The Last Word
A final word from the Executive Director, Naomi Hart.
After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the world knew that Germany was poised to invade France – and noone was more cognisant of the crisis than the highest echelons of the French army. The country’s best military tacticians knew, or so they thought, that any attack would come either across the highly militarised Maginot line to the east, or the plains of neutral Belgium to the north. In between these two sat the formidable Ardennes forest, a mountainous region ostensibly so impassable to heavily armoured divisions that military leaders failed to fortify it. In May 1940, the predictions about the imminent German assault were proved obsolete. Hundreds of German tanks ploughed through the Ardennes, penetrating France with almost no resistance and occupying Paris with brutal swiftness.
France paid dearly for its neglect of the Ardennes. Of the many lessons to be derived from this moment in history, one is that bracing for a crisis requires policymakers not to close their minds to emerging problems and to consider the risk of events with a low possibility but a high level of danger.
Crucially, reacting to a crisis frequently requires innovation and should not be an exercise in reducing the circumstances to their least complicated causes or most likely outcomes. Consistent with this proposition, Ben Friis-O’Toole warns of the hazards of simplifying the causes of the credit crunch and global economic downturn, suggesting instead that appropriate policy responses are most likely to reveal themselves when governments embrace rather than eschew the complexity of these phenomena. Jessica Carter similarly argues that the West may need to dispense with its own traditional wisdom on how best to address the security threat posed by a nuclear North Korea. She advocates greater emphasis on both the critical humanitarian emergency that exists there and the need for South Korea to forge a more robust relationship with its northern neighbour, even at the expense of its ties to the United States.
Formulating innovative approaches relies upon welcoming diverse voices to public debate. Stakeholders who are easily silenced should be furnished with opportunities to contribute to policy. Neroli Austin and Misa Han contend that any response to human trafficking must empower rather than criminalise victims. Victims of heinous international crimes deserve special privilege, at the risk of depriving international criminal law of credibility, write Diana Tjeong and Matthew Kalyk. Nowhere is prioritising victims’ needs more crucial than in Zimbabwe, opines Mark Grime, where the Responsibility to Protect doctrine has eminently failed to safeguard Zimbabweans’ rights in the face of a public health disaster.
Despite the numerous situations which merit urgent attention, we should also exercise caution in applying the label ‘crisis’. Some readers of this volume will harbour a healthy cynicism towards the entire category of incidents and trends which are branded as ‘crises’ because of the frequent abuse of the term – a scepticism that several contributors share. Daniel Liu argues that the media is liable to provide lopsided and incomplete coverage of ‘crisis’ issues. Tim Mooney scrutinises the behaviour of opposition politicians in times of alleged crises, concluding that they frequently and visibly object to measures that they actually support in order to cultivate political capital, irresponsibly exploiting public panic. Melissa Yu proposes that using the term indiscriminately blunts its meaning and empties it of explanatory power. These contributors unanimously champion more honest appraisals of purported crises in order to craft suitable responses, lest the term comes to obscure as much as it reveals.
“It is possible to debunk the pessimism associated with crises: to decouple situations requiring urgent international attention from an exclusive focus on their degenerative effects.”
Perhaps most importantly, it is possible to debunk the pessimism associated with crises: to decouple situations requiring urgent international attention from an exclusive focus on their degenerative effects. In the lead article of this volume, Ben Lodewijks advances a compelling argument that economic crises generate not only challenges but also opportunities. As policymakers presently grapple with the ramifications of a poorly regulated financial sector boiling over, he suggests they should also seize the occasion to reconfigure the relationship between government and citizenry and to bolster economic cooperation on the international stage.
Ultimately, this volume seeks to throw light on the need to approach situations of crisis – and even the concept of crisis – with integrity, clear-headedness and a desire for prolific debate. The international community has exhibited its ability to learn from past errors: when the Allies launched a counter-offensive against German-occupied France in July 1944, their assault was intricately planned and meticulously executed. I am delighted to be involved in a publication that strives to ensure that when crisis hits, our eyes are open.
