Reforming the United Nations by Ignoring It

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC), as the only legitimate dispenser of humanitarian intervention, is limited in its effectiveness by the veto powers afforded to the Permanent Five members (P5). Various reform agendas have been attempted over the years, and all have failed; for the most part because any such reform would limit the current level of international control that the veto affords the P5, and yet those reforms would also require P5 approval before they could be enacted.

The solution to this can be the normative rise of regional peacekeeping solutions that don’t merely seek to execute resolutions by themselves, but actually bypass United Nations (UN) approval and UN processes altogether. This would, in effect, take away the control over international actions that the P5 members currently hold with the veto power. By simply ignoring the UNSC, the UNSC will be forced to accept the complete loss of power associated with that behaviour, or conversely choose to reform themselves in order to retain a diminished share of their original power. Ignoring the United Nations Security Council might just be the only means to reforming it. JIOS_Vol1 (journal-iostudies.org)

Lost In Translation - Review of Kim Young-ha's ‘I Hear Your Voice’

The place of translators in the world of fiction, represents a moral hazard of sorts. They get their name on the cover, and paid regularly by each sale, but don’t risk the same downsides in the event of failure. The author always suffers much greater damage to their reputation; if indeed the translator suffers at all. Both are coming at the same enterprise from such different directions: the author careful, and risk adverse, editing away to tedium; the translator pushing things out to publication as quickly as possible. But maybe it’s an employee’s market out there at the moment, because Kim Young-ha’s next book, a collection of short stories, ‘Diary of a Murderer’ – due to be released in early 2019 – once again uses Krys Lee for its English translation. Someone is not getting what they think they are out of this relationship.

Institutional Responsibility for Mass Atrocity Crimes with Thomas Pogge

Humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are currently limited and encumbered by a pervasive absence of political will. In the calculations of states, political considerations are constantly winning-out over the moral considerations of saving at-risk segments of our planet. While institutional and legal reforms undoubtedly play a role in addressing this challenge, such reforms and structures have existed for generations now, and have largely failed to bridge this gap from ‘moral necessity to political action’.

What has been lacking is a moral understanding of humanitarian crises that is capable of reliably motivating the international community to undertake remedying actions, rather than merely expressions of concern. Such a moral foundation is achievable through institutional cosmopolitanism, an understanding of humanitarian intervention as satisfactions of our negative duties, and specifically the work of Thomas Pogge.

A Framework for Avoiding Human Rights Scrutiny: North Korea and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was designed to bridge the divide between best humanitarian practice and the sovereign protection of states. Its applicability to the grave human rights abuses in North Korea, as expounded in the United Nations Commission of Inquiry report, were immediately obvious. By the letter of the doctrine, North Korea should have been subject to an R2P-led intervention in order to halt systemic human rights abuses that the regime in Pyongyang proved unwilling to address themselves. Yet through a series of factors – designed and un-designed – the North Korean state has managed to construct an avoidance framework for interventions of this kind. A replicable standard by which the international community will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid living up to their human rights obligations in the face of continuing violations by obstinate states.

The Needs of Strangers and the Will to Act – Peter Singer, John Rawls, Thomas Pogge

Having let two people die in the past two days, you decide the next evening to skip your stroll and instead take a calming nap. After an hour or so, you are startled awake from an eventful sleepwalk. You are kneeling down beside yet another small lake, Pogge Pond, this time with no shoes in sight. Elbow deep in the water, you realise that you are holding something under the surface. As you look closer you begin to make out the wet form of another young child, kicking, scratching and clawing to escape your grip on the back of his head. You can either let go and allow him to breathe, or continue with what you have started…

You will have to think about it…

Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas by Jinah Kim (review)

Every argument turns back on America as the evil from where all other evils manifest, the pages become increasingly muddy with the authors partisanship, and the glee becomes palpable with every new call for pound-of-flesh justice. The problem slowly builds into a crescendo, on every page there is a face-value acceptance of not only grief, but of how that grief should be dealt with (always reparations), and of the ‘truth’ claims of victims and victimhood. This is a deliberately dense academic work, but there is nothing ‘academic’ about bludgeoning forward under the conviction that your argument is self-evident, and incontrovertibly true. And yet in trying to build a “critical imaginative geography of the Pacific Arena”, Jinah Kim is successful.

Comfort Women and the David Irving Problem

The enemies of truth and civilization are not always as clumsy and easy to spot as we might hope. Occasionally they are sophisticated – credentialed even – with long-term, war-like strategies for smearing everything that we care about. If the comfort women issue continues to be protected as sacred ground, as something that cannot be touched, something impervious to new or contradictory evidence, then soon-or-later a David Irving-type figure is going to walk onto this manicured stage, and then burn everything to the ground; with truth becoming indistinguishable from falsehood.

Stuck Inside - Review of Han Kang's 'White Book'

Han Kang will have to be slower and less deliberate in her next book. She will have to produce something that doesn’t first require a recognition of her fame before it can draw applause. Moments of eye-opening prose are not enough to sustain the wave she is on, and it’s a game of diminishing returns. Let’s hope our punk rock band turns its back on fame and the allure of the fawning crowds. Selling the mansion, they move back into their parent’s garage with nothing but the same instruments and motivation that got them started… and a little more coherence. No understanding that anything they write will be heard outside those walls; no money to be made, no glory, no awards. A return to art for its own sake. Let’s hope that the series of empty white pages at the end of this book is the last stunt before a return to the literature that made Han Kang so good in the first place.

‘The Disappearance of the Western Libido’: Review of Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin

Houellebecq always writes to a theme, as if himself addicted. And Serotonin – his latest book – embraces this addiction as closely as any other: a “small, white, scored oval tablet”, a “perfect drug, a simple, hard drug that brings no joy, defined entirely by a lack, and by the cessation of that lack”. And chasing old dragons, it starts with life at an early end; and with sex.

Missiles and Miscalculation

There is plenty in this book, and plenty to like. The imagery of American pilots over North Korean skies recalling “the helpless feeling of watching the huge missiles powering up into space carrying huge nuclear weapons that the pilots knew were headed toward the United States” is hauntingly well done (even if the repeated use of the word ‘huge’ sticks in the throat). But more than anything, this is bold. It reaches for something difficult, and succeeds, and fails, in just the ways you might expect. For this, Jeffery Lewis both seems to know the limitations of his project, and then at times completely forgets what that project actually is. The personal 'testimony' of survivors is a good piece of literary craft, however it doesn’t blend as it should with the cold technical explanations throughout. And Lewis's attempts to slow-play his readers often doesn’t catch, as he tries to retroactively hint at what he has already told us is coming. Yet, in a strange way it all kind of works. The clumsy moments and the jagged edges, don’t take away too much from what this actually is – a missile expert talking us through an incredibly dangerous scenario. And the worst thing that can be said about this scenario, is also the best thing that can be said about this book – it is plausible.

Removing Yourself from the Personal: Review of ‘A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid’

There is a scene during one of their prison interviews, where the author reaches out and touches de Kock’s hand in an attempt to comfort him. Innocuous you might think, but if we are to take Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela seriously – and her constant assertions of expertise and authority – then how should we approach a claim like this: “Something odd did happen the morning after the interview. I was awake and lying in bed. Then it dawned on me that I couldn’t lift my right forearm. I immediately ‘knew’ why. It was the same hand with which I had reached out to consolidate de Kock, and now it had gone completely numb”. If true, then she has, astonishingly, stumbled onto a brand new psychological phenomenon… or perhaps an old one – solipsism. But let me be the first person to say it out loud – I don’t believe her!

The Moral Missteps of Climate Activism

This brings us back to Deutsch’s submarine. Embodied within all that technology, all that comfort, and all that safety, is a continuous stream of problem solving – not just problem avoidance – stretching all the way back to the enlightenment. Now we are being told that our progress is itself the problem. That we should open the hatches and shrink back into sustainability – the same sustainability that killed all our cousin species. But this has things around entirely the wrong way – “Sustainability is the disease and people are the cure”.

The Politics of Karl Popper

An open-ended stream of explanations is always available to us. The limitation is never resources (because all resources only become so by virtue of what people actually know) but only knowledge. It is never going to be pretty, but we can begin to step ourselves out of Karl Popper’s swamp, and to do so at ever greater speed. Progress of this kind in any one area, is also intimately linked with knowledge and progress in other areas; if technology continues to lead the way in this regard, as it does today, then progress in politics and morality will follow closely behind. The only dangerous thing we can do, is to think that some solutions are beyond our reach. “What lies ahead of us is in any case infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life.”

Tiananmen of the Mind

Walking in from the imperial structure of the Forbidden City, with its shaded walkways and tight lanes, the change in atmosphere is sudden – like stepping out of your front door and finding yourself on the African Savanna; a pride of lions staring back at you in contemplation. It is a study in the psychological impact of space. Once through the arches of Tiananmen Gate – The Gate of Heavenly Peace – your pace slows along with your confidence. With every step you feel more vulnerable, naked, and on display.

Pulling on the Stitches of Japanese Identity - Review of The Invitation-Only Zone

Across the coastlines of western Japan, starting in the 1970’s, a terrifying horror story was playing out. Lone fishermen weren’t coming home, women out on regular evening walks were lost forever, and young lovers were disappearing; engines still idling in their abandoned cars. Many of the vanished were dismissed as runaways, people deserting unwanted families for a new life, or even suicide. It wasn’t through incompetence that police forces failed to piece this together. Drawing a link between missing people, from different beaches, from different islands, sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart, just would have stretched credulity too far. And this still wouldn’t have got anyone to the implausible truth that the North Korean regime – directly guided by Kim Jong-il – was kidnapping Japanese citizens in the hope that they might become – or failing that help to train – his next generation of covert agents.

Cutting History to Fit: A Study in Motivated Reasoning - Review of 'Korea Where the American Century Began'

“For my father (1928 - )” reads Michael Pembroke’s brief dedication, “who was there”. It is a raw, honest and principled motivation for writing a book… but not an intellectual one. ‘Korea: Where the American Century Began’, teases to do something impressive, but finds itself stuck in this first sentence; unable to kick free from the author’s antipathy toward what, and who, he blames for his father’s ‘being there’.

North Korea's Princess: The Strange Life and Dangerous Future of Kim Yo-jong

More than just unfettered access to the leader of North Korea, Yo-jong could, quite conceivably – considering some of the recent social changes inside her country – be next in line for succession if something were to happen to her brother. As close as she is to Kim Jong-un, this must also worry her. In her short adult life, Yo-jong has witnessed a veritable revolving door of family members being exiled or killed for simply being in the position she is now. Her uncle, Jang Song-taek, just like her, had built-up a huge portfolio over the years. And just like her, he had, through international diplomatic excursions (to China), become a statesman in his own right, and someone who foreign leaders had begun to see as an alternative centre of power; as a potential replacement for Kim Jong-un.

The Rise of Kim Yo-Jong in the North Korean Regime

Through the circus of it all, and the Machiavellian fear, Yo-jong had lost one of the last remaining certainties in her life. The people that ‘shared’ her social circle, were always coming-and-going. Exile assassination, even defection was common – her aunt defected in 1998 – but for a child that had spent so much of her life in isolation, only ever flirting, when permitted, with new crowds, this was different. Seven years after burying her mother, her father was now dead; she was starkly more alone in the world. Looking around her, there was very little remaining. Her two eldest siblings were becoming strangers to her, Jong-chol, her eldest maternal brother was suddenly in the uncomfortable position of having to lay low, so as to not risk undermining the transition of power (he did not return to North Korea for the funeral). And Jong-un, understandably busy running the country, had also recently married a modern-minded wife, Ri Sol-ju, who not content to play the traditional Korean house-maker, was increasingly becoming political, accompanying the new leader on official visits.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Problem of Political Will

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was created in the hope of overcoming the barrier that state sovereignty, as a principle, had become to actions of humanitarian intervention. It was imagined that as mass atrocity crimes were coming to the attention of the international community, that, on the whole, they were willing, able and eager to intervene in order to stop the violence in question. Holding them back was sovereignty as both a legal and normative barrier. This was always a bad explanation for the pervasive lack of humanitarian intervention; accordingly R2P, as a bad solution, has failed almost entirely. The problem is, and always has been, that when faced with mass atrocity crimes, the international community is plagued by a near-permanent lack of political will to action.

Viewing North Korean Aggression from the South - Single Page Analogy

As the months and years creep by, you become increasingly desensitized to the noise. He still screams, and provokes, and seeks a reaction, but you have learned to drown him out. Sure he is unpleasant, and occasionally a threat, but what else is there to do other than ignore him?

This becomes such a normal part of your daily life – and having seen it for so many years – when people hear the threats your neighbour makes, and witness his erratic behaviour, it is now often You that acts as mediator, and downplays the problem. A strange contradiction forms: people looking in from a distance, are more interested, and more concerned, by your neighbour and his antics, than you are.