Europe’s Enlightenment philosophers and the notion of the universality of rights were in part the intellectual sprigs of the Confucian philosopher Mencius.

We forget that the UN was the child of humankind’s bloodiest conflict. The world was exhausted by the Second World War and the excesses of totalitarianism (Mao was still to come), so the UN was a liberal enterprise constructed to deal with matters of hard power through consensus and what the political philosopher Joseph Nye eventually termed ‘soft’ power. As the UN’s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, famously said, the UN ‘was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell’.

Lots of Australians have continued to work for the UN. On the ground and at the sharp end of that work, it’s often dangerous. My UN colleagues have been harassed, shot at, assaulted, bombarded, expelled, humiliated, raped and murdered. I’ve lost colleagues in accidents and to bombs, and one was strangled in his bed. Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash on a peace mission in Congo in 1961. We laud our armed forces, but almost never our unarmed forces, of which Australia has thousands already deployed.

The UN is a Tower of Babel, with all that that implies. Engaged in matters of soaring ambition, often you might labour prosaically alongside people with jarring cultures, or accents you don’t understand, or whose systems of government you fundamentally oppose. Yet, in conditions of stress and shared enterprise, great friendships are formed, lasting alliances are forged and a sense of human solidarity is amplified.

The UN’s bureaucracy is a network of improbable complexity. It’s easy to sneer at and very often frustrating, but, despite the towering aspiration of this malformed creature, it does produce gold. More than 100,000 troops serve in 14 peacekeeping missions. Agencies such as UNICEF, the High Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights and the World Food Programme temper the misery of the most vulnerable.

The UN is the jack-of-all-trades repairperson we don’t like to think about. As with assumptions about electricity or water flows, or the absence of diseases like polio or smallpox, we ignore the power cables and pipes until the taps run dry and the lights go off, as it might have if the World Health Organization hadn’t largely functioned to coordinate a global response to Covid-19. In a world where the old pillars of vertical power alone are creaking with obsolescence and complex juvenile networks soak power up, the UN remains the best place to tackle global affairs.

Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans knew the weaknesses and ‘exhilarating’ strengths of the UN. He helped negotiate what he called the most robust arms-control treaty on weapons of mass destruction—the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. After genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur, he was a proponent of the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine that, in theory (as Syria sadly demonstrates), is a red line when rulers try to eradicate their own people. International laws and norms protect us through the very act of negotiating those laws, as well as mutual vigilance over their observance.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s recent speeches flag a renewed Australian commitment to the UN. This reflects the pandemic’s revelation of our complex, interwoven global fragility, from our systems of health, welfare, security, transnational business (including our university industry), communications, pleasure-seeking and government to the fragility of our own bodies. Neat post–Cold War assumptions about a world order crafted from neoliberal economic and political triumphalism are dead.

Those assumptions were a bad and simplistic bet, and now we pay the debt. Two decades of expeditionary warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan that excluded a rising China and a moribund Russia bled the US of wealth and credibility. It also obscured the sickening of the international system we thought we knew. Yet America’s reaction to a bloodied nose and diminishing economic and military power while China rises and Russia rebounds has been a corroded commitment to the UN. That vacuum has been logically filled by China, now the UN’s second largest contributor, with a new influence in agencies such as the WHO.

Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian politician and intellectual, has said that the political question is always, ‘Who will protect me now?’ In an exponentially complex world, how do those of us distracted by raising children and paying mortgages answer that? Newly risen populists exploit the Ignatieff question and our distraction with a facile bait and switch. Because no single government can provide solutions to universal complexity, populists bait us with fear of our present and switch in a fear of other tribes. Fear leads to the politics of extremity as we stop seeing people for who they are.

Australia has much to gain from a robust UN and much to lose from its impairment. To use just one example of complex challenges, the world must have refreshed migrant and refugee agreements that account for huge and permanent flows of displaced people in the 21st century, which is quite different from the era of refugee treaty instruments of 70 years ago. Australia must balance the management of our sovereign borders and the intakes we need to keep us prosperous with our liberal humanist obligations to those we recognise as equally human, but out of luck.

Covid-19 is just a single adverse event. Unlike the misfortune of an earthquake, a three-month fire season, a tsunami or low-level Middle East wars, this once-in-a-century event has provided fresh insight into the complex civilisational impact that a contagion of greater transmissibility and lethality, or a solar flare or asteroid, or an epic nuclear disaster, or a human-made bacteriological or chemical storm (such as the widespread dispersal of Russia’s chemical agent Novichok) would have on life on earth.

The relatively moderate impact of Covid-19 has alerted us that our neatly organised lives can be switched off in a blink. The great post-pandemic challenge will be to build new resilience into the globalised systems of consensus—the ‘rules-based order’—that we increasingly rely on to physically protect us. This encompasses agreements on nuclear weapons proliferation, climate change, international crime and extremism, space and cyber warfare, corruption and finance, water resources, fishing, and virtual propaganda battles fought over social media outlets that leave our very grasp of reality spinning.

A sense of reality in a complex world is critical. Good propaganda, as Nye once said, is not propaganda, and power and resilience in the 21st century are closely related to ‘whose story wins’. You can’t speak authentically of peace when you promote war, or free trade when you stymie it, or human rights when you cage your own populations en masse. People will eventually call you out. Middle-power countries of modest ambition, whose rhetoric is matched by fact, must constrain our leviathan trade and alliance partners through multilateral organisations in order to shape the world for our own security.

Australia is a UN poster child with a winning story, and it’s not just about Kylie Minogue or Paul Hogan. Our story is about an authentic 21st-century national resilience, as evidenced by our systemic and political management of the Covid-19 contagion. This resilience includes luck, such as iron ore deposits, but also consensus politics spawned by our social temperament, an educated population, a great health system, a first-class bureaucracy, and the fruits of an immigration flow that has fuelled our economy and hardwired us to every other continent. We’re close to what we preach.

Yet we also lag. Australia has a huge corps of Australians who have quietly and expertly built resilience into the international system over decades. Yet this highly trained network is unmapped, scattered and currently untapped for its collective soft-power intelligence and sharp-power impact. In the dozens of conflict and disaster zones I’ve been involved with through multiple UN agencies, I was contacted just once by an Australian embassy when there was a perceived and very public threat to life.

In this line of work, you find yourself exposed to disease, thirst, mischance and lots of people with twitchy trigger fingers, but working for the UN or in the multiplying international agencies such as ActionAid or the International Rescue Committee is not an act of altruism. You’re the face of your country, at a coalface of international cooperation, performing exciting work, imbued with meaning, and often with real and immediate impact on lives out of luck.

Less understood is the impact this work has on global resilience and, ultimately, the safety, security and resilience of the Australian homeland.