The world still turns, even on lockdown

Focus on the upcoming Australian Open tennis tournament these last few weeks in the local media has been intense. Still, it’s possible that Olympics officials in Japan are monitoring the first tennis Grand Slam event of the year even closer than we are in Australia.

As tournament organisers struggle to quieten tweeting tennis players in quarantine hotels in Melbourne and Adelaide, in Tokyo, sports officials are doing everything they can to keep the Olympic dream alive. Especially after the recent story from The Times, citing an unnamed source, which suggested that the Japanese government has already secretly decided the Games can’t go ahead (a report since denied).

This year, the Olympics and the Australian Open are united by a common opponent: Covid-19. These two major international sporting events have a few other traits in common, as well. Both involve international athletes, coaches and media, potentially travelling in from coronavirus hotspots around the globe.

Australian Open organisers chartered flights from three international airports to bring in around 1200 international athletes and media. The Olympics will have to deal with a similar issue, albeit on a grander scale: more than 200 countries and territories are represented and 11,000 athletes are due to take part.

Both events are lengthy affairs, too. Different to a one-off football final, the Australian Open and the Olympics take weeks to complete rather than a single evening. The health risks posed by potentially infected athletes, coaches and media is presumably higher as they hang around for longer and have more interactions with locals. At both events, in-stadium crowds are also planned. 

Tokyo organisers have also said that the viability of the Games, which are due to start on 23 July, will not be dependent on the availability of a vaccination or athletes. That’s another shared trait with the Australian Open where, presumably, no one taking part will have had a Covid-19 jab (or maybe want one). Melbourne Park is not a good place for aching arms, after all.

For all these reasons and more, the Australian Open, due to start on 8 February, is an ideal dry run for Japan and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Some five months ahead of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad, it gives all those involved in Tokyo a chance to observe what works and what doesn’t at a comparable international sports event.

The quarantine issue is a considerable challenge for instance. So far, the Australian Open’s 14-day hotel lockdowns have attracted plenty of criticism from tennis players. It’s hardly surprising in this social media age, where gripes are seldom kept behind closed doors. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem for Tokyo organisers, after they decided that athletes will be limited to arriving in Japan just four to five days ahead of their event and then leave within 48 hours of completion.

At the Olympics, athletes will be tested when they leave their home country and on arrival in Japan. That’s less rigorous than Australia’s testing regime, which takes place throughout the quarantine period. Japanese health officials hope these steps will be enough to stop the more contagious UK-variant of the virus from hitting the country, where Covid-19 cases are already soaring. But upscaling the Australian quarantine model is worth keeping in mind.

The Australian Open also gives Tokyo and IOC officials a chance to review their public relations tactics, too. Should an Australian Open participant set off a Covid-19 outbreak in Melbourne, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews will no doubt front the cameras and receive a grilling by local media. This will give Tokyo organisers important insight into communications around a mid-tournament outbreak. Anecdotally, Tokyo Olympic Committee (TOCOG) press conferences so far have been confusing, haphazard affairs. Olympics media representatives are not known for their media transparency once the games begin, either.

The Australian Open is also an important chance for Olympic organisers to convince themselves that major sports events can take place safely, even when crowds are involved. After all, there’s a lot on the line in Tokyo.

Japan’s spending on the delayed Olympics is now believed to have hit $20 billion, with the figure rising daily. Part of that cost involves paying compensation to the buyers of apartments in the athletes’ village, which were meant to be handed over to residents months ago. Its TV rights contract with US broadcaster NBC is reportedly worth around $1.3 billion alone. That would be in jeopardy if the games were to be cancelled. Should the games not proceed, the insurance claim will be astronomical, and not even that likely to succeed.

Undoubtedly, dealing with Covid-19 is one of the toughest challenges for any sports administrator and athlete. There are many competing interests that need to be weighed up, constantly. Even worse, in contrast to the high bounce of a Rafael Nadal second serve or a fast-finishing Usain Bolt, the opponent this time around is totally unpredictable. All the more reason for Olympic organisers to keep a close eye on events at Melbourne Park, just like most of us Aussie tennis fans will be this summer. (Go Ash!)

From the first days in January this year, the question that dominated the outbreak was how upfront Beijing had been about the novel coronavirus that became known as Covid-19. Richard McGregor:

So far, the handling of the crisis seems to have underlined one of the ongoing problems with the authoritarian strictures of the party-state, which places a premium on the control of information in the name of maintaining stability … Could the virus have been contained, and its spread limited, if officials in Wuhan had levelled with both their bosses, and the public, earlier? It is impossible to say, but at the moment, it certainly looks that way.

Still, the warning signs about the rapid spread of the virus – and what would result in more than 1.7 million deaths so far – did not translate into public trust, particularly in already politically stressed Hong Kong. Vivienne Chow:

An unprecedented level of panic is caused not just by fear, but by the lack of trust. Reactions of the people of Hong Kong and the international community are a vote of no confidence in the authorities’ abilities to protect people and contain the virus. Authorities here are not only the Hong Kong and the Chinese governments, but also the World Health Organisation, which is supposed to “lead partners in global health responses”.

Australia began to react with travel restrictions, buying time at a cost to the education and tourist industries, but Dominic Meagher warned “that time must now be used effectively”.

Three things must be done: eliminate panic, develop some form of treatment, vaccine, or cure, and put in place more sustainable policies to slow down the virus.

But by late February politics and prejudice had complicated the response around the world over. Audrey Jiajia Li:

With 28 countries so far reporting confirmed cases of the virus, caution over the mysterious deadly illness is expected and natural. Yet it is important to emphasise that Chinese people are the victims, not the culprits, of this epidemic.

South Korea, Europe, the United States, India and almost everywhere saw spiking rates of infection. The Tokyo Olympics were soon abandoned, Indonesia struggled and Pacific island nations feared the danger as lockdowns spread. Leaders felt the pressure to rise to the occasion. Michael Fullilove:

There has been a lot of discussion about the communications tools, including websites and texts, that governments are employing to speak with their nations about the coronavirus pandemic … The media noise being generated about Covid-19 is deafening – but the single note of a good speech, well delivered, can penetrate it.

And by the end of March, it was increasingly clear the virus would hold momentous consequences for the world. Daniel Flitton. 

The crisis will affect everything in some way, whether budget assumptions, global supply chains, or the trappings of power … drastic change [may be] later assimilated into a “new normal”, the point was still a major readjustment and far-reaching – and lasting – implications not only for the community, but also for relations between nations.

So The Interpreter examined the cross-cutting influence of the virus had on existing international challenges, whether the Hong Kong protest movement, poverty in India or the Philippines, migrant workers in Singapore, insurgency in Thailand, fighting the remnants of Islamic State, conflict in Afghanistan or tensions on the Korean peninsula. The crisis had a disproportionate impact on women, while the cost to the global economy was also manifesting. Roland Rajah:

The social distancing required to slow the virus – both voluntary and mandated by governments – means the economic hit is going to be large, and there’s probably not much that traditional demand-stimulus policies can do to materially counter it. In part, that’s because people won’t go out to spend the money, but it’s also because the virus is an intensifying supply-side shock as well – with big disruptions to normal business activity and many workers pulled out of work, either for health reasons or as workplaces and schools are temporarily shut down.

And if a first step to combating a problem is first understanding it, disinformation and conspiracy online was certainly no help. Natasha Kassam:

The dilution of information on the internet is currently posing a risk to global health and safety. Much like globalisation has extended the reach of the virus, social media has extended the reach of fake news. And the stakes are higher.

Bright spots emerged. Enterprising Indonesians mixed their own hand sanitiser, and Bob Kelly – aka BBC Dad – had some helpful advice for those staring at a Zoom meeting working from home:

This will be a slog for the next several months, and my guess is that for all the convenience of telework, most people will enjoy going back to an office when this situation finally breaks.

Nick Bisley wondered at the future power dynamics in Asia. Mark Beeson asked what the crisis might hold for the vaunted international order?

Any of the big issues that collectively confront us – including climate change, economic disadvantage, and, of course, controlling pandemics – would seem to necessitate some form of institutionalised international collaboration.

Countries raced to develop vaccines while wrestling with the rights to privacy when tracing the virus spread. The future design of cities was questioned, we wondered about spies and the warning signs, protecting political leaders from the virus or whether they could strike a global bargain to do better next time?

Jennifer Hsu charted the growing power China’s Xi Jinping amid the pandemic, while Erin Hurley watched Donald Trump shrivel before the challenge. Meantime, Stephen Howes urged the world to remember those most vulnerable:

Covid-19 is hitting at a time when the number of displaced people is at its highest since the end of the Second World War. What if the virus takes hold in a massive refugee camp in Africa, the Middle East or Asia?

Should the world have been better prepared? Shahar Hameiri:

Used to financing and implementing limited interventions far from home, developed states’ governments were suddenly fighting huge contagions on the home front, for which they were often poorly prepared. And since very limited collective capacity had developed previously, their full focus immediately turned inwards, thus producing a fragmented, “zero-sum” response globally.

Or did the world overreact? Ramesh Thakur:

Health professionals are duty-bound to map the best- and worst-case scenarios. Governments bear the responsibility to balance health, economic and social policies. Once these are included in the decision calculus, the political and ethical justification for the hard suppression strategy is less obvious.

Perhaps, in the end, planning doesn’t matter. Gordon Peake and Christian Downie:

Magnified exponentially by these last few weeks, there seems something both absurd yet strangely comforting about feeling emboldened enough to guess a course for endpoints years away … [looking back] planning documents are proof-positive of that old Yogi Berra maxim that the most difficult thing to predict is the future.

Let’s see in 2021 if nature cares that humans can count in years.

Main image via Flickr user 7C0

An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.

Any runner with a shoebox full of medals knows that victory is sweetly remembered through the shiny keepsakes bestowed upon those of us lucky enough to cross the finish line. This year saw the rise of virtual races and perhaps the most epic challenge of all, the quarantine backyard ultra-marathon.

With no starting line-up or electric crowd atmosphere, lone runners took to their neighbourhoods. They covered hundreds of kilometres around suburban streets. A dedicated few racked up the miles back and forth with tiny laps inside the relative safety of their own homes. Covid-19 might have struck seemingly out of the blue, but for the runner who had 2020 goals in mind, the months of training for race preparation was not to go to waste.

The running community have managed to build themselves a new absurd form of racing, which will likely go on to be a new tradition for the now well-connected global running “club”.

For those of us who felt isolated and left wondering how to fill the hours when the Covid-19 storm hit in March, we could be grateful that in some countries outside exercise was considered essential for physical and mental wellbeing. Although not all have been so lucky. Perhaps a collective thought should go out to the Australian runner in Beijing caught breaching strict quarantine. 

It goes without saying that a sense of normalcy will be welcomed with open arms in the world of running, and perhaps for the unconquerable few who trained with masks on they will have earned a competitive advantage. For them, any virtual race bling might be remembered even sweeter. Here’s mine.

How will Covid-19 affect electoral democracy in Australia and around the world?

The pandemic has starkly revealed two fundamental aspects of successful democracy: the extent of a given society’s trust between its citizens and their government, and the capacity of those same governments to deliver and enforce appropriate public health responses. 

Countries whose governments are both trusted and capable have seen them handle the virus relatively well, while those with neither trust nor capacity have seen it spread out of control. On this metric, Australia more resembles Asian democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea in our relatively high levels of social compliance than the more individualistic Anglophone societies with which we tend to feel comity.

As the examples of the United Kingdom and the United States have shown, democracy itself is no guarantee of an effective response to the virus.

However, the pandemic also presents a major challenge to one element of modern democracy – the holding of mass elections. 

Election day – a forum for a mass public gathering of adult citizens across the country, and their congregation within discrete and sometimes crowded polling stations – has become more dangerous in the Covid-19 era. Even when social distancing can be enforced, this kind of activity is now inherently problematic on public health grounds.

Delay or cancellation of elections is one response to Covid-19, and a growing concern, given the worldwide democratic recession. Local elections in Hong Kong, for example, have recently been delayed for a year using the pretext of coronavirus, but really as a response by Beijing to the growing support for pro-democracy parties.

Even in established democracies, many elections are being postponed. New Zealand’s general elections, originally scheduled for this month, have been delayed till October as a result of the Auckland outbreak. In the United Kingdom, local elections – including the London mayoral vote – have been pushed out by a full year, on advice from medical experts.

For jurisdictions within Australia such as Queensland, whose state election is constitutionally fixed for 31 October, expanded use of pre-poll voting and social distancing at polling places is the response – at least for the time being.

Another option is to hold elections over the internet. Estonia already does this, but due to well-founded security concerns, very few countries have yet taken the step to open up their elections to all voters on-line. 

Paper ballots and a paper trail are still seen as essential to election security and providing a post-election audit capacity to safeguard the integrity of results. In 2017, Finland abandoned plans to move to online voting, concluding that the costs outweighed the benefits.

Even if the virus prompts a rethink, the kinds of investments needed to provide an acceptable level of ballot security and to withstand cyber intrusion are likely to be some time in future.

A third and most likely option is thus a renewed focus on voting by mail. In Australia, we have already embraced this and other forms of “convenience” voting in large numbers. At the 2019 federal election, 40% of Australians cast their ballot prior to election day, while the recent Northern Territory poll saw, for the first time, more voters casting their ballot in advance than on election day itself.

Australia and other established democracies are increasingly shifting from having a polling day to having a polling period, a change which may turn out to be irreversible.

But there is a potential downside to this shift: the loss of civic engagement and broader opportunities for democratic deliberation.

In Western Australia, postal voting was introduced for most local government elections in 2011, in order to make voting easier, particularly in rural areas. This shift increased turnout but has been criticised for making democratic engagement more superficial, particularly in passionate rural communities.

Given that the point of elections is to choose, the lack of widespread exposure to the election campaign and the debates on policies makes a swing towards voting by mail problematic. If voting by mail diminishes the salience of elections and makes it less likely that informed deliberation over policy alternatives takes place, it has the potential to undermine democracy itself. 

The looming congressional and presidential elections in the United States this November ­– which will effectively be a referendum on the Trump presidency and his handling of the pandemic – will be a stress test of postal voting’s compatibility with democracy in a polarised and low-trust political environment.

With decreasing confidence in the ability of the US Postal Service to handle a surge in requests for early ballots now as well as postal votes themselves, it would be prudent to expect at the very least a degree of uncertainty and potential delays in results, akin to the 2000 Bush-Gore election. 

But there is also the potential – lesser but not trivial – for more significant problems than just delayed results. 

Voting by mail has already become an issue of major partisan division, with Democrats seeking greater voting by mail and Republicans opposing it, as part of their ongoing efforts to restrict the franchise. If this continues to November, we may be facing a high-level contest not just to see who wins the election but over the rules of the game itself.

In April, the UN Security Council issued a statement endorsing the UN Secretary-General’s call for a ceasefire in Yemen to better enable a response to Covid-19. The Council recognised that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen made the country “exceptionally vulnerable”, and that any further military escalation would “hinder the access of humanitarian and healthcare workers and the availability of healthcare facilities”. 

The Council is right to be concerned. Thus far, Yemen has confirmed just 469 Covid-19 infections. But testing rates are among the lowest in the world, and the fatality rate – at 24% – is one of the highest, suggesting that the real caseload is much higher. The UN Secretary General said last week that there was “every reason to believe that community transmission is already underway across the country”.

Even without Covid-19, after more than five years of war, Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The conflict has devastated the economy, destroyed civilian infrastructure and brought the provision of basic services to the brink of collapse. The health system has been particularly hard hit. Hospitals have been bombed, only half the country’s health facilities are fully functioning, power cuts are common, and items such as personal protective equipment and ventilators are in short supply. 

The conflict in Yemen has been fuelled by arms supplied by foreign states to the Saudi Arabian–led international coalition (or SLC), which since 2015 has been engaged in a military campaign to oust the Houthi rebels. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest arms importer. Most of its arms come from the US, followed by the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Canada. Other SLC members Egypt and the UAE are also among the world’s leading arms importers, receiving most of their weapons from the US and France.

Since 2015, arms exports to the SLC have continued despite overwhelming evidence that the SLC has been violating human rights and international humanitarian law in Yemen. Most of the civilians killed in the conflict have been killed in SLC airstrikes, many of which have targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure – schools, houses, markets, farms, factories. Some of these attacks were carried out with weapons supplied by Western states. A report released by human rights organisations last year documented 27 “apparently unlawful Saudi/UAE-led Coalition attacks” on civilian homes, educational and health facilities, businesses and gatherings that appeared to have used weapons made in the US or UK.

The supply of arms to the SLC has prompted efforts to block arms sales through legislative and judicial processes. Last year the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the UK Government had acted illegally by exporting arms to Saudi Arabia without assessing whether the SLC had been violating international humanitarian law. In the US, Congress has repeatedly tried to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but every time has been overruled by presidential veto. The European Parliament has called for an EU-wide arms embargo on Saudi Arabia.

As concerns about the spread of Covid-19 in Yemen have escalated, arms sales have continued. In April, Canada lifted a moratorium on arms exports to Saudi Arabia, and in May, the US approved a possible sale of thousands of armoured vehicles to the UAE. Germany has approved US$341 million in arms sales to Egypt and $8.5 million to the UAE this year alone.

In other words, members of the Security Council have called for a ceasefire while simultaneously providing arms to enable the fighting in Yemen to continue.

This is not the only irony in the Security Council’s response to the conflict. The other is that in 2014 the Council established a sanctions regime for those found to be violating international human rights and humanitarian law. It established a Panel of Experts to review the evidence and help it decide whom to impose sanctions on. Every year since 2016, the Panel of Experts has reported to the Council that all parties to the conflict in Yemen have violated human rights and international humanitarian law, and it has recommended that sanctions be imposed against individuals from all parties. The Security Council has responded by imposing sanctions and an arms embargo against Houthi-aligned individuals, while studiously ignoring the evidence regarding the SLC’s airstrikes and violations of human rights and international humanitarian law – that is to say: the evidence from its own Panel of Experts, which it established for the specific purpose of assisting it to designate individuals and entities to be subject to sanctions.

To be clear: states such as the US, the UK, France, Canada, Germany and others who have supplied arms to the SLC have contributed to the destruction of Yemen’s infrastructure. In doing so, they have aided in the collapse of Yemen’s healthcare system, and thus increased the country’s vulnerability to Covid-19. These countries should now hold themselves responsible for enabling a response to the outbreak. This means immediately ceasing arms sales to members of the SLC, funding the humanitarian response to enable aid agencies to respond to Covid-19, and supporting a Security Council resolution that extends the existing sanctions regime to include individuals engaged in violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, from all sides of the conflict.

In March, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire, urging solidarity against the common threat posed by Covid-19 and stating that the “only war we should be waging is the war against Covid-19”. But while we are all focusing on this new “war”, actual wars are being ignored.

Humanitarian organisations working in conflict-affected environments have scaled back their work to do what is essential and to accommodate “social distancing” and travel restrictions. Staff who are now grounded must try to coordinate the delivery of aid via telephone, video and computer. This radical change has led to very limited contact between humanitarian workers and communities in need of aid. Working remotely has proved to be possible in some professional fields, and even advantageous in unexpected ways. But where levels of distrust and suspicion are high ­– as they often are among people in conflict-affected environments – expecting to be able to communicate freely via telecommunications is not realistic. People in such environments may fear being overheard on the telephone, revealing their identity or location, any of which could lead to harm.

Remote work also often particularly disadvantages the poor, rural communities and others with limited access to telephones or mobile networks. More vulnerable or marginalised members of a community might be further at risk because if they don’t have the ear of key informants, such as community leaders, whose roles have now become critical in helping humanitarian organisations to assess and respond to urgent needs. For the same reasons, the more vulnerable and marginalised, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled, might also have greater difficulty in accessing life-saving information and services.

Division and Distrust

As a result of travel restrictions, there are already reports in many countries of people being unable to access food or water. As a result of the reduction of activities to the most essential, other critical needs are overlooked, and protection concerns increase as, for instance, cases of gender-based violence escalate.

It becomes hard to adhere to the principle of “do no harm” when, for example, counselling is offered to victims of domestic violence who don’t have anywhere private to speak. These heightened risks, as a result of endeavouring to respond to humanitarian needs remotely (alongside the additional time it takes to coordinate and deliver aid remotely) can compromise responsiveness, and further increase the likelihood of distrust towards humanitarian actors.

Communities’ lack of direct contact and first-hand knowledge can also feed rumours about the motives of humanitarian actors and conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus, which impairs humanitarian work as well as efforts to prevent the spread of the virus – as was seen during the Ebola crisis. This problem is manifesting itself now in the rise in anti-foreigner sentiment in a number of conflict zones, and in cases of harassment and hate speech against foreign staff in South Sudan, Yemen, CAR, DRC and elsewhere.

This distrust is also being fed by the operating models of many humanitarian organisations, utilising remote management tools and “contactless deliveries”, especially for communities that often do not have the luxury of being able to socially distance.

Trust is further eroding as responses to Covid-19 become increasingly securitised, and security forces take tough measures to enforce curfews, including attacking journalists under the guise of enforcing such measures. Some states are taking advantage of the crisis – to repress or persecute people – while some non-state armed actors are taking advantage to make political and economic gains, perhaps assuming the world’s attention is currently elsewhere.

Rising distrust between groups has been seen previously in cases where outbreaks of infectious disease occurred in conflict zones. In the case of Ebola, this was partly the result of initial relief efforts being largely externally driven and marginalising local people, including local health workers. Distrust soon manifested itself in attacks on Ebola treatment centres and workers, including the murder of a WHO doctor, and was aggravated by armed actors, resulting in a deteriorating security situation which hampered relief efforts. Trust was further compromised, according to some, by heavy-handed responses of security forces to protests.

A big lesson from the Ebola crisis is that without trust, effective humanitarian action is difficult, and that trust does not develop instantly, but is built or lost over a period of time. And it is relational. At the time, feelings of being ignored had festered over years, alongside perceptions that humanitarian actors were motivated by self-interest. Lack of trust was also mutual: humanitarian organisations demonstrated little trust in communities being able to make the right decisions about their own lives or, for instance, how to respond to the threat posed by Ebola, instead imposing measures based on little or no consultation.

A related lesson to be learned from the Ebola crisis is not simply to focus on containing the outbreak – reducing suffering to statistics – but to also support affected communities and to demonstrate commitment to the people, not just to addressing one of the many problems they face.

This erosion of trust combined with the diversion of the world’s attention (and increasingly its resources) to crises “at home” will severely compromise effective humanitarian action in communities most in need. This will have devasting consequences for the people within these environments, as well as for broader international peace and security, as humanitarian needs, insecurity and fragility increase.

Last year, the UN estimated that 168 million people depended on humanitarian relief as a result of conflict, violence, and disasters, and peacekeepers were deployed to 13 countries to help conflict-affected societies navigate the often-bumpy road from violence towards peace. Covid-19 has already exacerbated global humanitarian needs, and will have particularly dire consequences in displaced populations and refugee camps, and in conflict and post-conflict zones, where health systems and essential services are weak, if they exist at all.

Moreover, the pandemic may lead to the escalation of violent conflict: although Covid-19 has pushed some armed groups towards ceasefires, in other places violence has intensified, or threatens to, as the pandemic draws the world’s attention. This trend is likely to continue as countries turn inward to deal with the virus’ effects on their own populations and economies. Thus, at a time when there may be fewer resources for peacekeeping, it may be in greatest demand.

However, while Covid-19 will amplify existing challenges to peacekeeping effectiveness and global perceptions of legitimacy, it is not the biggest threat to the future of peacekeeping. At the heart of these challenges lies the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by peacekeepers.

This year, data released by the UN showed that allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers in 2019 were 43% higher than in 2018. This is not particularly surprising: every year or so, allegations of sexual misconduct by peacekeepers ricochet around global media, shocking international audiences and leading to heartfelt statements about how such abuses will not be tolerated.

And yet, the abuses continue.

Why? At the core of the answer is the fact that the effects of sexual exploitation and abuse on peacekeeping outcomes are poorly understood and highly underestimated, as my recent book illustrated, drawing on interviews with diplomats, policymakers, peacekeepers, and others associated with peace operations. This has meant that many officials and personnel treat such misconduct as a relatively minor code of conduct issue, rather than one that strikes at the heart of peacekeeping effectiveness. Policy responses have been hamstrung and under-resourced as a result.

Research has shown how sexual exploitation affects the perceived impartiality of peace operations and contributes to the long-term entrenchment of transactional sex economies. My research, based on extensive fieldwork in Bosnia and Timor-Leste, has further documented how sexual misconduct by international interveners undermines the outcomes of individual peace operations on multiple levels.

The central goals of UN peacekeeping are five-fold: to protect civilians from armed conflict; to prevent conflicts in order to reduce human suffering and build stable and prosperous societies; to strengthen rule of law and security institutions; to protect and promote human rights; and to empower women to participate in peace processes. Sexual exploitation and abuse critically undermines each of these goals.

On the individual and community level, it compounds human rights abuses and poverty experienced by already vulnerable communities, sometimes resulting in victims (and children born of abuse) being thrown out of families and communities as a result of the stigma associated with sexual violence or exploitation. It contributes to the spread of sexually transmitted infections, puts women and children involved at risk of further abuses by police if they report their experiences, and often traps victims in cycles of abuse. It also leads to communities being less willing to “allow” women to work with international organisations and missions, for fear that they will be exploited in exchange for their jobs.

On the structural level, sexual misconduct by peacekeepers normalises sexually exploitative and abusive behaviours in post-conflict societies and institutionalises impunity for such behaviours in host-state security sectors, which peacekeepers train and mentor. It also does so among peacekeepers themselves, who export these behaviours (and impunity for them) into subsequent deployments. And it creates economies of sexual exploitation that long outlast the presence of peacekeepers, as business models adapt towards, for instance, sex trafficking and sex tourism, after peacekeepers leave.

And on the operational level, it undermines peacekeeping outcomes by diverting resources available for vital human rights and gender work towards sexual exploitation and abuse responses, seeding mistrust of interveners amongst local communities (the trust of local communities is a critical factor in peacekeeping effectiveness), and diminishing the confidence interveners themselves have in their organisation and in the international peacekeeping project. People I interviewed also recounted stories of how sexual exploitation and abuse by particular contingents within a peace operation made peacekeepers the targets of violence by local actors, and led to outright conflict with other contingents, as was the case when Australian and Jordanian peacekeepers came to blows in Timor-Leste.

These outcomes clearly undermine UN mandates around human rights, rule of law, and civilian protection, which peacekeeping doctrine holds as foundational to the establishment of lasting peace.

Perhaps most critically, when peacekeepers perpetrate sexual exploitation and abuse, they contribute to a deepening of the legitimacy crisis currently facing UN peacekeeping, and the UN more broadly. The UN relies on the commitment of its staff, member states, and the general public internationally to continue its work, and yet unchecked patterns of sexual misconduct lead to staff attrition, decreased funding, mistrust between member states, and they bolster those who seek to limit their country’s participation in peacekeeping.

A great challenge facing the UN in this regard is its structure: while the Secretariat has devoted significant resources to strengthening policy and accountability mechanisms, the actual responsibility for investigating and punishing misconduct by uniformed personnel falls to member states, some of whom are less willing or able to do so than others. Moreover, with ever-increasing pressure on the UN peacekeeping budget, mission leadership is forced to make difficult choices about how to distribute resources between what are considered “core security functions” and work that address issues of gender and sexual exploitation and abuse. That some officials see sexual misconduct as a peripheral concern has meant that the structural and resourcing challenges are, in some missions, compounded by a lack of political will to address misconduct proactively.

At a time when the UN’s work is more vital than ever, and when resourcing that work will likely be harder than ever, it is critical that threats its capacity and credibility are addressed. This means taking sexual exploitation and abuse seriously as an issue that strikes at the heart of the UN’s effectiveness in peacekeeping, and leveraging political will and resources to prevent misconduct more effectively and hold perpetrators accountable.

In a Covid-19 world, there is perhaps little that can still shock and surprise. Still, this week’s brutal attack by Afghan insurgents on a clinic in a hospital in Kabul’s western suburb of Dasht-e-Barchi, during the holy month of Ramadan, made for particularly horrific news, given the targets were pregnant women, children, and newborn babies. The same day, a funeral of a police commander in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar was also attacked.

The Kabul attack was a dark reminder that no one is safe in Afghanistan’s war, and no target off-limits.

The head of Afghanistan’s Human Rights Commission, Shaharzad Akbar put into words what perhaps many Afghans felt.

These newborns,among d first voices they heard, on d first day of their lives, was the sounds of gunfire, & smell of burn & smoke, & among their first experiences, being targeted in a war they & their mothers had no part in.Will their lives, like ours, continue 2 b shaped by war? https://t.co/dKoHtRpTNg

— Shaharzad Akbar (@ShaharzadAkbar) May 12, 2020

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the Kabul attack at the hospital which is supported by Médecins San Frontières, but many suspect Islamic State. First, an Islamic State-associated group claimed the attack in Nangarhar province. Second, the Dasht-e Barchi neighbourhood is largely home to ethnic Hazara, who have been the repeated target of Islamic State in the past. Third, Islamic State has attacked hospitals before, such as Kabul’s military hospital in 2017. There is also the matter of the regional Islamic State leader being arrested in Kabul just a day prior to these two attacks.

In response, President Ashraf Ghani ordered a resumption of the fight against all insurgent groups,including the Taliban, even though the group denied responsibility. Guilty or not in this instance, the Taliban is still being held to account, given their relentless attacks over the past weeks after they walked out of “fruitless” peace negotiations with the Afghan government in April, and in spite of having signed a preliminary agreement with the US in February paving the way for US troop withdrawals based on several conditions, including a ceasefire and curbing the aggression of other militant groups, such as Islamic State.

Afghanistan’s insurgent groups have long gotten away with making – in their minds – nearly every Afghan a legitimate target, whether for being pro-government, pro-Western, of the wrong ethno-religious group, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yet a maternity hospital is still a stretch in the twisted logic of any insurgent group.

From 2013 to 2015, I worked with a local Afghan NGO trying to understand how ethnic Pashtun communities coped in insurgency-controlled or contested areas (the Taliban is a predominantly Pashtun movement). These projects explained much about how Afghanistan’s insurgency was seen through the eyes of community members. The strength of their grassroots base among Pashtun communities, in the face of questions about their “legitimacy”, was eye-opening. Some of the findings of these research projects (none of which have been made public) are worth recalling.

First, when community elders raised the issue of civilian casualties with the Taliban, the insurgents frequently avoided discussing the topic, the elders said. Most felt it was because the Taliban had no rationale as to why an insurgency with strong religious roots would target innocent civilians. The insurgents were quick to deflect blame – as the Taliban did in Tuesday’s attack on the maternity hospital – which is typical, as they often contest UN civilian casualty reports. At best, our research showed, the Taliban might consider civilians “accidental martyrs” in a holy war.

Second, according to community elders, the insurgents were fully aware it was a sin under Islamic law to kill “innocents”. Thus, the targets were called “puppets, spies, and criminals”, and rarely “civilians”. Afghanistan’s insurgents have long had a narrow definition of civilian – in stark contrast to international law, where a civilian is someone not engaged in combat. Anybody who supported (or was seen as supporting) the Afghan government and its Western backers – civilian or not – was considered a non-civilian or legitimate target. More importantly, when pressed, the Taliban narrowed the definition of “innocent” to basically women and children. This makes a maternity hospital, even by Taliban standards, a horrific crime, explaining why they were so swift to deny responsibility.

Third, when communities seemed to have legitimate grievances (and evidence) that insurgents had killed civilians, the Taliban made promises either to punish perpetrators (“rogue fighters” that the movement did not condone) or to change their fighting tactics. Seven years later, no such change is evident. UN statistics continue to show that women and children die in disproportionate numbers in Afghanistan.

In one of my own rare interviews with a former Taliban official, it took four hours over three sessions for him to admit that “errors” in their warfare were occurring, after repeatedly denying such a possibility. He simply ended the interview by saying, “This is war … When we come to power, things will change.”

This is the crux of the problem with the peace negotiations – despite the Taliban’s continued aggressive warfare, and its failure to curb violence by other militant groups, Afghans are simply supposed to have faith in the promise that “things will change” when the Taliban come back to power.

If the Taliban wants their claims of peace taken seriously, they should agree to a country-wide ceasefire – not because the UN Secretary-General has urged exactly that in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, but because it has been a consistent demand from Afghan civil society groups for years.

A lot of ink is flowing about the “new normal” that will prevail post-crisis. A brief look at four different international issues offers a glimpse of what this “new normal” in international cooperation might be.

The first concerns global health. Leaving aside for the moment the call by countries such as Australia to clarify where, how, and why Covid-19 started, everyone must wish for a series of actions that lead globally to control of the virus, and establishing an effective vaccine. The indications are that scientists and health professionals across the globe are prepared to collaborate on this. It’s not clear cut, but it tends to the positive.

The second issue is climate change. This long-term problem has so far received at best intermittent international cooperation, while at worst its importance has been dismissed. Now, because of the lockdowns imposed around the world (about 3 billion people affected), New Delhi has clear skies, China’s pollution indexes have dropped, and there are dolphins back in the lagoons of Venice. One would think that this might give some impetus to greater work on controlling human destruction of the climate. But the climate talks known as the COP26 conference set for Glasgow later this year will not take place (and, ironically, the conference centre itself has been converted into a temporary Covid-19 hospital).

Economic priorities, including investment in large scale infrastructure to provide jobs, will have to be balanced against environmental policies set in balmier days. The world oil price has collapsed, putting pressure on energy policies. Public transport systems have to deal with the risks of handling large numbers of passengers in confined spaces, and the skies are empty of aircraft causing economic havoc. National reactions will differ on how to respond and international consensus much harder to obtain.

The third area is migration. One of the most important components of globalisation has been the movement of people, particularly in the labour market. Look at the examples, including South Asian workers in the Middle East, highly skilled from all over the world heading to the US and Western Europe, Pacific Islanders coming to Australia and New Zealand, or students to Western Europe, the US, Canada, and Australasia. Right now, that model has collapsed.

Is it going to get back up again? Certainly not in the next year or two, or longer. The implications for the developing world are staggering because of the importance of remittances to their economies. Remittances to Tonga, for instance, comprise 37% of total GDP. Policy decisions in the migration field will be made again largely at a national level, against a framework of need for labour versus severe domestic unemployment. Not to mention the backlash against foreigners which seems likely.

The fourth area is foreign investment. Again, a key to globalisation and a key to economic growth that has supported economies around the globe. With every country in recession and searching for capital, the challenge will be to ensure that investment flows relatively freely to help recovery. Already we are seeing that a first reaction is to control inbound foreign investment more tightly. The European Union, the US, Japan, and Australia, among other governments, have already tightened their regimes. Part of this is a reaction to China. Part of it is because the Covid-19 crisis has led governments to believe that they have to have national controls of certain industries.

Most of current regional trade agreements have an investment component allowing foreign investment to flow more easily. Will they change? Will governments want to renounce some of their obligations to their trading partners? Not encouraging so far, and more will certainly come.

But it is not all doom and gloom. The announcement that certain World Trade Organisation members, including the EU and China, but not the US and Japan, have agreed to establish an interim arbitration arrangement is good news.

And to put some life into tourism, the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand have endorsed the concept of allowing travel between the two countries when both can be sure of mastering the health issues involved. It is desperately sought after by the industries on both sides of the Tasman. But it is not for tomorrow, encouraging as the idea is. It may eventually provide some economic stimulus also to the South Pacific, if the bubble is extended to include them.

It’s got nothing to do with Covid-19, but a fascinating short passage in Malcolm Turnbull’s new memoir is illustrative of the challenges Scott Morrison faces in dealing with US President Donald Trump, and how much Australia can rely on the US as it squares off in an increasingly sharp rhetorical fight with China over coronavirus.

Turnbull reflects on calls made while he was prime minister to dispatch Australian warships to probe inside the 12 nautical mile zone around China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, as the US Navy had done. But Turnbull resisted, concerned Beijing could escalate by ramming and disabling an Australian ship. He writes:

If the Americans backed us in, then the Chinese would back off. But if Washington hesitated or, for whatever reasons, decided not to or was unable immediately to intervene, then China would have achieved an enormous propaganda win, exposing the USA as a paper tiger not to be relied on by its allies.

I’ve written an article for the Council of Foreign Relations that explores this question about how much Australia can rely on the US in the context of Covid-19. It’s the type of question that tends to get subsumed in the political realm by all the talk of “mateship” and alliance with a capital A, yet Turnbull’s logic makes clear that every prime minister must ask it. I’ve deliberately begun my piece from the premise that managing relations with the US is the most testing issue in Australia’s foreign policy ­­­­– a characterisation I suspect is most usually applied these days to relations with China. But it is important to recognise that for all the tetchiness of dealing with Beijing, the demands and opportunities drawn from Washington of years in war and peace are greater. Sometimes friends can be hard work.

Speaking of, Morrison made clear when Turnbull was promoting his book that he wasn’t eager for advice from the man he had unseated in an intra-party challenge less than two years before. There is no doubt that Turnbull branding Trump a “bully” alongside China was a complication Morrison didn’t really need, particularly given the coincidence that the PM happened to speak to Trump by telephone on the day Turnbull’s book as formally launched ­– and we know what a penchant the President has for books that involve him, and his at-times demanding phone manner, which Turnbull and Morrison have both experienced.

Yet political autobiographies are too often discounted as an exercise in score-settling and self-justification, or are read only for gossipy detail. Turnbull’s reflections are worth close examination as a guide to understanding the challenges that Australia’s leadership confronts in dealing with major powers, particularly the United States. As much as any autobiography will paint its principal subject in the kindest light, contemporaneous accounts of this type are instructive about the key debates and various sources of official advice on the big issues – themes that last well beyond the time in office of any one leader.

Turnbull reveals that Canberra had commissioned official psychological analysis of Trump, as every foreign capital would have, which recommended flattery to appeal to the narcissist. Australia’s diplomats also proposed concessions in a tax treaty in a bid to smooth over tensions, an idea Turnbull rejected. Having watched at close quarters Trump push around Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Turnbull was convinced by his own experience that “sucking up” was the wrong way to go, even as a considered strategy.

But it was the same principle he adopted with China. “I knew, from years of experience of dealing with bullies, that if you take a strong position on something and then back down under pressure, you’ll be mightily diminished,” Turnbull writes.

“We also knew, from first-hand experience,” he noted elsewhere, “that China’s policy towards other countries was thoroughly integrated. If a foreign nation disappointed China – for instance by criticising its conduct in some manner ­– then it could expect both criticism and economic consequences. Ministerial visits would be stopped … Chinese tourism would drop off, foreign business in China would be boycotted.”

And Morrison faces that very challenge, with recent threats of a consumer backlash followed by news today Beijing has slapped a ban on meat imports from four Australian abattoirs. It will invariabily been seen as retaliation, though Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has cautioned “we certainly don’t see any relationship and we would expect that no other counterpart country should see a relationship between those factors”.

“Sometimes”, Turnbull writes, “when a Chinese Customs official says an Australian exporter’s papers ‘are not in order’, they are, in fact, not in order”. Other times, he notes, this can very much be a political decision.

Either way, Morrison will be weighing just how much he can rely on friends.