In recent days there has been a great deal of debate surrounding the humanitarian imperatives for aiding refugees from the Middle East. This new briefing by Dr Simon Mabon builds upon these arguments to suggest that there are also strategic reasons for helping with the crisis that could contribute to the response to ISIS.

FPC Senior Research Associate Craig Oliphant examines the strategic, economic and political challenges Russia faces dealing with the states of Central Asia. He explores the impact of the Ukraine crisis on the relationship between Russia and Central Asia and examines the growing influence of China in the region and what it means for Moscow’s long-term role.

In this new FPC Briefing Dr Matthew Funaiole takes the upcoming 70th anniversary of the Pacific War (World War II) as an opportunity to assess the controversy in Japan about its international posture. Prime Minister Abe has in recent months repeatedly struck the nationalist war drum, leaving leaders in Beijing and Seoul increasingly worried about a resurgent Japan. While Abe’s vision for Japan does circumvent the pacifist aspects of the Japanese constitution, greater understanding into Japan’s imperial past is needed before evaluating Abe’s policies. This briefing explores Japan’s complicated relationship with the West to better understand the origins of Japanese imperialism and the lasting impact of Japan’s pacifist constitution.

In this new Foreign Policy Centre Briefing, Dr Shahar Hameiri and Dr Lee Jones examine international community responses to ‘non-traditional’ security threats (NTS) – transboundary issues such as pandemic diseases, transnational crime, drug smuggling and people trafficking. They argue that the primary focus of the security response involves attempts to change the behaviour of individual states’ domestic institutions and networking them across borders with their counterparts and international agencies. While this approach is seen as a way of avoiding international political conflict, Hameiri and Jones argue that the outcomes of these apparently technocratic interventions are shaped by domestic political struggles in target states. To attain better outcomes, the international community needs to be more aware of the domestic political impact of their interventions and build supportive coalitions with powerful domestic groups.

FPC Research Associate Dr Simon Mabon and his colleague Lucia Ardovini analyse the response of key regional actors in the Middle East to the rising threat of daesh (ISIS/ISIL), looking at differing Iranian, Saudi and Egyptian approaches.

The most public expression of such thinking was recently on display in two speeches delivered by President Obama to and at the closure of a three-day Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, held at the White House in February 2015. Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), as Marc Lynch perceptively , is the contemporary version – with more technocratic and palatable language and less ideological spin – of what Bush-era neoconservatives used to label as winning the ‘war of ideas’. Neoconservatives, despite what their critiques often argued, rarely spoke in terms of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. They did however relentlessly contend that an ongoing clash within a civilization, Islam, was taking place pitting on the one hand ‘good’ and ‘moderate’ Muslims, against ‘bad’ and ‘fundamentalist’ ones on the other. Given this religious context, America had an important stake and role to play in influencing this on-going war of ideas within Islam against fundamentalists and extremists. This reasoning and rhetoric was not only confined to of the time, but also made its way into President .

Since the early 2000s, starting with the Bush administration and continuing with the Obama one, a range of overt as well as covert policy interventions have taken place worldwide designed to steer, reform, update, influence Islamic education, debates, teachings and practices away from theological interpretations articulated by extremist and jihadist groups and towards more moderate, or pietist, or liberal, or even fundamentalist but non-violent interpretations of Islam. Madrassas are being reformed, preachers trained, Imams, clerics, and Muslim religious and public opinion leaders willing to issue fatwas or speak out against Al Qaeda, ISIS and delegitimizing terrorist tactics more generally, are actively sought and when possible supported – often undercover. These programs are rooted in a thinking that sees ‘Islam as the solution’, to use the famous Muslim Brotherhood slogan, against politically active and especially violently committed Islamist movements and groups.

An institutional infrastructure has emerged over the decades to devise, manage and coordinate these initiatives. Rooted in small incremental changes under the Bush administration, bureaucratic developments have consolidated under the Democratic president’s watch. A revamped White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a legacy of the Bush years, was mandated in 2009 by Obama to think through – among other things – how to improve interfaith cooperation and dialogue with the Muslim world- . America today holds what can be described as two ‘ambassadors’ one to Muslim states and the other to Muslim peoples. These are a , first appointed by Bush in 2008, and a , a position created by the Obama administration in 2009. A Directory for Global Engagement in the National Security Council, created in 2009, and a Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications in the State Department, created in 2011,seek to coordinate Muslim engagement initiatives and CVE programs.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, the most public and visible part of what is a developing architecture across the foreign policy apparatus – including the Department of Defence and CIA – designed to intervene in debates within Islam and among Muslims to delegitimize terrorist tactics and jihadists discourses. The underlining principle is to use religious arguments and traditions, mobilizing ‘moderate Muslims’ (whoever these are) to speak out against violence and show that ‘true Islam’ (whatever this may be) is peaceful, and pushing for the articulation of an understanding of Islam and Muslim identity that is compatible with American interests, especially in the Middle East, and Western values (whatever these may be). There has been an important push towards these types of policies also across Europe, for instance, often proposed as palatable alternatives to more militarized and securitized interventions to fight terrorism. An important part of the British response to the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, has involved a controversial by David Cameron’s government asking Imams and Muslim leaders to condemn actively violent attacks, such as those on the French satirical journal, and explain how their religion “can be part of British identity”.

Assuming that contemporary violence committed in the name of Islam has something to do with religion, an issue that is anything but settled and vigorously debated by scholars, intellectuals and religious leaders today, few have paused to think about the unintended consequences and possibly pernicious effects these policies may be having. Let us focus on two issues: public calls for so-called ‘moderate Muslims’ to speak out, and often less public and more covert initiatives designed to directly intervene in theological debates and controversies within Islam and among Muslims.

Calls for so-called moderate Muslims to speak out, while generally well-meaning, are also highly problematic. These calls, rather than defusing heightened narratives of religious conflict, appear to inadvertently single out a group of people (Muslims) and a religion (Islam) for being especially connected to terrorism. A step forward has been made in using the rhetoric of ‘violent extremism’ rather than ‘Islamic terrorism’ to defuse the idea that there might be a particular link between Islam and violence. While the label violent extremism could be generalized to include members of any religion or secular creed – especially at a time when right-wing, supremacist, domestic extremism is to be on the rise in the US – it is ‘Muslim’ violent extremism that the US government is mostly concerned with. Thus, it is Muslims who are regularly and publicly exhorted by the highest levels of government to demonstrate that theirs is a ‘religion of peace’. The paradox is that the more Western leaders ask moderate Muslims to show that Islam is in fact a ‘religion of peace’, the more they are politicizing religious belonging and belief while also conveying the message that the burden of proof lies mostly with this one particular faith and their adherents.

Moreover, the so-called ‘moderate Muslim’ has become one of the most ambiguous and contested categories of our time. It means everything and anything to anyone. Maybe the moderate Muslim is someone of deep faith (why otherwise use a religious identity marker compared to an ethnic, national or regional one?), who disapproves of violence (is this what the ‘moderate’ stands for?). Presumably of all forms of violence, though. This so-called moderate Muslim, hence, may be heard condemning and speaking unequivocally against both warped Islamist violent ideology and acts, but also against rising Islamophobia in the West and America’s wars and policies in the Middle East.

Caught in the War on Terror’s logic, which sharply divides the world between us and them, this so-called moderate Muslim often inevitably appears problematically stuck in the middle – in what ISIS’s glossy publication despairingly calls the ‘grayzone’. Moderate Muslims are too lenient towards the West for conservative Islamist standards, while too critical by American standards. Their profound religiosity is seen suspiciously by Westerners, while their non-confrontationalist interpretation of Islam often questioned as unauthentic by extremists. In the processes, the more the moderate Muslim is invoked the more the label becomes a tainted one. Ultimately, the paradoxical result is that an important critical voice in today’s conversation about the role of Islam in world politics, as well as America’s problematic conduct in the Middle East, is effectively undermined.

American initiatives designed to intervene and steer Islamic theological controversies worldwide towards the delegitimation of certain religious and political narratives, especially those that advocate violent tactics, raise urgent policy questions. First and foremost, there seems to be very little oversight and scrutiny of such initiatives, especially internationally oriented ones – some reports tracking the effectiveness of domestic CVE programs have been made available by the and the . Who is being funded, which religious leaders, madrassas, Islamic centres are receiving US support and what are they doing with this support? What type of religion and Islam are these groups articulating and advancing? Much of this information, if it is available anywhere, is not easily accessible. If it were, it would likely discredit – in the eyes of many Arabs and Muslims – most of those institutions and figures receiving some sort of American backing.

This observation leads to a second, important, point. Critical learning and open debate about Islam in the Middle East has been undermined in recent decades, if not century, not solely because of the emergence of rigid, ultra-conservative and fundamentalist interpretations, but also because of continuous state meddling in religion. Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist ideologies have thrived in part because of a growing legitimacy deficit of official religious institutions and centres of learning in the Middle East. Established Islamic religious institutions and leaders have been perceived, not erroneously, by younger generations to have been co-opted by Arab political leaders and ruling elites over the past century to serve their state building projects, especially creating consent and stifling opposition.

This entanglement between official government and official religion has been on display recently in the emblematic case of Egypt’s al-Azhar University, historically one of the most authoritative centers of Sunni Islamic thinking and learning in the region. Since taking power in 2013, General el-Sisi’s Egyptian government has reportedly been sacking thousands of preachers sympathetic or affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations. These have been replaced with al-Azhar graduates who must follow a particular government-approved religious and political script. The case of Egypt and al-Azhar is emblematic, but in the Middle East.

Further co-option of religious sites and figures to serve an international and foreign agenda such as the American one is thus likely to further aggravate rather than ameliorate this legitimacy crisis. Hence, CVE policies may inadvertently risk multiplying, rather than restricting, the opportunities for unlearned and unorthodox theological interpretations of Islam to flourish. Precisely like those put forward by Al Qaeda, for instance, whose intellectual cadre and ideologues are medical doctors and engineers and not religious scholars.

Moreover, underlining these American policies is also an often implicit belief that Muslims need their own reformation and their own Martin Luther. The assumption is that this process would lead to some kind of accommodation between Islam and democratic liberal values as in the end it occurred within Christianity. But this form of reasoning is problematic, as a recent article in also points out, and it is so for at least three reasons. It is Christian-centric, founded on a particular understanding of the Protestant reformation and its relationship to liberal politics, and based on an unwarranted belief that outsiders can direct the historical course of religious communities and traditions.

First, every religion has it own trajectory and its own way of negotiating the relationship between its texts and traditions, and a changing reality. It is an erroneous assumption that all religions should follow the same, Christian, path to modernity. Second, if any parallel can be made between Islam and Christianity, it may be worth remembering that the period of the Protestant reformations was surely not one marked by peace and supposed secular and liberal tolerance. The reformation and the subsequent counter-reformation became deeply entangled with more than a century of war in Europe, Martin Luther was profoundly intolerant of Jews for instance, and Protestants have had a long history of anti-Catholicism. Given this context, further violence and sectarianism spurred by a supposed ‘Muslim reformation’ is surely what the Middle East does not need at the moment.

Thirdly, can American foreign policymakers and programs really influence the course of a major world religion from the outside? As even one of advocating for the active reform of Islam humbly acknowledges at some point: “It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion. If ‘nation-building’ is a daunting task, ‘religion-building’ is immeasurably more perilous and complex.” American nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan have been catastrophic failures and the trail of unsavoury unintended consequences which these projects are leaving behind, think ISIS among many, is surely no cause for celebration. One wonders why and how American policymakers will be any more successful in the “more perilous and complex task”, as the RAND report puts it, “of religion-building”.

Overall, CVE activities are based on an idea that there is a religious problem – although not with Islam itself but surely within it – which is in need of a religious solution. As a result of this thinking we have come to live in an age where the most powerful state in the international system is seeking to intervene and mould the future direction of a major world religion according to its values and interests. Few have stopped to question the wisdom of such rational, whether America should politicize religion even further in its War on Terror and what the longer term unintended consequences of such operations might be. Democracy in Iraq was supposed to be the antidote to violent extremism, which instead today appears out of control. What if then the religious cure proves even more dangerous than the disease it seeks to fight?

Dr. Gregorio Bettiza is a Lecturer in International Relations and Security in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter.

March 2015.

At the same time, the Azerbaijani authorities have increased anti-Western rhetoric at the highest levels. So far, this has largely been aimed at the United States, perhaps because of the comparatively strong position of U.S. officials on human rights violations taking place in Azerbaijan. But European values and initiatives have also been targeted. Most notably, on 3rd December 2014, Presidential Chief of Staff Ramiz Mehdiyev issued a 62-page anti-Western polemic, accusing the U.S. and Europe of applying double standards to Azerbaijan and supporting a “fifth column” of activists, NGOs, and media outlets working to foment instability in the country.

Despite this hostility, Europe has continued to engage in business as usual with Azerbaijan, particularly in the context of energy cooperation, as Azerbaijan’s oil and gas resources present an attractive alternative to Russia. In the midst of the unprecedented human rights crackdown, Azerbaijan was allowed to serve as the political leader of the Council of Europe, chairing its Committee of Ministers from May to November 2014. As Human Rights Watch stated, Azerbaijan’s Chairmanship set a “new low” for the Council of Europe, and “represented an assault on the institution and everything it stands for”.

Moving towards a Strategic Modernisation Partnership
The track record of the European Union (EU) is not much better. The body has done little to address the fact that Azerbaijan has failed to implement many of the democratic reforms outlined in the EU-Azerbaijan Neighbourhood Policy Action Plan. Instead, the EU continues to move towards entering a Strategic Modernisation Partnership with Azerbaijan.

In June 2014, following a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso  stated that the EU wanted to move to “a long-term association grounded on democracy and shared values, in particular fundamental freedoms”. However, just moments later, he said that he and Aliyev had “discussed the ways to accelerate and expand the Southern Gas Corridor and we agreed that this will be our mutual priority for the coming year”. In the same press conference, Aliyev , unchallenged by Barroso, claimed that “all fundamental freedoms are guaranteed in Azerbaijan. There are free media and free internet…The [sic] freedom of assembly is fully guaranteed in our country. The [sic] freedom of religion is also fully provided in our country”.

Indeed, the EU has largely stood idly by as the Azerbaijani authorities have worked to destroy the country’s last vestiges of democracy. EU officials have reacted to some of the most serious developments – such as the arrest of investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova. But they more wholeheartedly welcomed a presidential pardon of just a few of the country’s scores of political prisoners – a step that hardly represented justice for individuals who never should have spent a single day in jail, nor did anything to stymie the cycle of politically motivated arrests that has continued.

Division within the European Parliament
The most significant attempts by the EU to hold Azerbaijan accountable for its human rights obligations have come from the European Parliament (EP). In September 2014, the EP adopted a resolution “on the persecution of human rights defenders in Azerbaijan”. The resolution condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the arrests of a number of human rights defenders and demanded their immediate and unconditional release. It also called for broader human rights reforms “as a matter of urgent priority”. In October 2014, detained Azerbaijani human rights defender Leyla Yunus was named as one of three finalists for the prestigious EP Sakharov Prize. Despite the fact that she did not win the prize, the EP <http://www.europarl.europa.eu/the-president/en/press/press_release_speeches/speeches/speeches-2014/speeches-2014-november/pdf/speech-to-mark-the-award-of-the-2014-sakharov-prize-for-freedom-of-thought-to-dr-denis-mukwege-by-martin-schulz–president-of-the-european-parliament called> on the Azerbaijani government “to release without delay this innocent woman”.

However, despite these positive steps, the EP remains split on Azerbaijan, due in part to lobbying practices described by the European Stability Initiative as “<http://www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=156&document_ID=131 caviar diplomacy>”. The EP monitoring delegation’s <http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-EN.asp?newsid=4699&lang=2&cat=31 statement> on Azerbaijan’s 2013 presidential election inexplicably declared it to have been “a free, fair and transparent electoral process” (sharply contrasting the <http://www.osce.org/institutions/110015 findings of the OSCE>). A number of Members of European Parliament (MEPs) also took part in dubious <http://www.esiweb.org/pdf/esi_document_id_145.pdf private monitoring missions>. Although six of these MEPs were later found to have violated the Code of Conduct by failing to declare their participation in these missions, EP President Martin Schulz <http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/no-action-in-azerbaijan-case-3/ decided not to take disciplinary action> against them, paving the way for more MEPs to be influenced in the future.

Individual officials within the EU system have begun to recognize the need for a different approach to Azerbaijan. In a hearing in October, just prior to taking office as the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini <http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/20480.html#.VDP1T0K48Es.twitter addressed the issue>, stating, “The Azerbaijan issue is not an easy one. Just because we are investing a lot on energy in Azerbaijan, and they know it very well, it is going to be crucial also for our diversification of sources. I think we need to stress even more the need for respecting human rights, especially in the field of media and political activities”.

Unfortunately, so far, no significant changes have been made with respect to EU policy towards Azerbaijan. But changes could be on the horizon. As Green Party MEP Paolo Bergamaschi said in a recent <http://www.azadliq.org/content/article/26790132.html interview>, “I can tell you that the situation in [the] EP lately has changed a lot. Even the voices that were fonder of [the] Azerbaijani government, they now keep silent. They don’t dare say anything because the opposition to the crackdown has grown very strong and is still very strong in the EP. So from this point of view I can tell you that either there is a change of strategy, either there are concrete signs or the EP will voice its concern in a much stronger way than what it did so far”.

A stronger EP position on human rights violations in Azerbaijan is critically needed, as is a stronger stance by the broader EU. In failing to take action to hold Azerbaijan accountable for its human rights obligations and continuing to turn a blind eye to the on-going repression in the country, the EU is making a serious strategic mistake. Compromising its own values by carrying on with business as usual with Azerbaijan might yield some immediate benefits for the EU, but this strategy is shortsighted. Ultimately, the emergence of strong democratic institutions is the best long-term guarantor of EU interests in Azerbaijan. Continuing to embolden an increasingly authoritarian regime is serving to destroy, rather than strengthen, these institutions, and will result in the erosion of democratic values within the EU itself – similarly to what is already taking place at the Council of Europe.

February 2015

The outcome is well described as a ‘call’ – rather than a protocol, a framework or even a roadmap. It notes ‘with grave concern’ the gap between countries’ greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and what will be necessary to restrict average temperature increases to two degrees Celsius. But it leaves the content of the planned global climate deal to be negotiated in 2015, setting up a diplomatic sprint to next December’s Paris summit.

This was expected. More concerning was that negotiators were unable to agree on a standard for communications of intended national climate actions that would guarantee meaningful scrutiny of the proposed actions. The reason for this was that nations remain far apart in their interpretations of the division of responsibility between developed and developing countries.

Firewall between developed and developing countries reasserted
The common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) of developed and developing countries is a key principle of the 1992 UN climate convention. Under CBDR, developed but not developing countries were obliged to reduce emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The concept has become increasingly controversial as the developing country share of global emissions has grown.

At Lima, disputes over differentiation characterized negotiations on the content of national commitments, adaptation to climate change and the financial commitments of wealthy nations. The EU’s call for the Paris deal to reflect ‘evolving national responsibilities in the world economy’ was effectively rebuffed by the G77 and China bloc and, especially, the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries. As the conference ran into extra time the negotiation grew heated, with Malaysia’s lead negotiator using the rhetoric of the anti-colonial movement to reassert the need for differentiation.

Alongside the substantive disagreements were suspicions of bad faith. Certain developing country delegations attributed bias against them to the co-chairs of the main negotiation. The Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries also reported concerns that a text that they had rejected could be adopted ‘by acclamation’ in the closing plenary session.

The strength of disagreement over CBDR surprised some observers, who had credited last month’s with bridging the developed/developing country divide. In fact, China had made it clear that the joint statement did no such thing. The National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, within China’s National Development and Reform Commission, went so far as to as ‘a victory for the principle of common but differentiated responsibility’.

The Lima session demonstrated that no agreement will be possible without some form of differentiation, but it is also clear that the ongoing impasse over how to apply the CBDR principle is holding the negotiation back. Some creative thinking on how to update differentiation to account for twenty-plus years of economic development and growing emissions in the big emerging markets has not yet been widely adopted. In the October session of the negotiations, Brazil had proposed a ‘concentric differentiation’ approach, under which all parties would move from different starting points towards economy-wide, absolute emissions reduction targets. Brazil in November on the topic and undertook to provide further clarification, but its idea was not reflected in the G77’s positioning on differentiation at Lima.

Clarity on national commitments diluted
A key task of the Lima meeting was to provide for the content, timing and assessment of the communication of intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs). INDCs are climate actions that nations will commit to under the 2015 climate deal.

The CBDR division has rendered ostensibly procedural matters like the information to be contained in INDCs intensely political. Developed countries want INDCs to primarily be mitigation commitments; developing countries want them to include adaptation to climate change and financial support. Developed countries pushed for a centralized assessment process of INDCs applicable to all; developing countries opposed this and called for similar assessment of rich-world financial commitments.

At the beginning of the conference, the EU called for all countries’ INDCs to contain information to enable them to be compared, aggregated and assessed against the stated goal of keeping average global temperature increases within two degrees Celsius. In the event, as successive draft texts proved unacceptable to the main bloc of developing nations, rigor was stripped out of these national communications. Some indicative changes:
• Whereas the 8 December draft text called on nations to submit their INDCs in the first quarter of 2015, or otherwise by 31 May, the Lima agreement drops the May deadline.
• The same draft provided that ‘each Party shall communicate a quantifiable mitigation component’ ‘in the light of evolving national circumstances’ and that ‘Parties with greatest responsibility and those with sufficient capability are expected to take on absolute economy-wide mitigation targets’. The Lima agreement merely notes that each nation’s contribution is to ‘represent a progression beyond the current undertaking of that Party’.
• The draft provided that all nations ‘shall’ provide information on ‘the reference point (including as appropriate, a base year), time frames and periods for implementation, scope and coverage, expected level of effort’, etc. The Lima outcome provides that nations ‘may’ include these and other details in their INDCs.
• The 8 December draft encouraged nations to question each other on their INDCs and tasked the secretariat with organizing a June dialogue on INDCs and with preparing a paper on the ‘aggregate effect’ of INDCs by the end of June. In the Lima agreement, the dialogue is gone and the ‘aggregate effect’ report is to appear by 1 November – less than a month before the start of the Paris summit.

This weakened text will make it harder to assess national commitments against the goal of limiting climate change.

Mixed outcomes on elements of the global climate regime
With the Paris deadline still a year away, it is unsurprising that the Lima conference left many issues undecided (the draft negotiating text annexed to the Lima Call contains multiple options on many topics). Aside from the pressing question of INDCs, Lima saw some progress on climate finance but also ongoing disagreement over issues that are shaping up as faultlines at Paris and beyond:
• Pledges announced during the conference finally saw the Green Climate Fund reach its initial targeted capitalization of $10 billion. The conference tasked the Fund with accelerating both the opening of its mitigation and adaptation funding windows and engagement with the private sector.
• The question of compensation for ‘loss and damage’ caused by climate change remained controversial, with disagreement over how to address this issue in the negotiation.
• There was no agreement on how to address negative economic and social consequences of response measures to climate change, with the G77 and China, opposed by various developed countries, proposing a new mechanism to deal with the issue.

The limits of climate diplomacy
Cooperation, as the political scientists Robert Axelrod and Robert Keohane once observed, ‘is not equivalent to harmony’. Each year, the UN climate summit furnishes new evidence for this proposition.

This year, the Saturday night scramble for a text all could live with essentially restored the status quo of the process, leaving well-worn negotiating ‘red lines’ intact. Provisions that played down differentiation and were therefore (according to the G77 and China) ‘unbalanced’ were removed, but so was language calling for badly needed transparency on the part of governments. As one negotiator commented on Saturday, ‘every time we do an iteration of this document we get less and less’.

Nevertheless, the Lima outcomes were fairly described by parties, presiding officers and the UN secretariat as doing enough to keep a robust Paris deal within reach. Such an outcome will require high-level political compromise of the kind that was never in prospect this year. Rather than simply condemning the Lima outcomes (which a number of civil society groups did before the digital ink on the ‘Lima Call’ was dry), it might be worth reflecting on what this process can deliver and what it cannot.

Twenty-plus years of experience suggest that the UN climate negotiations are effective at spurring nations to greater climate action than they would otherwise have undertaken, at creating platforms to mobilize resources (including knowledge) and at bringing together diverse public and private sector actors to work on the common challenge. However, the UN process has been unable to deliver anything approaching a comprehensive global solution.

Giving that climate change is a whole-of-world-economy problem aptly described by economist Ross Garnaut as ‘diabolical’, this is unsurprising. Instead of railing against the limits of climate diplomacy, critics should look for opportunities to increase the effectiveness of the process.

These include coordinating with other public sector processes, including the Sustainable Development Goals and city-to-city networks, in order to produce complementary, mutually reinforcing outcomes. They also include deeper engagement with the private sector and more experimentation with mobilizing climate finance, recognizing that public sector funding will continue to be insufficient. The Lima outcomes included encouraging language on both of these opportunities.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, the incoming conference president, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, noted that many of the negotiators present had spent much of their careers on climate change. 2015 will be a crucial year for translating that commitment into a stronger global response to climate change.

December 2014

The current Ebola crisis has sparked a fuse and brought attention to what has been the plight of many poor Africans for a generation. The key question is why it has taken African governments, businesses and ordinary people so long to wake up to the fact that inadequate healthcare systems are a ticking time bomb.

Thus, this explosive health issue has implications for all Africans and the world at large. As far back as 2006, I raised the issue of human resources for health, and the massive wholesale loss of skilled healthcare professionals from Africa to the west and the Middle East. This is in part due to the poor working conditions in Africa and the rising demand in the west where there are much better working conditions. Africa has two physicians and 11 nurses/midwives per 10,000 of the population. In contrast, there are 14 physicians and 28 nurses/midwives for the same population ratios globally. In Europe, there are 33 physicians and 68 nurses/midwives and in the Americas, there are 23 physicians and 55 nurses/midwives (World Health Organisation for Africa – Atlas of Health Statistics 2011).

In the UK, between 2002 and 2008, the Nursing and Midwifery council for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland registered 11,500 qualified medical staff from Africa to practice in the UK. In addition, the General Medical Council has 14,377 registered clinicians from African countries. These numbers do not include Africans who have trained and qualified in the United Kingdom or African trained pharmacists, therapists and other supporting healthcare professionals working outside the continent. The ratio of healthcare workers is similarly high in the USA, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. The growing loss of vast numbers of African healthcare professionals from across the continent generates huge structural deficits with respect to building much needed robust and resilient healthcare systems across African economies.

In April 2006, African diaspora organisations organised a high level event with Save the Children UK which explored human resources for health in Africa. The discussion group came up with recommendations for action. The summary report from the event .

Since then I have been personally involved in conference after conference and meeting after meeting focused on this pressing issue. I have taken part in numerous surveys and have mapped the skillsets of diaspora healthcare professionals as well as micro-scale healthcare projects. My involvement has always been with the expectation that many of the recommendations for action would lead to the transformation required. Unfortunately, nothing has happened. The current Ebola crisis has exposed to the world what the poor of Africa have been going through for years. The silent cries have increasingly become a loud shout for help NOW!

Most of Africa’s ruling elites do not use the national health systems they preside over. They prefer to fly to Europe or the Middle East, where they can access reliable healthcare provision as private patients at great cost to the public purse in their home countries. As such, they fail to give any priority to ensuring that African health systems deliver high quality services for ordinary people. Even the emerging middle class are forced to identify private healthcare providers or deplete meagre savings in order to seek treatment abroad. In addition, one of the main drivers of diaspora remittance transfers to Africa is the constant call for funds to meet family healthcare bills. This poor state of affairs has led to the growth of informal and unregulated healthcare systems commonly used by poor people. These informal systems are compromised by increased risks due to unqualified healthcare workers adopting unsafe healthcare practices.

Unfortunately the Ebola crisis must be seen as an opportunity that must be seized upon to turn the tide of healthcare in Africa. African leaders and Africans must stand up to deliver and demand the required change now. There is little need to set up committees or commission reviews. Instead, it is time to implement the various policy recommendations that have gathered dust on various shelves. One example is Africa’s Road Map for Scaling Up the Human Resources for Health for Improved Health Service Delivery in the African Region 2012–2025, produced by the WHO.

In summary, across Africa, transformation of healthcare is required at all levels. This includes public health (prevention), treatment (health service delivery) and the various elements required to support quality assured healthcare systems. The priority actions should include:

• Aggressive strategies such as those deployed to attract business investment must be used to build healthcare systems in Africa. Presently, African countries, with the exception of just a few, spend less than 15 per cent of government expenditure on health, despite pledges by the African Union in 2001 during the Abuja Summit. It is important that all African governments recognise health as a priority investment.
• Robust monitoring of spending and the implementation of regulation for healthcare systems is critical.
• Valuing healthcare workers, both medical and non-medical staff, across Africa and beyond by ensuring terms and working conditions are fit for purpose.
• Building and sustaining integrated healthcare systems in order to promote both preventive and curative healthcare.
• Healthcare research and development which is exclusively Africa focused and Africa centred.
• Building healthcare systems which are underpinned by trust. Thus patients must believe that healthcare professionals are not motivated by financial gains but by ethical professional standards.
• Eradicating unregulated healthcare provision that compromises public safety.
• Educate and inform the wider public about how to hold their elected officials to account on healthcare issues.
• Identify ways to engage the expertise and experience of Africa’s broad healthcare diaspora.

The current crisis demands that we all change and demand change. Like many African diaspora healthcare professionals, I am willing to support the transformational change required. What we need however is for our various political leaders to lead with humility and do what is right for the wider public rather than serving the interests of a small group of ruling elites. The many lives lost to the current Ebola crisis, to malaria, TB and HIV, among others, demands that we must all make a change NOW.

November 2014

The facts speak for themselves: nearly 5 million people use illegal drugs in Russia, 1.7 million of whom are opiate users. Almost 60% of officially registered HIV cases in 2013 were also people who use drugs. In some cities, HIV prevalence among people who inject drugs is as high as 74%.The epidemic is on the rise, with 800,000 people officially registered as HIV positive and many others who do not even know their status.

Tuberculosis has reached epidemic proportions in Russia, now the primary cause of death among people with HIV, and 78% of men with both TB and HIV are injecting drug users. The total number of people with HCV who also inject drugs is estimated to be over one million.

Despite this shocking scenario, the state provides no services to stem drug dependency and its related health and social problems. People who use drugs are depicted by state officials as ‘deviant’ and as criminals, and therefore undeserving of equal access to healthcare. The Russian government refuses to adopt even the most mainstream and well-studied approaches to drug treatment, including OST, which is actually illegal. Instead, antipsychotic drugs that were used against Soviet dissidents are part of the standard regime for treating drug dependency in state facilities, a practise contravening international standards.

In the 1990s, health problems related to drug use quickly emerged as major social and health challenges. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) stepped in to respond to the crisis, providing clean needles and other support to drug users. NGOs and donors expected the Government to take over and expand these services. But soon after Putin’s re-election in 2012, the situation worsened dramatically. Many NGOs become the target of new anti-NGO laws and a climate of fear spread, with mounting stigmatisation against people who did not fit the norm.

In today’s Russia, it is still very difficult for NGOs that argue for health policies backed by scientific evidence and human rights to advance their agendas openly. With increasing levels of repression, few organisations are challenging the state. In the area of drug policy and treatment and AIDS, the Andrey Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice (ARF) has been one of the few to take up this challenge.

Our approach has been radically different to others, having realised that the Government was ideologically opposed to drug users and was unlikely to shift its entrenched stance towards them. In 2009, we started out as a small but flexible platform, fundraising for and supporting community initiatives and activists, but with no physical infrastructure and therefore low overheads. This allowed us to build dynamic, horizontal projects that were conceptualised, led and managed by community activists, giving us flexibility to respond. Our strategies were designed to minimise risks stemming from any crackdowns by the increasingly heavy-handed authorities.
Our approach has evolved and been hugely successful, but we still operate without an office or other facilities. We now have an effective communication infrastructure based on hourly updates via Google listserv enabling us to coordinate and manage cases with other service providers helping people who use drugs in and around Moscow. Last year, we provided health services to some 1600 individuals and, according to drug users’ feedback on overdose prevention that we started to record just recently, each day we save one person’s life from a fatal overdose by giving out Naloxone and overdose prevention counselling to people.

A major factor in our success is the use of human rights law to fight Russia’s authorities. We track cases where rights have been violated, do strategic litigation, and take bold campaigns to the public. In 2013 we initiated a street lawyers project using paralegals to provide legal education and basic legal aid to people who are victimised by law enforcement officials or discriminated against by medical facilities. These cases almost always fail in the Russian courts so we take them further. We have taken more than a dozen cases to national and international courts. One of these is Irina Teplinskaya, a drug user who filed a complaint to the UN Special Rapporteur on her right to health in 2011, and in 2012 filed a case in the Russian courts on her inability to access OST. Her case, together with two similar cases, is now under review with the European Court of Human Rights.

Above all, our approach of direct, confrontational activism gives a powerful voice to people who take drugs and are living with HIV. More broadly, ours is a fight for the rights and dignity of all people in a context where the state has abrogated its responsibilities to its citizens.

October 2014

Anya Sarang is President of the . This article is adapted from from contained within AIDS Today: Tell no lies and claim no easy victories, the first edition of a new biennial publication that presents the state of the civil society response to AIDS, published by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. This chapter contains the links to the references for the statistics quoted above.