leadership for justice peace safety and security

Effective and Ethical Leadership for Global and Local Justice, Peace, Safety and Security: Building

Canals rather than Dikes

Erwin Schwella

Introduction

• Erwin Schwella• Interests and Institutional Affiliations– SPL Stellenbosch

• SIGLA• ACCERUS• IFR• PLF

– Leiden University• LLC

– NIPAM, Namibia

Reflections on War and Peace : Initial and Provisional Common Sense Perspectives from a Mere Concerned Citizen

Destructive War Constructive Peace

Orientation• Goal: Explore, discuss and learn from leadership thinking

and action applied to global and local needs related to justice, peace, safety and security

• Objectives: • Explore relevant:

• Contextual dimensions• Base dynamics of current reality• Challenges

Orientation

• Leadership Responses– Concepts– Competencies– Conclusions

Orientation• Relate these dimensions to:

Effective and ethical leadership;

Towards global and local peace, justice, security and safety;

Building canals and bridges rather than dykes and walls

Setting the Scene: Justice, Peace, Safety, Security

Si vis pacem, para bellum:

"If you wish for peace, prepare for war" • Does this mean that preparing for war will

result in peace?• Do you get what you prepare for or what you

wish for?

Setting the Scene: Justice, Peace, Safety, Security

• Is there a logic and/or preferred sequence in the phrase chain: Justice, peace, safety and security?

• Should there be a logic and/or preferred sequence?

• If there is a logic:– Should/is this logic based on morality and/or

causality

Justice, Peace, Safety, Security

• Are their possible/inferred causal relationships?• Are there and/or should there be moral relationships?• How does this relate to effective and ethical leadership? • A personal considered opinion:• Justice results in peace and justice and peace are

conditio sine qua non for sustainable safety and security• From an African perspective:

“Development can only be advanced in a safe and peaceful environment” President Joaquim Chissano @ SIGLA@SPL@Stellenbosch

The Quest for Justice, Peace and Resulting Safety and Security

• Justice is more than a mere absence of injustice• Peace is more than a mere absence of war and

conflict• People and their leaders are significant actors in the

process of creating the conditions for and the condition of justice and peace and therefore safety and security

• Peace, justice, safety and security are linked to effective and ethical leadership

• Leadership and leaders matter.

Context: Base Dynamics of the Current Reality

• Inequality• Differential Access• Rising Expectations

– Global visibility– Impact of mass media

• Sustainability • Poverty• Diversity• Mobility• Real, perceived and created scarcity• All of the above?

Base Dynamics of the Current Reality

• Global and local inequality– Inequality realities and trends• Global Gini Coefficient 68-70 • Higher than the world’s most unequal countries: South

Africa and Brazil• Top 5 per cent of individuals in the world receive about

1/3 of total world income, and top 10 per cent receive one-half

Base Dynamics of the Current Reality

• Ratio between the average income received by the richest 5 per cent and the poorest 5 per cent in the world is 165 to 1• Richest earn in about 48 hours as much as the poorest

in a yearMilanovic (2005 and 2008)• 2000,the top 10% of adults in the world owned 85% of

global wealth, while the bottom half owned barely 1% (ASPA, 2008)

– Inequality within countries? What are the trends?


• Differential access– Real, created and perceived inequality and scarcity

linked to the challenge of sustainability– Basic human needs:• Clean water and sanitation

– 37% per cent of the developing world’s population – 2.5 billion people – lack improved sanitation facilities


– Over 780 million people still use unsafe drinking water sources.

– Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services, kills and sickens thousands of children

– Leads to impoverishment and diminished opportunities for thousands more (UNICEF JMP)

• Education:– 67 million children were out of school globally during the

school year ending in 2009 (Unesco Institute of Statistics


• Sustainability“If all of humanity lived like an average resident of Indonesia, only two-thirds of the planet’s biocapacity would be used; if everyone lived like an average Argentinean, humanity would demand more than half an additional planet; and if everyone lived like an average resident of the USA, a total of four Earths would be required to regenerate humanity’s annual demand on nature.” http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2012_summary_booklet_final.pdf accessed 13 August 2012.

http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2012_summary_booklet_final.pdf




• Poverty– The richest 20 % have 83% of global income– The bottom 20 % have 1% of global income

(Cummins and Ortiz, 2011)– Last thirty years have seen the gap between rich

and poor continually increase, making a reversal of the trend more and more difficult despite recent progress


– UNICEF estimate: more than 800 years for the bottom billion to achieve ten per cent of global income at current rate of change

– 2015 Projections UN MDG– At the current rate of progress by 2015 about 1 billion

people will still be living on less than $1.25 a day – Global extreme poverty rate of just below 16 per cent – Four out of every five people living in extreme poverty

will live in sub Saharan Africa and Southern Asia (UN MDG Report 2012)


– Globalised liberal market economy may have delivered economic growth

– ‘Singularly and consistently failed to deliver economic justice’ (Rogers, 2009: 10)


• Oxford Research Group (2011):– Perhaps the four most important underlying

drivers of insecurity are:• Climate change,• Increasing competition over resources,• Global militarisation, and• Marginalisation across much of the ‘majority world


“Changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals - from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable lands - are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict”

UN S-G Ban Ki-moon, (2007)


– Consequences: • Too little to go around?! • Mechanisms to control access • Mix of political and economic measures to control

access to public and private goods and services– “Markets and/or military might”

• Billions excluded from basic services due to base dynamics of current reality• Through mass media and globalisation increasingly

aware of it• Impact/Injustice?


• Base Dynamics creates global and local public leadership challenges in respect of justice, peace, safety and security

Leading into Leadership Challenges

• The societal context, within which effective and ethical public leadership has to be practiced now, is best described by the famous Charles Dickens quote:– “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; – it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; – it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; – it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; – it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; – we had everything before us, we had nothing before us;– we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the

other way."

Justice, Peace, Safety and Security Leadership Challenges

• Deal with the Price of Inequality and the other Aspects of the Base Dynamic

• Global, National and Local Transformation– Constitutional – Institutional

• Prepare for Justice and Peace and Wish for Safety and Security

• Adaptive Challenges and Wicked Problems– Heifetz– Grint

Challenges as Dilemmas

• Global governance deficit• Global, national, local conflicts of interest• Institutional deficit• Institutional fatigue• Scaling challenges • Individual / collective leadership capture• Leadership disempowerment and incapacity

Dealing with Justice, Peace, Safety and Security Leadership Challenges

• Angry and alienated demands to deal with the big issues related to inequality, access, expectations and sustainability

• Public leadership is being determined by the challenges rather than determining what is to be done about the challenges

• Three possible insufficient meta outcomes:– Malthusian collapse / MIT “Limits to Growth”

Justice, Peace, Safety and Security Leadership Challenges

– Schumpeterian innovation / Joel Barker: Always Another Door Opening

– Applying less than adequate mere muddling through methods

• Rather than these inadequate, naïve or neglecting options there is a need to find ways to deal with wicked/adaptive problems

Justice, Peace, Safety and Security Leadership Concepts

• Conceptual and strategic options in the approaches linked to dealing with adaptive or “wicked” problems

• Leadership as facilitating learning (Heifetz)• Leadership as adaptation and learning in

complex adaptive systems (Gunderson, Hartzog)

• Leadership in complex adaptive systems (Hartley & Bennington and perhaps Schwella?)

Justice, Peace, Safety and Security Leadership Competencies

• Facilitate learning and dialogue before dictating action and “final solutions”

• Frame and share questions to enhance analysis rather than answers to enhance quality decisions

• Create awareness, analysis, experimentation to inform decisions and action

• Manage stress and conflict within tolerable ranges for innovative and creative learning


• Include and involve all stakeholders in the “problem” in a consciously and properly managed and controlled process

• Facilitate:– participative professional evidence and ideas

based professional approaches, rather than

It is about facilitating a learning dialogue rather than forcing a lamentable dictatorship.


– power determined political emotion and ideology based approaches

to problem solving• Create knowledge and learning based

networks which is strong on a participative vision and weak on boundaries

Challenging Conclusions

• Scalability of the approach?• Enquiry requires facilitation (leadership

without authority), thinking and intellect• Implementation requires force (authority),

thrust and impact• Concluding Questions: Is this/Are you for Real?

leadership for justice peace safety and security

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