MIHAELA CARSTEI: Hi and welcome to F-World: The Fragility Podcast. Together with our guests we explore how the forces of fragility manifest across the world and in our day-today lives, and how we can build a more resilient future. I’m Mihaela Carstei and am joined by my two co-hosts Johan Bjurman Burman and Paul Bisca.

And today we’re speaking with Sarah Cliffe. Sarah is currently the director of New York University Center on International Cooperation. Prior to that, she held several leadership positions at the World Bank and the United Nations. At the World Bank, Sarah pioneered the work on fragile and conflict affect the states, serving also as the Special Representative for the 2011 World Development Report on Conflict, Security, and Development. At the UN, she spearheaded efforts to help countries build civilian capacities that would help strengthen peacebuilding and post conflict transitions. Sarah’s vast experience ranges from countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Rwanda, South Africa, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste. She began her career in the United Kingdom and has degrees from Cambridge University and Columbia University. Welcome to F-World Sarah! 

SARAH CLIFFE: Very good to be here. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: We always love to know the story that brought our speakers to this podcast, to this point in their career. So, we want to know how you grew up, what shaped your views of the world, what experiences made you interested in studying conflict and fragility and ultimately development overall? 

SARAH CLIFFE: I grew up in south Wales in the UK, in a coal mining area, in a town called Pont-y-Pwl. And it had, I think, various different effects that influenced my interests throughout my career. So one is that it was during the period of the coal mines closing in the UK. First of all, the miners’ strike and then the closure of the mines. So, I grew up in a place where poverty and inequality were very visible, and where the effect of shocks was very visible. So the town that I grew up in went – at one period – to having 70% male unemployment, with very large consequent economic and social changes in the community. That I think has always made me interested in the effect of shocks and how communities are resilient or are affected by them. It also affected my relationship to thinking about conflict. 

Wales of course, is an area of the UK that has a very strong identity like Scotland and Ireland. It has a strong sense of history and of previous conflicts with England and with the rest of the UK. And that was very much part of my schooling and my education. I went – after I did my first degree and I worked for a short period as a management consultant – I went to work in South Africa and that also had a very strong effect I think on my later career. I was in South Africa from 1989 to 94, which were five or six years of the great period of the apartheid transition. So I worked at that time for the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. And I was in an environment where people talked on a daily basis coffee, over an evening meal, about fundamental transformations in society. So people would ask questions like, is communism or capitalism better? Which should we choose for our society? It was a really fascinating period of thinking about what transformation means from a very difficult legacy of conflict.

I also had – after South Africa – a kind of different experience of conflict. I went from South Africa almost directly to Rwanda, after the genocide. And South Africa, of course, experienced a low-level civil war over a lot of the period of the transition, but it was a low level civil war in a middle income country, which otherwise had quite functioning institutions. Rwanda during the genocide, of course, was affected from top to bottom of society and in every corner of the country. So that was, for me, a depth of immersion in the kind of suffering that conflict can bring, which had a deep effect, I think, on my later career. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, I have a question about the UK actually, because your story in that part of the UK – people forget that in the Western world there were pockets of deep poverty and inequality as they still exist and I’m thinking Appalachia today. So what would you say prevented the UK from having a conflict when it had such deep inequality compared to other countries? And we all kind of intuitively know, but I’d love to hear how you thought of it and whether or not – when you were growing up – that risk of conflict ever even came up. And I assume this was maybe a little bit before the troubles in Northern Ireland, which have a completely different source. But how you grew up reminds me of the mining towns that I grew up with in Romania in a way, and the ones we see currently in West Virginia. So speak a little bit to that, why did conflict not actually emerge there? 

SARAH CLIFFE: No that’s a really interesting question. And the UK of course, has certainly had its share of conflict, including the prolonged Northern Ireland conflict, which was going on through the period that I grew up and went to university. The area that I grew up in also was the site of considerable violence, particularly during the period of industrialization, when people were being moved off, small holding farms, there was the start of the trade union movement, which was very much resisted by the employers of coal mines. There were large scale periods of violence. 

But Britain, of course, has not been in actual civil war for several centuries now. So the question about how do you avoid actual widespread outbreak of civil conflict, I think, is fundamentally one of the resilience and adaptability of institutions. So, Britain over a period of time has managed to, first of all, build some institutions that are well known for their resilience in general, the performance of the justice system and of different parts of the state. It has also adapted those institutions. So particularly the creation of different forms of parliament and representation for Scotland, for Wales, and for Northern Ireland, of course, after the Good Friday agreement and the peace process. So I think that’s important.

I would say with Britain that it’s under considerable stress at the moment. So the post Brexit period, as we speak, there’s a debate going on about whether the Scottish government is empowered to conduct a referendum on independence or not. So, I generally think that we’ve seen in the last five or 10 years, that none of our societies are immune from fragility and the risk of conflict. We should never be complacent about it. And we should always be attuned to the fact that it can reemerge. 

PAUL M. BISCA: So, I had a quick follow up on what you said earlier about growing up in a mining town because presumably 70% male unemployment makes for really fundamental conversations about what’s happening to the world around you. And then you went to South Africa where you mentioned that the morning coffee was all into deep philosophy with very real-world consequences. How did those conversations compare? If you could put the people in South Africa together with those in Wales, what do you think they would have in common?

SARAH CLIFFE: It’s a very interesting question. So, they, first of all, actually had in common a strong history of civic education among people who were quite disadvantaged economically, in both cases actually led by the trade unions. And this I think is something in the last 30 years, trade unions have fallen out of fashion. They were considered to be insider organizations that were protecting some workers at the cost of others. And of course, in some cases that is true. But when we think about democratic transitions, trade unions have often played quite a key role. As we’ve seen in some countries in Eastern Europe, was certainly the case in South Africa, and it was also the case in Wales. So, both of these areas were areas where you had unskilled workers, not people with a great level of formal education, but people who had received a lot of civic education through the associations that they belonged to. And that I think made for very interesting conversations, because you had people who were at the hard end, really the coal face of course one would say literally, because it was a coal mining area of the effect of international trends and who were debating what those trends meant for them. 

It was a little bit different however, in terms of the spirit of hope, because I grew up in an area which was going from having been a flourishing industrial hub with jobs that were hard and dangerous but were relatively well paid and allowed people to live relatively well to going through a very painful transition where those jobs were retrenched, families had to find other ways of supporting themselves. South Africa, by contrast, in the years I was, there was a country going through a period of immense hope – that this was finally after a period of since 1906, when the ANC was established, a period of decades and decades of struggle – was going through the prospect of a real transformation.

JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So in the world of conflict and kind of fragility analysis, we are quite detailed about how we use conflict and how we use violence. And I know obviously you, in the reports that you’ve produced, really emphasized that there is such a difference between conflict which is something that we need to have in society and violence, which is obviously something that we would like to avoid even – just echoing your point – even in the US recently, we saw conflict breaking into violence, even in a country where we think of the institutions as being strong and sturdy. So in your mind, how should we be thinking about managing conflict and how do we assess what level of conflict is acceptable or sustainable in a particular societal context. And when we get to that limit of what is acceptable or sustainable. How can we deescalate to keep it from boiling over? 

SARAH CLIFFE: So exactly, as you say, Johan, of course, conflict understood as being contestation between views and interests and values is part of what makes a vibrant society. It’s part of what makes us grow and change and adapt. So there is, I think always this dilemma with trying not to be seen as coming across as suppressing that type of positive contestation, but being aware what are the pathways that can actually lead to violent conflict. And it is of course, violent conflict that we are against, not peaceful contestation of views.

So here there are, I think a couple of things to be aware of, particularly now in the situation and the context we have of communication and new technology. So one is that we now know a lot about the kind of stressors that can exacerbate the risks of violence. And in addition to the World Development Report that I worked on the World Bank and the UN have published Pathways to Peace, which was a very good piece of work in terms of looking at how those journeys and those pathways happen and pointed out by the way that they tend to happen over a relatively long period of time, and that you do in fact have time to take action to stop them. So I think that the key thing here is to be aware of what are the stresses that can increase those risks and manage those stressors. And the stressors can be in the economic area. We’ve seen for instance, in the last two years, because of COVID and now because of the impact of the invasion of Ukraine, a series of economic shocks that certainly carry with them some risks for conflict on social peace. They can be in the area of the political or security realms. So here I think another key thing to think about is that we don’t always want to avoid the stressors, we may, in some cases want to manage them.

So I’m thinking for instance, about the very, very well grounded research, the countries and societies that are in early phases of democracy – often called anocracy where you have some democratic institutions, but you don’t have a full range of democratic institutions in place – those societies are at higher risk of conflict. We can see that very clearly in, in a large body of research and data, that doesn’t mean that the right reaction to that is to say, well, we’re not going to have elections because people now have a very strong expression of demand for that representation and that voice. It’s very clear that around the world, they see that as part of what they want.

So the question is not, do we stop having elections? The question is how do we manage the risk associated with elections? And you have in the last period of time, I’ve been very interested, for instance, following the events in Kenya, but you have there for instance, a country which had gone through a large period of electoral violence and has so far in this electoral process managed to avoid that kind of large-scale outbreak.

PAUL M. BISCA: So we’ve been using certain terms that almost segue very nicely to the next question that I wanted to ask you for people in this field in development and in conflict, the World Development Report that you led was truly a milestone in the sense that it brought that agenda into the international financial institutions.

It even made it possible for people with an interest in security, like me who were, sort of, then just graduating to find avenues to tackle this area. So I remember the one, the first meetings I’ve ever been to at the World Bank was – someone had said, you need to see this if you’re interested – and it was, I think you and Nigel Roberts presenting the WDR report. One thing I thought of, could you say a bit about the framework? Could you explain a bit the framework of the report, but in a way that would speak to the kind of people you would mention that you met in South Africa, or maybe in your hometown, how would you explain to them what you’re trying to say in the report and how is that relevant today?

SARAH CLIFFE: So, the basic framework of the report is encompassed by the idea that societies are successful in preventing conflict if they have legitimate institutions that can deliver security, justice, and jobs. But that’s something that needs quite a bit of unpacking if we’re to think about what it really means. So, I think what we are saying here is that there’s two sides basically to whether your society actually faces large scale, violent conflict. One side is to do with how many cracks there are in all of your strength as a state, a government, a community, a civil society association. So what we popularly, what we generally call institutions. And I tend to think of that as being, how many cracks do you have in the glass? No society has no cracks in the glass. And we’ve really seen in the last 10 years, most high-income societies go through some quite challenging periods. But if you have a lot of cracks in your glass, when it gets knocked by anything, even when it gets knocked by a, a small pencil on the side of it, it will actually shatter.

If you have very few cracks in your glass, you can manage to have it knocked over and it may not shatter into pieces. You can still survive. So Mihaela asked earlier the question about the UK and what made it avoid conflict. I often think of one of the examples of this being Spain. So, if we look at Spain in the last period, it has faced a lot of the shocks and stressors that have led other societies into conflict. It has had extremely high unemployment, particularly high youth unemployment, it’s had a strong separatist movement in one part of the country. It’s had challenges to the credibility of some of its institutions from the monarchy to the justice system, to the private sector. It’s had corruption, scandals, and shocks among its political parties, as well as among some of its other institutions. And yet Spain has not fallen into full scale, civil conflict or anything approaching it. In fact, and that I think is because it’s over the period since the end of the dictatorship in Spain, the Spanish society really built institutions that mended a lot of those cracks in the glass, that managed to make sure that the glass was pretty robust and could withstand quite a lot of shocks from outside. And that I think is one of the main messages of the WDR on what prevents conflict. 

The other things in the WDR framework that are important are to do with solutions to prevention. So, the WDR looks at essentially a couple of mechanisms for restoring confidence and then building those strong institutions. And in restoring confidence, it looks at the importance of inclusive enough coalitions. So the idea of that is that you don’t need to have everyone, every political segment of society on board, but you need to have enough on board. The spoilers or those who would wish to, to derail a process of peace cannot actually get a majority of support. And that you are maintaining a unity against that. 

The WDR who looks at confidence building and how to build that into more permanent gains. And it considers how do societies that are trying to prevent conflict, deliver some quick results, which make people feel things are going for the better. So I shouldn’t think about aligning myself to a rebel movement or a violent movement or an opposition movement that espouses violence, because things actually are getting better. Doesn’t mean that you’ve fixed every problem. It just means you’ve fixed one or two things that are very important in people’s daily lives and that give them that, that sense of confidence. And it looked then at a repeated mechanisms whereby countries and societies translate that confidence into institutions that can work over the longer term. And one of the things that was notable about the WDR is that it looked at the length of time that takes – still something that when we are thinking about conflicts today is very important. We calculated for instance, that when you looked at all the transitions in the 20th century, and you looked at a set of ways of measuring what makes societies more robust – so not having military and politics, low levels of corruption, high levels of government capacity – on average, it took between 30 and 45 years for most of those indicators of measurement to go from roughly the level of Haiti today to roughly the level of Ghana today. So this is much longer, of course, than in the development community certainly, or the international community more generally, we tend to expect things to happen. So, we look at Afghanistan we look at other situations, we expect that there would’ve been progress in a three-year period, and yet nothing in history tells us that this is in fact rightly to take place. 

JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, as you said, these are some of these countries like Haiti, Somalia, for example, have had a lot of support, have tried to build these institutions, but yet they have emerged from, for Haiti, from the Duvalier dictatorship, just like Spain emerged from their dictatorship, but have not been successful in building these institutions. And as you said, building the coalitions, getting the spoilers out, building the confidence into permanent gains that can translate into institutions. This takes us obviously to the central topic of fragility. And we would love to know a little bit more about kind of, now 10 years on after the WDR, how do you think about fragility and how does fragility intervene to make it impossible, it seems, for countries like Haiti to build institutions that Spain were able to build in the last 40, 50, 60 years. 

SARAH CLIFFE: The WDR I think when we look back at it. It had a number of things which we see as being very applicable today and which I have to say sometimes when I reread or re-dip into parts of it, I think, oh, was good that we highlighted that because we’ve seen in the 10 years since that it’s even more relevant.

And some of the things there that I would highlight is its emphasis on external shocks, both as stresses and as solutions. So WDR 2011 actually has a focus on invasion and occupation as part of what it said – was something at the time that was considered in the World Bank to be quite controversial and we had to go through all the literature and the evidence around this to be able to justify why we made that point. But indeed, we do see now of course in the 10 years subsequently a rise in interstate conflict most recently, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but with many other areas of the world in which this is an increasing issue. So this I think has been important. The other element that I think is important here and has been developed since the WDR is the exclusion of particular groups. So that WDR looked at justice stress and it looked at discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or race or other group-based identifiers. But it’s one of the areas where at the time that we looked at it, we didn’t have enough evidence about the relationship of that type of group-based inequality to conflict to be able to make that point as strong as I think in the team we would’ve liked to, to have made it. And since this period that evidence has emerged. So we now have a good body that looks at the relationship of group based inequalities and identities to conflict. So this is very much something that I would think about going forward. 

I think those two elements are going to be important and they have an interplay with each other because what we see in many countries around the world are political leaders who manipulate group based identity so who are exacerbating, that type of identity. We see technology, which also has an automatic effect on increasing the salience of those identities. So the way in which social media algorithms work, both tends to fragment towards smaller and smaller identity groups and to take to more extremist positions. So, this is a risk. And we have, I think looking ahead in this century, a great likelihood of a set of international shocks that will then interact with what is happening in societies and with their own sense of identity fragmentation. So all of those elements I think are really important to build on and think about going forward. 

Just to come back to a very practical question, Johan you asked about Haiti or, or Somalia, or I guess we could say Afghanistan in the sense, I do think that there’s a sense of impatience worldwide, including among donor communities. Look, we’ve poured a lot of effort. We’ve poured a lot of money and investment into some of these situations, and we don’t see them getting better. So I would say in response to that firstly, that you have to look at whether we were actually doing the things that our evidence would tell us we should do in those situations and Afghanistan over the last 20 years is probably an example where certainly as much was done that went against what we know works as was done that would support what we know works. 

Secondly, you need to look at what I had described before in terms of the track record of how long societies take. So if we were talking about societies taking 30 to 45 years to go through this type of transformation, I also could say that none of those transitions were purely upwards progress. So all of them went through some sense of two steps forward, one step back. And the problem we have now is that when countries are going through those backwards steps, there is a great deal of international impatience about staying engaged and remaining with them through those steps. I think it’s crucially important that we actually do take seriously that evidence and that we stay engaged. And that we understand that in the development and the donor community we have for many years made the problem of treating countries as either darlings or pariahs. So either we see them as being the great example of a country exiting fragility, or we see them as being terribly regressive. So I could use perhaps Myanmar in recent years, as an example of that. Myanmar was a transition that the international community poured a great deal of support into, even though the risks were there to be seen well before the 2020 coup. So we have to, I think, stop trying to divide societies into this very dichotomous kind of binary system and think that this is a process that they go through. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: So I want to transition a little bit to the big tapestry that all of this is taking place on, and that is sort of the multilateral system and we are approaching the next, we’re a few weeks before the 77th meeting of the, and it’s taking place in a highly tense international environment, which we’ve mentioned a few elements already: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It consequences with high energy and food prices, the tensions over Taiwan between the US and China, uncertain post COVID recovery, because it’s at multi-speed in a way across the world. And these are just a few of the challenges.

And it also seems what you just said I was just thinking we are the 77th UNGA meeting. It takes 35, 30 to 45 years to make that transition that you highlighted for us earlier. And that’s a lifetime in many places, even though our lifespans as humans have been extended in some of these places, not by much. And that is a lifetime. So. Why should the world that feels all this pain pay attention to UNGA meetings? What do they reveal? What’s important about them? And can you talk a little bit about the main actors, their interests, and ultimately what’s at stake? 

SARAH CLIFFE: So I think that the world needs to pay attention despite the frequent frustrations of looking at the scene of international diplomacy, simply because the last three years have shown us how many crises we face that cannot be solved by one country alone. So COVID-19 of course, was the absolute example of this type of crisis it’s a crisis, a health crisis that turned into a socioeconomic crisis where countries tried for some period to go it alone. We saw vaccine nationalism, great competition over hoarding medical technologies. And it then became evident that of course you cannot combat a pandemic which can spread across global borders unless you have a system of attempting to prevent it breaking out in different parts of the world. It’s a test I think that the world failed quite comprehensively. So, but it’s hopefully a test that we can still look at and learn lessons from going forward. 

To some degree, the conflicts going on around the world also show that kind of complexity. So you could say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to some degree are very traditional military expeditionary force. But what we see in terms of the interlinked-ness of world, the world’s economy is the effect in terms of food and energy prices worldwide as well as less, less attended effects. So I think these issues are going to be absolutely front and center at the UNGA in September this year. It will be both a return to diplomacy and a test of diplomacy if we want to put it that way.

So a return to diplomacy in that this will be the first UNGA that is expected to be held under not quite normal conditions, but with much larger in-person attendance, far more bilateral meetings, far more opportunity for diplomacy. This is important because we saw in my center, for instance, we analyzed the coverage of the two UNGAs during the period of the pandemic and the coverage in the press plummeted. It went down by almost two thirds. So you ask what is the reason for this? Is it just that the media was preoccupied by other things happening? I don’t think it’s just that it’s that with virtual meetings, you get none of the real diplomatic progress that you get in person. So those UNGAs actually had a larger number of heads of state attending virtually than had been the case since the UN’s founding, because they didn’t have to travel. They could just connect over their, their computer, but they didn’t include any of the bilateral meetings on the side and in the corridor, which are actually what makes progress in terms of diplomacy. And that’s why they have low coverage because they were not in fact achieving things that really moved the world forward. So this is why it will hopefully be a return to diplomacy and allow the opportunity to do that. 

It will be a test of diplomacy and that the challenges are very high. So we have to see to what extent that will actually move forward. We’ll see, on the agenda, I think the spillovers of the Ukraine war as well as the conflict itself. And of course, we’ve seen in the last few weeks that the UN has played a significant role in getting the agreement in relation to the grain blockade of Ukraine. So this is I think a positive thing to see the potential of. The UN and delivering in this sort of situation, I expect that the food and energy price crisis is going to be quite central stage.

And we also have some longer-term issues for instance, education on the agenda of the youngest. So lot of opportunity to make progress. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: When thinking about the world, ultimately, I’m trying to also think about the citizens within the countries that are donor countries and supporting the developing world. It really strikes me that it’s very hard to – you talked about the declining media coverage – I was also wondering if you think there’s any sort of effect based on domestic politics within the donor countries and. This population has also dealt with COVID right. There is, as you yourself experienced growing up in Wales, there is poverty and there are problems within the donor countries. And if it takes so long to actually see two stories of success, the 30-to-45-year progress, how do we keep the topic of the UN the multilateral system relevant domestically ultimately within the donor countries? Because if you don’t have political support at home, it’s that those taxpayers’ money that have to help support aid around the world. So I know it’s a very hot topic, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. 

SARAH CLIFFE: Yeah, I know it’s very important. So I think if we look at the drivers of what is happening geopolitically at the moment, there are a couple of similarities to the period before World War I. So one is that we are going through even before these shocks of the last two or three years, we’re going through a reordering of the hierarchy of states in terms of their economic and military power.

The shift in the relative power of the us and China, other shifts down the first 10 or 15 major world powers and a shift always brings with it tensions. The pre-World War I period of course, was a period of repeated smaller conflicts before that conflagration. Secondly – though and this is Mihaela very much in your question – we have this period of very internal looking politics in many high income countries in particular around the world. Although it’s a phenomenon that I think is more widely spread and that also has some similarities to the pre-World War I period. So for me, one of the best books that I’ve ever read about this is a book called The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark, which looks at the build-up to World War I. And he has very extensive sections that look at how all the main protagonists were actually very preoccupied with narrow parochial domestic concerns, which led them to take decisions, which in fact, exacerbated the potential for war, but they were not decisions intended to meet foreign policy goals.

They were decisions intended to meet their domestic political circumstances. And I think we see something very similar now that many high-income countries and the permanent five members of the Security Council all have very strong domestic drivers of the ways that they are acting and they’re all facing higher polarization or risks of polarization internally. So this is really a very risky situation, I think, for the world to be in globally, because you can have unintended consequences of decisions that are taken mostly for domestic reasons, but that play out on the international stage. So I think that it’s going to be very important looking forward that we focus on the interplay of national and international issues and that governments who, and government leaders who have a concern about the risks that we are facing think about how to support action, which addresses both of those levels, the international level and the national.

JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So you’ve alluded to this situation that we’re in now, where on the one hand, we are more frustrated with diplomacy than perhaps in a long time. While on the other hand, we have these global crises that without diplomacy, probably we won’t be able to solve them. And so it puts us in this very interesting conundrum where what we need the most we’re also most frustrated with. You also mentioned this reordering of the world order. Further exacerbates kind of this frustration and this lack of leadership if you will. And so for the UNGA, there has been calls for taking this as a sign for UN reform, even the EU on the European Council website put out underlining a need for transformative changes to make the UN 2.0, to make the UN properly equipped for future challenges and opportunities. So, in your mind, what does that mean? And how can the world take steps towards that? And also, is it too risky to open up for that type of reform in the current political climate? If we do it, can we step back rather than forward? 

SARAH CLIFFE: So, this is going to be probably the, one of the most important questions of not only this UNGA, but of the next few years. Can we make any progress on this? Because I think that we have seen in the face of the two crises that we’ve discussed today, COVID 19 and the invasion of Ukraine, that the international architecture is not fit for purpose to deal with complex emergencies that have political and security aspects, and that also have economic and social aspects underpinning them. So if we look at the options for that, I think the options are essentially a fix that tries to draw together the existing architecture that we have into something that is more able to act quickly and act a jointly to meet this kind of emergency. And that kind of proposal is put together actually in the Secretary General’s report “Our Common Agenda”, which is a report that has got somewhat bogged down in the typical UN discussions, but it’s a report that lays out a pretty ambitious and compelling vision of what the risks are in the next period and what sort of action may need to be taken. 

So one of the proposals in that report is to try to create an emergency platform based on links between the United Nations, the G20, the IFIs, regional organizations, such as the AU and EU and so forth, which has a set mechanism by which it convenes and tries to take decisions in crisis. So that might beg the question, I think, from many people around the world, but doesn’t that exist already? – because it’s one of the questions, perhaps we would automatically ask. And the answer is no, it doesn’t exist at the moment. And what we see in the face of the crisis of the last two or three years is that each of those organizations and networks acted somewhat separately without a great sense of how their actions affected each other.

The second more ambitious option that I really think we should try to think through now is whether there is actually a new form of institution needed for the crisis that we’re going to face in the rest of this century. So this always of course seems very ambitious, almost utopian, but we have managed to innovate in international institutions over the past period. The G20 for instance, is a relatively recent platform and one that up until this year – when it was hobbled by its inability to deal with Russia’s membership and the Ukraine crisis – but up until this year, it acted as a influential and effective mechanism. So this I think is something that should be on the agenda going forward.

PAUL M. BISCA: So picking up on that, I wanted a bit to challenge the point that maybe we need a new institution. We have many, but take the UN Security Council. For instance, it is ineffective because one country has broken every single principle that is the bedrock of the UN. Russia has invaded a sovereign country under no imminent threat whatsoever. It had many avenues to pursue diplomatic ties and on the one – so on the one hand you have one agent in the international arena that is all about disruption right now, whether it’s in Africa, trying to supply security through paramilitary groups, like the Wagner group. But ultimately Russia right now, other than saying to the world we’re really good at destroying buildings, it really doesn’t offer a counter narrative to what the democratic West, with all its imperfections, does. On the other hand, you have China that inspires a different kind of model that says development first, we’re not here to talk about your political situations, we’re here to basically be a benign actor for global harmony. So how do these values that inform these different players clash, and why would that institution – a new institution – work? Because ultimately you get, you could get into a situation that you have real politic by committee. It’s the same, it’s the same sort of elite capture that could happen and could bog down any other mechanism. Is it something that we’re not maybe trying to capture well when we think about – you know the instinct of people who work on institutions is always to say, we need new institutions, we need better institutions, but why would they work given that there are players committed to basically undermining them?

SARAH CLIFFE: So I think would first take some issue with whether we categorize only Russia as having been the spoiler in terms of the performance of the Security Council and its credibility in the last period.

So one of the things that has been very notable in the debate at the UN in the last few months has been quite different opinions between Western mostly high income countries, but particularly the Western country group, and the developing country group on the dimensions of this war. And one of the things that will be raised of course, is the track record of how the Iraq occupation and the Libya intervention was seen in the Security Council and was seen in the wider membership of the UN.

And in both those cases, those were seen as situations in which it was the West in the case of Iraq, particularly the US who had it would be seen by many countries, misled the security council over the basis for an action and then taken part in a fairly reckless military expedition, arguably with, if we like some sort of analogous in scale effects to what we see with the extremely reckless and unjustified invasion that Russia has perpetrated in Ukraine. So I’m saying this not because I would, in any way defend Russia’s actions – I think it needs to be condemned very strongly – but because I think that that we need to see also that there are perspectives that do not see only Russia among the permanent five members as having taken some reckless actions on the security front that have endangered world peace.

So this is important also, when we look at the challenges in maintaining unity around Ukraine, which I actually feel is crucially important because it is a breach by a permanent five member of the territorial integrity of a country. That’s a bedrock fundamental question for the international order. So maintaining unity of a large majority of countries to condemn that and to look for ways to reverse it and to ask for accountability, I think is important. But in order to get that unity, we are going to have to understand a bit more about how developing countries see this crisis. And I think they see it in four ways that are slightly different from the West.

One is that their public opinion is different. So in most European countries, for instance, there is no question that the war in Ukraine is seen as something in which there is one side that is good and one side that is bad. That’s not the case in Indonesia, or Bangladesh, or India, or South Africa, or many other developing countries around the world. So what data we have on public opinion shows a much more mixed picture. 

Second is the perception of double standards. So I talked about Iraq. This is something which is seen by many people around the world as having been something that did not get the same demands for accountability or for action as we are now seeing in the case of Russia and Ukraine. There are also, I think for many countries and perhaps particularly majority Muslim countries or members of the OAC, a strong sense that many conflicts which involved Muslims from the Rohinga people in Myanmar, to Iraq, to Afghanistan have not raised the same kind of defense as the conflict in Ukraine. And that for instance, the reception and welcome given to refugees coming from Ukraine, it’s very different from the reception given to refugees coming from Afghanistan or Iraq. 

A third dimension of that is, is interest. So countries of course, are concerned about the effect on food prices, energy prices on debt, on international aid.

And a fourth is process. That when we talked earlier Return to diplomacy, there are lot of countries who feel that both sides in the Ukraine war have faced them with somewhat kind of bullying approach of you’re with us or against us. You need to come and support this. And that sometimes raises feelings of resentment.

I think that it is very possible to keep that unity, nonetheless. So the, the track record of even recent weeks has been of more and more evidence I think of breach of many norms of international humanitarian law and human rights in Ukraine by Russian forces, many countries who are prepared to stand up and speak to that. But the listening to their interest needs to also be in place. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: And I remember reading you on your website, you had these amazing pieces on how to maintain international unity on Ukraine, and you kind of went through some of the topics you just laid out for us today. And I have a question – I’m going to challenge your challenge. 

I’m curious because this is such a thorny topic and it has so many layers that I’d love to understand better how can we – on one hand you can see the reasonableness of saying, okay, well, Russia is not the one that has challenged or has sort of taken the UN not fully as with the seriousness it should – it’s foundational principles. However, It’s doubtful that there will be the kind of consequences in Russia at the population level and the political realm that occurred after Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think you actually make the point in one of those pieces that you saw a backlash, you saw the anti-war movement in the US, and we are coming back to this – do the G77 countries, does Indonesia, for example, does the Indonesian population, the level of institutional development within Indonesia, do they see that difference?

Is it sort of – because I know perceptions don’t have to match reality – but where how can we better communicate that those actions are not equal. While yes, very bad choice, Iraq was a terrible choice and the political class in the US definitely felt the consequences. That’s unlikely to happen in Russia. How do we think through this? Because it’s hard sometimes, and I’m an Eastern European, I’m Romanian, so we feel the threat of – the security threat – of Russia a bit differently, more viscerally. And maybe we’re not as objective. It’s hard to stay objective though. And I’m wondering if we can do a better job communicating that while we should definitely hold everybody accountable for their behavior, all the countries, we should make sure we don’t equate what is going on right now in Ukraine with let’s say lesser transgressions, even though those are transgressions, and they should be held accountable to their level of seriousness.

SARAH CLIFFE: And I also think it’s very important to think that two wrongs don’t make a right, right? So it really doesn’t matter if what we think of the actions of the us and the UK and other members of the coalition in Iraq, we can still judge Russia’s actions against the standards it should be meeting and wholeheartedly condemn it. So I do think that’s important. There are also some other aspects to highlight, which are different and I think deserve being highlighted. So one is over what the aspiration is in terms of permanent holding of territory. So there is a difference for instance, between a military expedition, which appears to have the aspiration of permanently seizing and holding territory versus one that was designed with an objective of regime change however objectionable that may appear to many people around the world, but unlikely to to be categorized in the same sort of realm. 

The question of accountability within countries. So I think that this is very important and clearly that countries where they have the freedom and the voice to vote leaders out of office, if they don’t like the volume foreign policy directions they’ve taken, there is a difference to countries where that degree of freedom and institutional strength is not there. What I would say here though, is that there is also a difference between voting a political party or a set of elites out of office, which in the US was done following the Iraq war with the election of the Obama administration versus actual processes of truth and accountability over what happened during a period of conflict. So this, of course with all of your experience, you would know very well from Eastern European history. There’s a difference between the political response to that history and whether there has been a process that looks more deeply. What were the risks that allowed that to happen that allowed state capture, that allowed authoritarian rule, that allowed human rights abuses?

So where I think we, we have to look here, is that in Russia, first of all, this is probably going to be a long road. Although of course we don’t know, given that the internal dynamics are still very opaque. We don’t know what will happen over the next period, but I think the hopes for accountability within Russia in the short term are very low. I think it is very important to believe from history that accountability always comes round at some point however. 

So another piece of research that the WDR did was on the shelf life of dictatorships of authoritarian regimes. And there is always a correlation in the end between authoritarian regimes and opposition and conflict. It’s just that the timing of that happening is, one can never say this will happen in the next two years, or this will happen, but in the end it will always come around. So I think for instance, the efforts in Ukraine at the moment to hold and archive all the evidence and testimony of what has been done are very important and that for the Ukrainian people also, that should be done, even if the accountability for it cannot be delivered in the very, very short term.

If we go back to the US example, the use of the voting out of office, the electoral process as something of a kind of truth process, if you like, does I think have some drawbacks. So if you look for instance that some of the actions that were still continued under the Obama administration, so the use for instance of drones and remote attacks indeed, which continue until this day, that in part, I think is because of the lack of a deeper process of reflection on what happened in the period of the Iraq war to not see that simply as one individual specific country case and one governmental policy, but rather as a longer term kind of risk created by some of the military postures that the US has taken.

JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So you mentioned accountability now in this last question. And so I wanted to pick up on that and weave that in with a few other themes. We talked about how the welcome of refugees from Ukraine has been very different much more positive than that for Afghan refugees or Syrian refugees, for example. And then you also mentioned how before World War I, a lot of domestic policy decisions had unintended foreign policy questions. And so this brings me to starting to wonder if integration and the welcome of refugees might be one of these domestic policy choices that countries make that end up having unintended consequences on the global stage.

Migration is very much in the spotlight now, of course, always at the UN, but this year, even more so at the World Bank with the upcoming World Development Report. So. What do you think countries can do better to be more accountable towards those they first of all, have taken in already in terms of integration. And second of all, towards the global community, in terms of affording refugees from all countries, the same treatment that they all deserve.

SARAH CLIFFE: So I think it is important as you did in the question to highlight the difference between large scale movement of refugees and of migrants, because we have two different legal regimes for thinking about this and two different, you can say moral stances on it. So it, in terms of refugees, the ability to try to level up, if we like to the standards that have been used for Ukrainian refugees for me, would be the most important lesson to take from this crisis.

So there have been two senses in which those standards differed from how other populations like Syrians or Afghans were treated. One is simply the ease with which they were allowed to enter countries and to move on from one country to another. And the second is the access they’ve had to labor markets, to benefits, to support in the countries they’re in. So on that issue, I think it’s important to say that this is a wonderful thing, that the Ukrainians got this reception. It is absolutely wonderful and to be lauded in the societies who receive them. What we would like to see is what are the ways of leveling that up so that the next time that you have a crisis that involves people fleeing Libya in real genuine fear of persecution and of violence that they receive the same sort of reception. 

And important there, that there is a massive work on how this can be something that is beneficial also to hosting countries. So for instance, rapid access to labor markets, so people can actually work and contribute is in the interest of the refugees, but also the hosting society itself. I will say that I think we also know that needs to go with very strong communication. So we’ve often seen in hosting countries that those areas of the country that are in fact, most opposed to refugee or migrant arrival are in many countries, areas that are not receiving many refugees or people from outside. So this is more based on perception than it is on actual lived experience. And that then can be bridged with better communication, which looks at what are the benefits for hosting communities. So for instance, we’ve seen in Germany that this has enabled rural schools to be reopened, because you had populations go with young children to rural areas that previously had schools close. So I think that that’s that’s very important. 

On migration, which is also going to be a. Significant issue over the next few years. And one where there is clearly a link to risks of conflict in terms of popular perception, even if not, in terms of actual reality and evidence. I think that it is very important there to take much better lessons of what actually works in terms of the adaptation of society.

And generally, I don’t like to use so much the word integration just because it perhaps implies that it’s always the new arrivals who adapt everything, it’s not the society that receives them. Actually, I think if we go back in history, if we look at Geneva receiving the Huguenot population or the many countries around the world who have received new populations, of course it has changed also the society that receives them. But the other reality of that is that people don’t like change that is too fast. So I think we have to be realistic and think this is something that should be part of the current century, it’s very much something that can deliver benefits for everyone, but it does need to be managed in a way that societies accept and that they feel that their interest in their culture is not being challenged too fast and responsible.

PAUL M. BISCA: So on that angle I wanted to – because ultimately we are, when we think about the perception of the other, we discuss issues related to human nature and our ethical standards. And one part of that is of course, to acknowledge suffering everywhere in the world and to make decisions that allow those who are truly affected to benefit from hope and from a different kind of lifestyle and future. The other one could go something like this to say, I happen to follow from time to time the Champions League the soccer tournament. Yesterday Dinamo Kiev played with Benfica Lisbon and Dinamo Kiev lost. I used to follow Shakhtar Donetsk when they won the UEFA cup a few years ago, if for an average – and I’m also from Romania – so it’s, it’s fairly close, but for people in Germany or in other places in Western Europe, Ukraine has a much more proximate feeling. It is simply the fact that those are the people that you might have end up with, talking to at a restaurant meeting on vacation. And there’s a step between thinking, okay, how much of this response is owed to the simple fact that those people in some way to going on the opposite end and say, this is a double standard. And so I’m wondering what is the best way to bring up that nuance in a way, because maybe even the response in more developed countries would be different if there would be that space to acknowledge that. I’m thinking now, for instance, I used to, at some point look at West Africa security trends, and I would imagine that, notwithstanding all levels of development and all of that, if there’s a crisis in Mali, a Burkinabe, or someone from Niger would be more sort of open and more emotionally affected and willing to help than someone from a completely different country.

SARAH CLIFFE: Yeah. Yes. So I think this is right, that this is in many ways a natural human sense and that we should perhaps acknowledge it and think about how to address it, to avoid a sense of double standards or a sense of sheer inequity. Because the other problem of course with that is that because populations, we may feel more common identity with are physically close to us, what it means is that those who are disadvantaged by geography are not going to be received in places that can give them as much support as would be the case for those who are closer to hand. I think that what you say is right in terms of the closeness and the kind of ethnic cultural, historic ties familiarity in different ways of those populations, but also simply in terms of the standard of living.

So one of the things that I have noticed for instance is that I think many, many people in the west react to the scenes of destruction, the 1500 apartment blocks that have been destroyed in Kharkiv, for instance, during the war, because these are apartment blocks that any of us could live in. They could be apartment blocks sitting in new, New York, they could be sitting in Berlin, they could be. So when you see children’s shoes or clothes or toys lying at the bottom of those apartment blocks, it’s very easy to feel that common sense. It’s perhaps a bit harder when you’re looking at a village that has been devastated in the east of the Kivus and you don’t see the setting as being one in which your family, your friends your neighbors. So we have to think, how do we get over that issue. I think with some acceptance that there is going to be often a regional role, and this is also just pragmatic, we don’t come close to resettling globally the number of refugees we have every year, even before the Ukraine war, there is always a role of neighboring countries and having to deal with this burden, but also not to overstate how much that is a solution. So I would say that has been a little bit of a overly complacent, perhaps reliance that the Syrians can stay in neighboring countries, that the Venezuelans can stay in Columbia and so forth.

Now what we see, or at least what I have read in recent weeks is that even for the Ukrainian refugees, to some degree the welcome of European countries, it’s got a little strained in some cases. So there was perhaps a sense this was going to be a shorter term crisis that people would be able to go back. It’s very clear that’s not going to be the case. And so there has started to be a little bit of a feeling of strain. That’s very clear in these other crises. So Columbia, for instance, houses 2 million, more than 2 million Venezuelan and refugees, there’s very close links between the two countries, but there has been a sense of rising tension in the past year, as you see more and more of that impact. So internationally, I think we have to be very vigilant to that and try to make sure that neighboring countries who are hosting are helped with that task, which they do on behalf of the rest of the world in many ways. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: So I have a question that’s a bit broader than what we’ve been talking about, and it’s about the different ways in which the world is fragmenting and even the issue of refugees highlights this issue. We’re seeing a fragmentation, the institutions we have are not set for purpose right now. What are the risks of fragmentation? And if I may be devil’s advocate, is it a bad thing? Why is it a bad thing? 

SARAH CLIFFE: We, so if by fragmentation we understand smaller and smaller units, if you like. So, if we understand that our idea of who we is, who makes up us becomes smaller and smaller, so it’s no longer global or regional, it may not even be national, it’s a small subnational unit or one particular identity group. I think that there are some clear risks that we see in relation to conflict. Let me talk about that since it’s more my area.

So one is that we know that group based inequality has a relationship to conflict risk – it increases conflict risk. So if groups see that in comparison to other groups that they consider to be different or other from them, they are doing less well. That raises conflict risk. The more we fragment, the more that perception of inequality is easy to come by because if we have larger and fewer identity groups, it’s actually harder to have that sense that our group is doing badly and another group is doing well. So that’s one way in which fragmentation I think is bad for us. 

A second is in the ability to develop both institutions and economic welfare, the jobs part of the WDR security, justice and jobs. So institutions are very difficult in very small countries. For instance, we look at some of the very small African countries, look at the small island states, it is simply hard when you have only a certain amount of, of population to draw on of revenues, to draw on, et cetera, to build that kind of resilient institution. It’s also difficult economically. So there are significant economic costs to fragmentation both in terms of growth and income levels and in terms of resilience and duration of growth and resilience to shocks. So for me, there are benefits of course, to recognizing that people have identities that are important to them, culturally, that those identities may be various. And I think we’ve found ways in democracies to successfully recognize that we’ve used everything from culture and theater, to subnational political representation, local political representation to language policy, to recognize some of those identities, but the actual fragmentation into small or smaller units. I tend to be on the side of thinking that this is not generally a good thing. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: So that’s definitely – fragmentation to smaller and smaller units – makes sense that it heightens the risk of conflict. But there’s talk of a new Cold War. You’ve got the competing models of development: you’ve got China on one hand, and you’ve got the US and the West in general.

What about a new cold war? Would that stimulate competition and flushing out of models for development? And again, I know this is a provocative question but it’s just that you hear, especially within domestic politics – why am I asking this question? Because you hear populism that has emerged in the West advocating for that saying that it’s a good thing that, we don’t need to be so intertwined with the rest of the world. So maybe a new Cold War isn’t such a bad thing. And these are all arguments that don’t have a lot of challenge. That somebody like the people you were talking about in South Africa or the people you grew up with would hear counter argument, a good coherent counter argument to. So I’d love to hear why maybe a new Cold War, is it a bad idea, maybe that allows us to compete, train up and show the rest of the world whose model is better. And what do you think about that question? 

SARAH CLIFFE: So I’ll be provocative in response and say that I think it actually could have positive benefits for the populations of the West, Russia, and China, I think that the effects for the periphery, for the rest of the world, it’s very hard to see what the positive benefits would be.

So just to start with the first point. So it is true that during the postwar period, up to the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a effort both by the Soviet Union and the West to show domestically that they could govern better. And this is very explicit. If you read Cold War literature, there was an understanding that this was a battle not to be fought only diplomatically or militarily, but to be fought in terms of showing that your citizens were better off. And that I think actually for decades had quite significant benefits for the citizens of the main blocks. So there was an effort, for instance, in social democratic Europe, to show that social democracy could really deliver more equal standards of living and opportunities, better voice, better respect, better sense of belonging than communism could deliver. Within the Soviet Union there were also efforts to show that progress could be made and that different groupings could be educated and raised to opportunities that would be more equal than the West. I think that so far, the main blocks have not realized that, or have not acknowledged it in terms of their elite discourse.

So the discourse is very much still about defeating the other side, either militarily through technology, economically through sanctions and so forth. It’s not about whether the model is seen to be better. But it is a shift that I think is going to be crucial to make in the next period in part, because China – and Paul pointed to this in his question – I think China is working very hard on the projection of the model.

So it’s perhaps correct that Russia doesn’t have a strong model to portray. And the Western liberal democratic model is somewhat tarnished by the events of the last period, but China is working very hard on this. So the West, I think really needs to understand that this is going to be seen as part of the success and whether citizens in the Bronx in New York or in the East End of various European capital cities see themselves as having a role in belonging and opportunities in their society is going to be important for the model to come through as successful.

The difficulty I think is developing countries – the periphery. So Cold War, the Cold War in fact was fought not on the battlefields of Europe. It was fought in the periphery and the developing countries who were affected by that generally did not see positive impacts. So this meant a fueling of finance to conflicting parties who were perceived to ally with the main blocks.

It meant proxy wars around the world that were fueled by the West and by the Soviet Union in competition with each other. And this is part of what I talked about when I talked about different perspectives from developing countries. This is actually one of their fears at the moment that a lot of ambassadors at UN would say to you, look when when elephants fight the grass is trampled. So what we are worried about now is that this is going to be an era of elephants fighting and that for our welfare, this is going to end up being negative. 

PAUL M. BISCA: So of course now you mentioned elephants fighting. And my natural question is I want to know who wins. But if we were to do, to build a bit about what you said about the different models of governance and who really governs better, how do we generally know when we travel? I mean, there’s some obvious signs, quality of infrastructure and so on, but when that looks good enough, how do you know if a country’s well governed at a deeply human level if people do belong? What are the signs you look for?

SARAH CLIFFE: So you’re asking more at a personal level than in terms of research. So I certainly look for whether people talk freely and I think that’s something you can fairly quickly determine whether people are feeling confident to talk about their opinion or not. I’ve noted in my travels some odd indicators, perhaps that I believe are important, but I would have no research to back this up. But the state, for instance, and the look of primary schools or kindergartens.

So I remember for instance, the first time I went to Cape Verde, which is a country that for a long time has been, had one of the best sets of governance indicators in Africa. I went in fact, not for work, but as a, for a hiking holidays as a tourist, but I went past lots of tiny primary schools in the mountains that had many colored paintings of children and toys that had been made. And they were joyful places, basically places with color and life. And I’ve been to many other countries where that’s not true of primary schools at all. There are miserable places that you have a difficult time seeing seeing children being attracted to. So that would be one of the things that I tend to look out for.

I think if we look at it in more of a research perspective, what do we know about this in terms of research? One thing we can say is that the traditional development indicators don’t portray this adequately. So one of the reasons that pushed the Sustainable Development Goals over the edge to be agreed in 2014 was the history of the Arab Spring and the Millennium Development Goals. So when the Arab Spring hit in 2011, it started, of course in Tunisia and Tunisia had just been lauded by the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF the previous year for being the best global performer on the Millennium Development Goals and the example of what good development looked like. So the problem of course, was that people were measuring education, health, infrastructure, water, all the things that were in the MDGs, they were not measuring access to justice, respect, voice participation, any of those things. And the Tunisian revolution as with the other movements of the Arab spring were about those issues. They were not really about water or primary schools. So this I think is also important that we think about that’s difficult, of course, in countries where we don’t have very good and open access to data on perceptions. But I think that data on perceptions is in fact very important to judge how countries are being covered.

MIHAELA CARSTEI: Thank you so much. We really appreciate you taking the time. I was just looking at the amount of time we’ve just spent together and it’s over well over an hour and we could keep talking, but I think we don’t want to take too much advantage of your kindness and time here. If you have just one thought to leave us with, what makes you hopeful?

SARAH CLIFFE: History makes me hopeful to some degree. So my first degree was in history though that’s not something I pursued afterwards, but I think if you have gone through the depth, looking at the depth of crises that we have seen in past human history and the crisis that the world has managed to come back from, and in fact has created new openings and new futures that makes me hopeful. It makes me hopeful when I look at the history of Europe. So if we look at the history of Europe and yet what emerged in the second half of the 20th century, this was a future that was almost unimaginable. So Europe faces challenges now. But it has come through this in the past. The same if we look at the history of the regions that were colonized of Africa, for instance, and of the misery it was put through. And yet the degree of development and hope and leadership coming out of Africa is is enormous. And then even if we look at more recent experiences, so we talked at the beginning of this session about Rwanda, which was for me, one of the most emotional experiences probably of my career, because the aftermath of the genocide was really very brutal. And yet Rwanda, while like all societies also having its flaws, but it has seen astonishing development since that period. So I think in this sense, history should make us hopeful that even when things seem very deep and gloomy, we know that there are pathways out. 

MIHAELA CARSTEI: That’s great. Thank you so much. And to our audience, thank you for tuning into F-World: The Fragility Podcast. We hope you found our conversation interesting and inspirational. We definitely did it. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to know more about us, about F-World, please visit our website f-world.org and follow us on Twitter @fworldpodcast, which is the same on Instagram. Thanks for listening!