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Experience in the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) highlights many of the operational challenges in implementing the UN’s agenda of women, peace and security (WPS). As I reflected on my recent UNMISS deployment as a military gender adviser, two critical aspects came to the fore: the UN’s credibility challenge in advocating for women’s participation in peacebuilding, and the tensions between fulfilling a mandate to protect civilians and supporting the implementation of a peace agreement that increases the risks to women and girls.

South Sudan became independent in 2011, following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended 20 years of civil war in Sudan. UNMISS was then established to succeed the UN Mission in Sudan, but in 2013 violence quickly re-emerged between the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement, led by President Salva Kiir and comprising mainly ethnic Dinka fighters, and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), led by former vice president Riek Machar and with mainly Nuer fighters. A power-sharing peace agreement was signed in August 2015 but failed when heavy fighting broke out again in July 2016 in the capital, Juba.

The 2015 agreement was revitalised in September 2018. It provided for a quota of 35% women’s participation in the implementation committees and was signed by Amer Manyok Deng as the representative of the women’s bloc. The quota reflects ‘the importance of [women’s] equal participation and full involvement’ in peacebuilding and ‘the need to increase their role in decision-making’, which was stressed in UN Security Council resolution 1325 (2000). Implementation of the quota has been slow, although Angelina Teny, for the SPLM-IO, chaired the Defence and Security Committee from late 2018.

UNMISS’s mandate gives it four main tasks: to protect civilians, to create conditions conducive to the delivery of humanitarian assistance, to monitor and investigate human rights violations, and, currently, to support the implementation of the revitalised peace agreement. In advocating for the 35% women’s participation quota in that agreement, however, the UN has created a significant credibility challenge for itself that’s apparent to local authorities and communities.

The UNMISS civilian component has 26% women, the police approximately 20%, and the military only 4%. At the leadership level, despite the appointment of Police Commissioner Unaisi Vuniwaqa (Fiji), women’s participation is lower again. Only one female military contingent commander has served in UNMISS (Lieutenant Colonel Katie Hislop, British Engineering Task Force 2017). Anecdotally, there are few military women in roles that are visible to the local population and in senior operational planning or staff roles, and their overall visibility to the local community as part of UNMISS is more limited than that of men serving in the mission.

The UN’s uniformed gender parity strategy focuses on increasing the proportion of women in missions, but its numerical approach gives insufficient weight to where and how women are employed. This negates the Security Council’s assertions that deploying more women increases community engagement and the mission’s ability to implement the WPS agenda. Rather than just percentages, emphasis also needs to be placed on deploying women into visible UNMISS decision-making roles, particularly at colonel level and above. A force leadership that normalises female participation provides a credible basis for advocacy, as well as a model for contributing militaries that don’t yet have their own senior female officer cohort.

Operationalising women’s participation is more than a practical challenge for WPS and reflects on mission credibility. A similar challenge arises for UNMISS for the protection of civilians, which is another pillar of WPS and a key mandated task.

UNMISS’s responsibility to protect civilians specifically includes the protection of women and children from conflict-related sexual violence. Campaigns of such violence have continued following the peace agreement, including a reported mass rape near Bentiu in September–December 2018. Importantly for operational planning, an investigation by UNMISS and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that the risk factors for organised sexual violence in Bentiu included large numbers of fighters in ‘stand-by’ mode awaiting the implementation of the peace agreement and the presence of armed youth militias. Those risks are likely to increase further when the cantonment of forces proceeds as part of the peace implementation. Thus, the processes that were intended to facilitate peace between the main security actors have increased the risk of violence for others. Counterintuitively, as violence between some armed groups decreased with the peace agreement, the risk of sexual violence against civilians went up.

It’s difficult for UNMISS to reconcile its mandates both to protect the population from sexual violence and to support the implementation of the peace agreement. This problem has been compounded by the fact that the perpetrators include government forces that are parties to the agreement. An added level of complexity is the persistent denial of UNMISS freedom of movement by government forces, which was criticised in Security Council resolution 2459 (2019). The UN’s 2013 policy on human rights due diligence only partially addresses this problem by requiring peacekeepers to avoid supporting human rights violators in their operations.

It’s particularly difficult to strike an operational balance between these competing tasks when UNMISS’s mandate offers limited direction beyond requiring the mission to prioritise the protection of civilians in the use of resources. The risk is that the security of women and girls is subordinated to the implementation of the peace agreement on the assumption that their short- to medium-term increased risk will be reduced in the longer term if peace is achieved—but when the implementation of the gender-specific aspects of the agreement is also slow, that mitigation seems increasingly unhelpful.

While these challenges are significant, it shouldn’t be assumed that they undermine the relevance or utility of WPS, although they do call for creative approaches and an explicit balancing of mandate interests in the pursuit of peace and security for all.

On 17 October, the Morrison government announced a review of Australia’s support for the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to determine whether it remains ‘fit for purpose’. There are compelling reasons for Australia to continue to support the deal, and significant implications if it does not.

Three fundamental bipartisan foreign-policy principles of successive Australian governments are a firm commitment to the rules-based international order, the United Nations, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The JCPOA intersects with all of them.

Signed in July 2015 and implemented in January 2016, the JCPOA is an international arms control agreement, endorsed by the UN Security Council as resolution 2231. As such, it falls very clearly within the parameters of the rules-based international order. And while Australia isn’t a signatory to the JCPOA (the original signatories were the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU), it is a party to the deal through its membership of the UN.

The non-proliferation-related objectives of the JCPOA were to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability, both for the duration of the deal and beyond. Its control mechanisms, most of which are subject to agreed sunset periods of between 10 and 25 years, include regular and comprehensive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and built-in safeguards which ensure that Iran neither has, nor is able to acquire, the quantity or quality of uranium, or the physical means of enriching that uranium, to make a nuclear weapon.

Notwithstanding the limitations of agreed sunset clauses, the JCPOA also includes in its preamble and general provisions Tehran’s explicit reaffirmation ‘that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons’.

The explicit reciprocity within the deal for Iran’s compliance was the lifting of a wide range of sanctions by the UN, and especially the EU and US, covering trade, finance and investment. On implementation, Australia, like other non-signatories, also lifted its UN-related sanctions.

What the deal doesn’t include is mandatory restrictions on Iran’s development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. These are voluntary. Nor does it include any provisions relating to Iran’s non-nuclear military activities, regionally or elsewhere.

As a package, all of the original signatories and the UN regarded the JCPOA and its objectives and control mechanisms as ‘fit for purpose’. But like all agreements, its functionality and durability are underpinned by trust.

Iran has not breached that trust. Its compliance with its obligations has been repeatedly verified by the IAEA during all inspections since the JCPOA’s implementation, despite US President Donald Trump’s announcement of his country’s withdrawal from the deal in May and the progressive imposition of old and new sanctions by Washington in August and November. Iran has voluntarily capped the range of its ballistic missiles at 2,000 kilometres, which is consistent with its perceived regional threats.

And despite the severe challenge to the JCPOA from Trump, all the other signatories have so far upheld their obligations under the agreement. In their joint statement on 24 September, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU agreed to implement legal and other means to try to normalise trade and investment with Iran and minimise the effects of US sanctions on legitimate businesses, to the maximum extent possible.

From an Australian policy perspective, the changes to the agreement that Trump has demanded are not minor. He has significantly moved the goal posts. He wants the sunset clauses to be removed, tougher compliance monitoring by the IAEA to ensure Iran can never develop a nuclear weapons capability, and mandatory restrictions on Iran’s missile program to eliminate any possible development of nuclear-capable long-range ballistic missiles. The last of these demands is widely seen as also seeking to control Iran’s conventional missile capability.

An added sting in Trump’s sanctions regime is the implementation of punitive measures against countries and businesses that continue to do business legally with Iran. Australian companies are among those that could be affected. A further complication of these sanctions for Australia is the negative effect on broader alliance relations, including America’s ties with Europe and the UK.

Trump’s new demands that Iran must cease what he has described as its malign and destabilising activities in the Middle East and elsewhere are unrelated to the JCPOA’s original objectives. These demands were first detailed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in his remarks to the Heritage Foundation in May. They are universally seen as an unrealistic wish list.

Trump’s concerns cut across an internationally endorsed agreement focused on non-proliferation objectives. They have breached the trust of other signatories, and are collectively seen as divisive and unrealistic. Some EU sources believe that Trump’s demands are largely intended as a lesson for North Korea in the hope of some transactional compromise. Reportedly, former US secretary of state John Kerry is being pursued by multiple parties as a broker in the search for any compromise. However, what Washington is currently demanding of Tehran is not seen as proportional or fit for purpose.

Given that the JCPOA is consistent with Australia’s foreign policy objectives, and provided the current signatories continue to meet their obligations, it’s difficult to envisage what the Australian government might see as a realistic alternative. To abandon support for the JCPOA in present circumstances would be inconsistent with Australia’s established foreign policy practice.

It would also raise questions of motive and reliability. Internationally, for example, would Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries see any such change as separate from the Jerusalem embassy issue? Australia would also need to weigh up very carefully the implications of such a change on its relations with other JCPOA signatories, including the EU itself and EU member states.

Whatever the outcome of the review, Australia’s principles and trust should not be compromised.

It was the autumn of 2001, sometime between the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and US President George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan. I was walking through Venice with Richard C. Holbrooke, who had been the US ambassador to the United Nations under President Bill Clinton. Holbrooke’s mobile phone rang. On the line was UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Holbrooke had expected the call. He and Annan spoke with the warm confidence born of their cooperation during Clinton’s second term. Annan, a kind of civilian pope, had forged a partnership with Holbrooke, the master diplomat who had been instrumental in ending the Bosnian War. It was a partnership that both men considered to be essential for global peace and stability.

This cooperative dynamic went beyond Annan and Holbrooke. The UN, as the quintessential symbol of international legitimacy and the rule of law, and the US, as the embodiment of pragmatic power and force, had a kind of alliance. As we mourn the recent death of Annan, perhaps we should also mourn that alliance—and, more fundamentally, the decimation of the UN’s global standing since Annan’s departure in 2007.

Annan was not perfect, and his career included tragedies and mistakes. In the mid-1990s, when he was serving as the UN’s under-secretary-general for peacekeeping, massacres occurred in Rwanda and, subsequently, Bosnia, because UN forces failed to fulfil their responsibility to protect. Annan took no meaningful responsibility for that failure.

Nonetheless, Annan possessed a combination of charisma, elegance, eloquence and self-control that was decisive in maintaining the visibility and legitimacy of the primus inter pares of international organisations. None of his successors has been able to offer these vital qualities, including António Guterres, who took the helm last year. Indeed, despite Guterres’s many positive attributes, the fact is that the UN has all but disappeared from the international radar screen since he took over.

The world stands on the precipice of a kind of chaos not seen since the end of World War II. Increasingly brazen attacks on multilateralism and the international rule of law threaten to destroy the postwar global system that was created—with the UN as its vital pillar—to ensure that history would not repeat itself.

Nowadays, the US has emerged as the UN’s chief detractor. In President Donald Trump’s view, the UN is useless at best. After all, it stands for multilateralism and the rule of law, whereas Trump advocates bilateral deal-making and the rule of force.

Russia is also challenging the UN’s role, albeit to a lesser extent. In March, Russia blocked a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the human-rights catastrophe in Syria. But, in a sense, the Kremlin’s move actually reflects the enduring perception that the UN does still have some influence.

One world power that has emerged as a somewhat surprising backer of the UN is China. Unlike Trump’s US, China recognises that the UN can serve as a platform for it to assert global influence, while building up its soft power. As a result, China has become the third-largest contributor to the UN’s regular budget and the second-largest contributor to its peacekeeping budget. China has even pledged thousands of personnel to UN peacekeeping operations, indicating a commitment to global security.

But to restore the UN’s standing and influence to the level it attained under Annan will require stronger support from Europe—in particular, France and Germany—alongside at least two other influential liberal democracies, perhaps Canada to represent North America and Japan to represent Asia.

Of course, critics will express their doubts. If France and Germany can barely manage any progress in the European context, how can they be expected to lead the world back towards multilateralism and the rule of law? Canada cannot expect to represent North America over the powerful US. And Japan is an ageing, if not decaying, society.

But what is the alternative? If these liberal democracies—which do wield their share of soft power—remain passive, the international order will continue to weaken, potentially to the point that it is shaped primarily by brute force, rather than diplomacy, cooperation or the rule of law.

Together, however, these countries can try to arrest the decay of international institutions and prevent the world from falling back into the systemic violence of the past. If American voters, as seems likely, take away the Republicans’ majority in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections in November, the chances of saving the international order will be even higher.

A collapse into chaos is more likely today than at any point in the last 70 years. But it is not inevitable. We may not have a secretary-general with Annan’s gifts, but we can and must continue to fight for the world order that he helped to build.

In his much-acclaimed 1970 book, Why men rebel, Ted R. Gurr postulated that political violence could be explained by looking at social psychological factors. Gurr’s theory about political activism, and specifically political violence, centred on what people think their living conditions should be as opposed to what those conditions are. He called this ‘relative deprivation’: people’s perceptions of their status and what they believe they’re entitled to are fundamental to contemporary political activism and public discontent.

A statement by former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich in 2016 exemplified the phenomenon. When it was pointed out to him that violent crime in the US was down, he retorted, ‘The average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think that crime is down, does not think that we are safer … People feel more threatened. As a political candidate, I’ll go with what people feel.’ In another example, Michael Gove, Britain’s former education minister, famously declared during the Brexit debate that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. Gove’s aim was to emphasise that, even though most experts believed that a British withdrawal from the EU was a mistake, the experts were either wrong or didn’t reflect what the people wanted and needed—or felt that they wanted and needed.

Relative deprivation lies at the heart of the discourse on migration. Nigel Farage, exploiting fear and opposition to the wave of migration from the Middle East and North Africa, was able to claim that Sweden’s liberal immigration policy has facilitated a massive increase in the number of refugees, which has led to Sweden becoming the ‘rape capital’ of Europe. Others have referred to asylum seekers as ‘economic refugees’—a term that doesn’t exist in law, but that fosters a perception that most refugees are ‘queue jumpers’, are ‘taking the system for a ride’, and pose a security threat, even though most terrorist acts are carried out by nationals not migrants.

Relative deprivation also feeds into the perception that the West is being inundated by migrants, as Pauline Hanson claimed in a speech to the Australian parliament in 2016: ‘We are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.’

Out of 24 million Australians, 7 million were born overseas. We’re a nation of immigrants, especially if we count the 40% of Australians who have at least one parent who was born overseas (20% of Europeans are foreign born). And yet, despite these figures, there’s tremendous opposition to Australia taking in migrants—especially if they’re Muslim, as there’s an assumption that such migrants won’t integrate.

Hard data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that migrants are far from a drain. They participate in and contribute to society, especially when we take declining birthrates into account. Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, links economic growth to population growth. He points out that population growth, especially in the West, has been in decline since the 1960s, and argues that population growth is the key to ensuring American economic power (over the past decade, population growth in the US has averaged 0.8%). Sharma adds, ‘In the past decade, population growth, including immigration, has accounted for roughly half of the potential economic growth rate in the US, compared with just one-sixth in Europe, and none in Japan.’

The goal of Gingrich, Gove, Farage, Hanson and others is to heighten perceptions of relative deprivation in order to sustain their own positions. Mainstream politicians who fail to challenge such views are not leading but being led. As well as making our society more intolerant, those attitudes undermine the economic development of the West, which is increasingly being defined by its ageing population, declining birthrates and failure to look after the elderly. There’s also an ethical problem: by rejecting those who seek refuge from violence and insecurity, we’re undermining our own moral values.

Policymakers should remember that Australia has played a key role in shaping the UN and international law. When we served on the Security Council, we showed great leadership in building consensus on key issues relating to Afghanistan and the Islamic State, as well as demanding action over the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. We’re now hoping to join the Human Rights Council for the 2018–2020 term and re-join the Security Council for the 2029–2030 term. This requires us to be leaders, which means that instead of supporting and advancing misconceptions, we should emulate Angela Merkel, who has declared that she stands by her 2015 decision to admit a million refugees to Germany despite the political cost that came with that decision.

Policymakers have a simple choice when it comes to the discourse on migrants. They can either be on the right side of history or be on the wrong side. They can help advance a dignified discourse on migration that’s based on fact and not on xenophobia, jingoism and distrust of the ‘other’.

We should remember that migrants could also strengthen Australia’s economy and society. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Liveability Index rated Melbourne as the world’s most liveable city (for the seventh time), followed by Vienna and Vancouver. It might be no coincidence that Melbourne is also Australia’s most culturally diverse city, suggesting that multiculturalism helps to make cities more liveable.

US President Donald Trump’s first address to the United Nations General Assembly will be remembered, above all, for its bizarre language, and its descriptions of North Korea as ‘depraved’, Iran as ‘murderous’, and Cuba and Venezuela as ‘corrupt’. And, beyond calling out miscreant member states by name, Trump also offered a fervent defence of his ‘America First’ agenda.

But while Trump’s particular choice of words was new to the UN, his arguments were not. He pointed out, with some justification, that other countries also put their own national interests first. And he reprised a longstanding complaint within US foreign-policymaking circles: that it is somehow excessive and unfair to expect American taxpayers to pay for 22% of the UN’s total budget.

After calling on the General Assembly to do its part to implement and then enforce sanctions against North Korea, Trump said, ‘Let’s see how they do’. But referring to the UN as ‘they’ implies that it is something apart from the US. Trump’s tone was that of a dissatisfied tenant, blaming the landlord for his home’s poor state of repair. But the UN is only as good as those who inhabit it, not least the US itself.

In his speech, Trump listed America’s many contributions to the world, and suggested that it keeps the UN around as a sort of favor to other countries in need of an international forum. He assumed no US responsibility for the UN’s fortunes, failures, or even its achievements. But, in addition to contributing more than any other country to the UN budget, the US also plays an outsize role within the institution. The US can thus claim credit for many of the UN’s successes; but it is also responsible for many of its failures.

It is worth remembering that no UN secretary-general assumes office without US support. And, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the US has veto power over any UNSC action, including sanctions, deployments of peacekeepers, and official condemnations of other member states. Even if the UN’s large institutional bureaucracy can be unwieldy at times, its effectiveness ultimately depends on its most influential members.

Consider the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s, when the Security Council decided to send in UN peacekeepers, rather than deploying a more robust multilateral presence, as would have been allowed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. The United Kingdom and France, which contributed the bulk of the peacekeeping force, insisted on a peacekeeping mandate, because they did not want to put their troops in harm’s way.

The US, for its part, refused to contribute any troops at all, and thus had no right to call for a stronger mandate that would have allowed UN forces to step in to end the violence. Although many Americans had witnessed the carnage from their living rooms and wanted the UN to do more to stop it, neither they nor their leaders—first George H.W. Bush and then Bill Clinton—had any interest in sending American troops to be a part of a Bosnian peacekeeping force. The result, as we now know, was that the killing continued, sometimes in the presence of UN peacekeepers whose countries had not given them a strong enough mandate to intervene.

By the time the US-led Dayton Accords had put an end to the war, in December 1995, the UN’s peacekeeping capacity had been so thoroughly discredited that NATO war-fighting troops were sent in to take over from the UN Protection Force. In other words, when the situation required war fighters, peacekeepers were dispatched; and when the situation called for peacekeepers, war fighters were sent. None of this apparent dysfunction had anything to do with the UN. It was a direct result of UN member states’ decision-making.

Even Trump’s dystopian and dyspeptic speech conceded that the UN makes valuable contributions to world peace, through peacekeeping missions and other forms of assistance. More often than not, this work is done in far-flung countries, where direct US involvement would be unpalatable to many American politicians’ constituents.

The UN is far from perfect. But, rather than bash it, American leaders, starting with Trump, should understand that its actions and decisions are often an extension of their own.