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Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Celebrity Lunchtime Seminar.
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I'm Dr. Oetker.
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I'm the director of studies of the Changing Conference Centre, and I'm delighted to have you here for the packed room today for the seminar.
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Today, I'm delighted to introduce our speaker, Lord John Alaniz.
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He's a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords.
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He's also here, Oxford, the director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict and Harris Manchester College.
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He's also a very close friend of CCW.
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He's on our academic board. He's also on the advisory board of countries, from conflict actors to architects of peace.
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Another project that we have might host at the CCW.
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He's also very much involved with our conflict platform project, thinking about how changing could dynamics influence conflict.
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But of course he also has a large, huge expertise experience.
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From his past involvement in politics. He was one of the negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement.
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He was the first speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly until 2004,
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and then one of four international commissioners overseeing the standing down of the terrorist group and organisation of Security an item.
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There's a long list that could go on and on,
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and I would encourage you to read his work as well and look up on what he's been doing in Northern Ireland and in other parts of the world.
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But today we're going to hear about terrorism and how human rights have recently developed in the context of terrorism.
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Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much indeed, Annette, for your invitation and kind welcome.
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Thanks to all of you for coming along as well. My involvement in in terrorism, of course, not directly practising it,
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but observing it and being affected by it came from being in Northern Ireland growing up whenever things were beginning to break down into violence.
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And my interest in human rights started around about the same time because I was the chairman of the Youth Committee of the Irish Council of Churches,
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and at that time the Irish Council of Churches established a human rights body
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to look at some of the practical issues that were emerging at that time,
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for example, human rights issues in prisons during the hunger strike, but also in lots of other areas.
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So these two issues of terrorism and human rights have been around for me for a for a very long time, since my late teens, early twenties.
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And indeed, in my international involvement there that I have mentioned in Liberal International,
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which is the the Federation or family, if you like, of liberal political parties, over 100 of them around the world.
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Before becoming president of of the international, I was the chair of the Human Rights Committee,
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which is the only permanent committee of Liberal International, apart from the the Bureau of an Executive.
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So human rights has always been a very important part. When we talk about the developments or recent developments in relation to human rights,
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you might therefore expect me to be coming along to speak about how things were improving or becoming more emphasised or whatever.
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But actually I am going to talk about how terrorism and those things that have caused it are
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flagging up some really quite fundamental problems for the whole notion of human rights.
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We'll come to that later. But let me go back to the start.
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So terrorism is is a crime, of course, but that can mask the fact that it's primarily a tactic of asymmetric warfare,
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often used by those who are less powerful against those who are, at least in formal terms, more powerful.
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The purpose of the terrorist is to use the creation of powerful feelings of fear, terror to leverage greater impact.
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Those who are the victims of a terrorist attack are not the targets of the campaign.
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The tactic aims to provoke governments or others in power and to lose their moral authority by overreacting against the community.
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The terrorists claim to represent and in this way,
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to undermine the sense that government have the capacity to protect those for whom they have responsibility,
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and maybe even more crucially, to damage the sense that those in authority have right on their side.
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And over the last century,
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the development of those measures of public morality that we call human rights have been intimately related to the reactions of governments,
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to the operations of war, the threat of social chaos, and the challenging use of terrorism against those authorities.
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It was a terrorist act, the assassination of Ferdinand, the Archduke Austria, on the 29th of June 1940.
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That was the trigger for the first truly global conflict.
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And the result was not just horrible violence but the dissolution of the old imperial order in the world, in Europe, first and beyond.
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During the 19th century, the understanding and use of terrorism had been developed by revolutionary
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anarchists as an effective tool in their campaign to subvert government governance.
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By the early 20th century, support for the underlying ideals and principles had wind.
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But other movements, not least nationalist and anti-colonial movements,
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then espoused what appeared to be a relatively effective, effective tactic for undermining those in power.
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The terrorist attack in Sarajevo in 1914 on these horrors that were inflicted and experienced on an unprecedented
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scale and resulted not only in the wholesale destabilisation of the Imperial World Order of the time,
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but impacted massively the intellectual life of the Western world.
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The optimistic political and intellectual liberalism and rationalism that had emerged centuries before
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from the Reformation and the Enlightenment received a very serious blue faith in human rationality,
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had led to extraordinary progress in science and technology and would continue to do so, not least in medicine, transport and communication.
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But it had received a profound setback.
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My professional background in psychoanalysis and Freud, for example, radically changed his theories after the First World War.
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Before that, he had focussed on the libido and sexuality and he said, I can't look at the trenches and attribute that to libidinal problems.
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And so he developed a whole new approach in theory based on aggression and then the death instinct.
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So that's just a marker of how really fundamentally it changed things.
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You know, I was going through a period of centenaries at the moment we can sometimes forget this was not just a war.
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It was the end of a whole order and a way of thinking about things.
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Enlightenment thinkers had hoped that a few generations of education and rationality would be a sufficient
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kerb on human aggression and violence and would result in the peaceful and stable progress of humanity.
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The First World War put a serious question mark against those optimistic assumptions.
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Initially, it was hoped that the problems that had led to Germany with probably the best,
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most rational and most orderly education system in the world at that time to engage in such destruction.
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Well, the hope was these were political problems, and they could be addressed by the application of more democratic principles.
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If human rationality had not in itself contained human aggression,
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then surely it was a problem of the old imperial political context of order and a new democratic constitution
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for Germany and international cooperation through the League of Nations could prevent a recurrence.
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Well, of course, you knew that the application of human rationality to governance in Germany's Weimar Republic
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and international cooperation through the League of Nations did not solve the problem.
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And despite improvements in the management and infrastructure of Germany,
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there was catastrophic inflation and a rise in political extreme extremism that
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resulted in a second and in some ways even more appalling global conflict.
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If human education in rationality applied to socio economic and political development did not prevent the disastrous violence of world wars,
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then it was hoped a new universal rules based approach might succeed.
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So with education wasn't enough, then let's have a new international rules based system.
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The result was the completion of the League of Nations by the United Nations,
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bringing countries together since the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions to address the challenges of economic instability,
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the running of the Nuremberg trials,
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to make clear that there would be no impunity for crimes against humanity which were not acceptable even in times of all out or absolute war.
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And very importantly, the setting out what one might think of as a new secular code of global commandments.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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The 38 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights started with a statement of belief in Article one.
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I quote it All human beings are born free, equal in dignity and rights, etc.
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Followed by the insistence that whoops, they are endowed with reason and conscience and.
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You'd up towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
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So this was a kind of foundational statement and context.
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These foundational beliefs were followed in articles 2 to 21 and in 27 by a set of potentially justiciable civil and political rights.
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But Articles 22 to 26 went further, setting down social and economic rights,
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which were described in legalistic terms, but of course, actually required economic and political implementation.
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And finally, Article 28 to insist on a social and international order and a set of responsibilities and
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prohibitions that are necessary for the implementation of the rights that had been set down earlier.
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Despite Article one. What the creation of this declaration recognised was that the freedom and dignity that
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every individual should be able to enjoy depended not only on human rationality,
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but also on conscience and the moral imperative of a spirit of brotherhood.
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And it was very clear that neither conscience nor the spirit of brotherhood had protected Europe against the calamities,
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not just once but twice catastrophic war within a generation.
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The human rights that had been declared by the humanists and liberals of the 18th
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and 19th centuries would not be guaranteed merely by an appeal to a rational,
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moral conscience. The new Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the new global body of nation states and embedded in an international
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rules based system and embodied in the new international institutions that it was hoped would ensure its implementation.
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Well, the decades that followed gave grounds for hope that humanity had indeed learned its
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lesson and that a new age had begun guided by universal values that went beyond religion,
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nationality or culture, and was founded on this new body of universal law,
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as it was thought to be based on human rights and give the possibility of a new international culture of lawfulness.
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International courts began to hold to account those found guilty of crimes against humanity.
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Countries that had been former enemies over many centuries came together first
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in Europe and then gradually in other regions to form transnational unions,
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which cooperated on economic, legal, cultural, scientific and political challenges, as well as the emerging global threats to the environment.
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Real progress was made in tackling infectious diseases and reducing poverty and hunger.
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The end of the Cold War saw serious efforts to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons and limit their further proliferation to new states.
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To some, especially in the West, it really began to look as though a new golden age was dawning.
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Then came Tuesday, the 11th of September 2001, and another terrorist attack of devastating significance.
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It was not, but this was the first major terrorist attack since the pre war campaigns of the old anarchists,
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though it was colossal in terms of the numbers killed and injured, but it was symbolically massive, too.
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Since the Second World War, there have been many terrorist campaigns as the colonies sought their freedom from imperial control and some that
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were also part of the victorious struggle between the United States and the USSR during the so-called Cold War.
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But since then, there had been warning signs of something new.
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Ancient feuds in the Balkans, frozen for decades within the sphere of influence of the USSR, started to re-emerge as the old Soviet system dissolved,
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and United Nations forces were unable to prevent some subsequent massacres, even when they were present in Africa, too.
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There were genocidal horrors that challenged the hope that in such situations,
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even the most fundamental rights could be protected by the international community.
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Even as the so-called second generation or socio economic rights were being pressed, new rights and responsibilities were also being promulgated.
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Group rights establishing no ethnic or religious minorities and first nation peoples should be treated were being added to the canon of human rights.
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The new Doctrine of Responsibility to Protect was endorsed by all the members of the states of the member states of the United Nations in 2005.
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If one was to judge on what was agreed on paper at a global level, enormous progress was being made.
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However, away from the chambers of the international institutions, of the libraries of global agreements.
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A different story was unfolding.
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Many people and communities around the world did not feel, but in reality, their human rights as individuals and groups were actually being protected.
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Nor did they believe that peaceful democratic politics were showing any evidence that matters would be satisfactorily addressed in that way.
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As a result, some countries have been experiencing the return of terrorism and not only in historic.
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To the unstable regions such as the Middle East in my own part of the United Kingdom, with all its history of parliamentary democracy,
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high intellectual and educational achievement, relative prosperity,
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and the role of the UK as a signatory and sometimes author of many international human rights commitments.
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But even within the United Kingdom, all was not well. From 1968,
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a terrorist campaign was brought by the IRA with the aim of breaking Northern Ireland away from the UK to create an independent socialist republic.
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Republicans insisted that the partition of Ireland had only been maintained through
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systematic injustices and the disregard of the rights of the Catholic nationalist people.
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There were civil rights marches in 67, but when these were confronted with pro-British protesters and violent loyalist mobs, the guns,
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which had been silent for some years,
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came back out again and physical force Republicanism returned to the tactic of terrorism it has employed in the past.
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But now, with an expanded arsenal and tactics upgraded from the outbreaks of violence
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in earlier centuries and the War of Independence in the early 20th century.
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Unless you think these things are all kind of separated from each other and local.
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So every time you hear about a car bomb going off in Afghanistan or Iraq, just remember it was invented in Belfast.
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Guy in the air, right. Was taking a carload of homemade explosive and he discovered it was becoming unstable.
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And so he decided to just exploded when it was in the centre of Belfast.
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And serendipitously, at least from his perspective, discovered this was an extremely effective form of bomb.
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And of course it went all around the world. So these are not merely looking for clues.
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Well,
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the initial reaction of Northern Ireland's Protestant Unionist Regional Administration in Belfast and subsequently the British government in London,
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two rounds of politically motivated violence or terrorism was a largely security response.
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But the more the local police force, later backed by the British army, tried to crack down on the terrorism and violence.
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The more the terrorists built their support in some pockets of the Catholic nationalist minority community,
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when the guns and bombs appeared in earnest, the political concessions that were offered were seem to be too little, too late.
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Soon, the British government found itself agreeing to the temporary suspension of some human rights,
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in particular the introduction of executive detention without trial known locally as internment.
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This polarised the community further and acted as a powerful recruiting sergeant for the IRA in the Catholic nationalist community.
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And since loyalists were internment as well, it also distanced many people in the loyalist community from the police and the British government.
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It took years for the British government to learn the lesson that while there is a security role in combating terrorism,
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the propagation of human rights and counter-terrorism is often wholly counterproductive, especially in open democratic societies.
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Once the government had openly breached some human rights for the use of internment,
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even in what could be regarded as extenuating circumstances, it became vulnerable to the accusation that it had also breached others.
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And not only did other major breaches occur, but importantly,
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claims of human rights abuses then became part of the propaganda struggle of terrorist organisations against the government.
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So it was possible to instrumentalize human rights claims whether or not they were the case.
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And it's because in sufficient numbers of cases they were the case.
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Northern Ireland was sliding back into the deep historic feud and it remained there for a generation.
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All attempts at normal political negotiation,
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social and economic development and incremental human rights improvements failed to end the terrorist campaign.
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Police and army chiefs repeatedly told the government, and some even said publicly that they would continue to do their job and contain the situation,
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but that there was no military or security solution to the problem of terrorism.
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It was, they said, a political problem that would have to be addressed politically.
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And it had been recognised, realised quite clearly by those responsible for public order and security.
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Terrorism was not just ordinary violent crime.
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And in can I say one of the reasons we then were able to move on to a peace process was
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that the IRA had also recognised that they could not be defeated by the British Army,
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but they could not defeat the British army.
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And so we had a hurting stalemate, not just a stalemate, not just a hurting situation, but a hurting student.
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And I remember working with Martin McGuinness in Iraq, who were meeting with all the various political parties there.
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And he said, you need to understand, you can fight for the next five years.
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For the next 25 years, it won't solve anything.
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You'll just kill more of your own people because this is a political problem and it needs to be addressed in that in that way.
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And of course, coming from Martin, that was a very powerful statement indeed.
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Of course, terrorism is a criminal activity and you can't go on a terrorist campaign without breaking the law.
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But while the ordinary criminal delightfully in Northern Ireland, often referred to as UDC or ordinary decent criminals,
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while ordinary criminals engage in crime for personal benefit,
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they try to ensure that no one finds out what they've done and they regard conviction and punishment as a disaster.
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But the terrorist generally seeks and gets no personal material benefit,
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ensures that the public knows that it was his organisation that carried out the
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atrocity and regards the failure of his cause as the ultimate catastrophe,
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not the compromise of his own umbrella, or even the loss of his own life.
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The failure of policing and security. Attempts to resolve the problem of terrorism.
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And then on. Astounding that we were dealing with a different motivation for a different kind of crime in Northern Ireland eventually led
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us to find a new way of analysing and understanding the problem of terror in order to find a new way of dealing with it.
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Human rationality was important, but it had to be applied to understanding the non-rational part of the human condition.
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That is the part that feels so passionately about values, principles,
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culture and identity that people are prepared to sacrifice their social and economic welfare and even their
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lives and those of their children in a struggle that is not in their best socio economic empowerment.
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This is really very important because for much of the 20th century,
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political science has suggested that people operated in in their best socio in power.
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What became very clear to us was that people were acting in ways that were not in their best social, economic and power interests.
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And so pouring money and economic benefits did not improve the prospects for ending the violence.
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In fact, we used to joke that all it did in Northern Ireland was create upwardly mobile Provos and give people more money to do what they were doing.
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It did not make people give up on their wish and vision.
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So it was necessary to start paying attention to human relationships, not just between individuals and within families,
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but much more importantly, the relationships of the various large groups that made up our divided people.
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The problem was not social economic development fundamentally, but it was three sets of relationships between Protestant,
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unionist and Catholic nationalists in the north, between the people of the North and the people of the South, and between Britain and Ireland.
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And the Irish peace process was then constructed on the basis of an examination of three sets of disturbed, historic relationships.
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The political represented, as the IRA said, they were only engaging in the violence because they could not find any other way to deal with the deep
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unfairness as they felt the history of humiliation and disrespect for their people and their culture,
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their human rights.
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If there could be a new way of writing these wrongs and building new relationships characterised by respect for human rights in all its fullness,
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and achieved through a new process of engagement and dealing with the legacy of the hurts of the past.
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Then perhaps a new beginning was possible.
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And while this process has followed a long and winding road with many hurdles and setbacks,
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it has ultimately been successful in helping the people of Ireland,
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North and South,
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leave behind a belief in the use of violence and physical force and instead commit to democratic politics and the human rights based rule of law.
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Brexit or Brexit, by the way, however, on the 11th of September 2001,
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as I was in Belfast and watched the unfolding atrocities in New York, Arlington and Stoney Creek,
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Pennsylvania, live on my television screen,
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I immediately sensed that something I recognised was underway but of an entirely different order of magnitude.
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We had known terrorism and political violence for over 30 years and experience told me that in addition to the
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individual casualties who had lost their lives and others who lives would be changed forever in the US attacks,
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there would be another unspoken victim the liberal commitment to a human rights based approach to communal problems.
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This attack on the United States of America on its home territory in such a devastatingly symbolic fashion,
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would almost certainly result in a fierce and violent response, as was intended by the terrorists who planned and executed the attack.
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That was its purpose.
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Although successive U.S. administrations had been involved in the Irish peace process and had been very considerable contributions to it,
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even as I watched the television screen and heard details of what was happening, my heart sunk.
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I had been in the Middle East enough to know that these attacks, which were so destructive of the lives and human rights of those in New York,
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at the Pentagon and elsewhere would almost certainly result in pressure for powerful punitive responses,
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which would test the limits of human rights elsewhere, and change the global dynamic from progress towards greater openness,
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freedom and human rights to an emphasis on security based on physical force.
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Confidence in the rule based system would likely begin to dissolve when in our province
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we were learning lessons about what worked and did not work in addressing terrorism.
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I could not help fearing that the counterproductive reactions I had seen as a teenager in Belfast.
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Would not be unleashed in a fierce reaction to the 911 attacks.
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Despite us having learned repeatedly at home that this was precisely the purpose and intention of the terrorists.
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Well, we did not have long to wait.
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The terrorists maintained that they were resorting to the use of terrorism as a tactic because they had learned from experience to have
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no faith in the instruments of international human rights law and politics to achieve the betterment of their people in their region.
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In turning to the the tactic of terrorism. They were breaching the criminal law,
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but they claimed they were doing so in the service of what they regarded as a higher law on behalf of their people,
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their values, their religion, culture and identity.
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As they struck back at the terrorist networks, the major global powers themselves increasingly disregarded the instruments,
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institutions and processes of the United Nations and human rights law.
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Military interventions were based on U.N. Security Council resolutions if they could be achieved.
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But not getting the UNESCO agreement was not regarded as an absolute prohibition.
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The justification for some of the military intervention soon came to be seen at home and abroad as dependent on untrustworthy information,
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even dishonesty. The use of extraordinary rendition and inhuman or degrading treatment were no longer seen as beyond the pale,
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even for some members of the Security Council when dealing with terrorism.
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And the term terrorism was increasingly used as a morally loaded descriptor,
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rather than the identification of a specific tactic of asymmetric warfare.
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The labelling of violent actions as terrorism became a justification in itself for almost any kind of aggressive military or other actions,
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even, and perhaps especially when they contravene human rights provisions.
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One of the singular strengths of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
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precisely that these rights are meant to apply to every single human being,
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wherever they are in the world, independent of domestic pressures or political systems within states.
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However, there is not only a legislature that sets down what is the law,
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but also a policing service that can move freely throughout the jurisdiction to investigate alleged breaches of the law.
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A justice system that makes judgements as to the guilt or innocence and handed down sentences
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as well as a penal system to administer the sanctions and say of those found guilty,
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not all of these key functions of a justice system apply fully in the case of international human rights law
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and increasing the number and complexity of human rights instruments without having effective implementation,
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begun to bring the system into disrepute and left some people feeling that in the absence of redress,
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they must eventually take matters into their own hands and respond with passionate and destructive.
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Bangor human rights enthusiasts have also felt that ensuring that a new right is adopted by the
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by international agreement is always a step towards its full recognition and implementation.
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However, it is here that the limits of human rationality and human rights become apparent,
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and the importance of human relationships and the psychology of large groups make their presence felt.
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If the statement of the human rights does not need within a reasonable time to its implementation,
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the whole notion of human rights begins to be undermined.
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The addition of too many rights introduced too quickly, sometimes in conflict with each other,
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can begin to produce a reaction against human rights as an approach.
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As a result, some people may turn to physical force again.
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Terrorism being one of the mechanisms to address the wrongs they feel human rights promised but failed to resolve.
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On the other hand, those opposed to the terrorists and the changes they want to see come to feel
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that so much focussed on the rights of terrorist suspects and communities
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from which they emerge becomes an obstacle to the recognition of the rights of the communities who are the victims of the terrorist campaigns.
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And they demand that their responsible governments take more and more strident
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action in what appears to be a fight for survival against an existential threat.
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In successfully frustrating the authority of the state and of the international institutions of cooperation,
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and by demonstrating the complexity of the implementation of the rights of every individual and community,
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terrorists have provoked increasing restrictions on rights and freedoms.
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They have dented the hopes for social, economic and social international order expressed in Article 20.
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It diminished the rights and freedoms, as well as the sense of respect and community set down in Article 20 and succeeded in diverting governments
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from their commitment to fully maintain undeveloped human rights and freedoms as set out onto the UN.
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Diar. It is of course crucial in such times that we maintain our commitment to human rationality and human rights.
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But we must also begin to understand that they do not in themselves represent the sufficient understanding of the human condition,
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how we function as individuals and groups, how we can evolve and progress to greater peace, stability and reconciliation in our world.
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We need to appreciate that emotions are not just feelings.
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They are part of the way our brains work.
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They are part of the way we think. Terrorism does not just frighten us.
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It affects the way our brains function. We know this from doing functional magnetic resonance imaging of people's brains.
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Different parts of the brain start to function with a different grammar and syntax, producing different sets of rules for thinking and action.
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We need to reflect the code during relatively peaceful, stable periods.
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Our understandings tend to proceed by incremental evolutionary development in times of crisis.
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Our whole way of thinking and being in the world is challenged, and it can become possible, sometimes even necessary,
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to take a leap into a whole new paradigm of understanding a frightening, challenging and dangerous time, but still one with opportunities.
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However, there are further quite fundamental problems about the rational, liberal, democratic, movement based order.
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It has been building for a long time that a stable, fair, merit guided system would lead to stability and equity.
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But this is not necessarily so.
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In fact, there are indications that stability benefits those who can best use stability to better themselves and their families.
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Statements about everyone being born equal, as we reflected in Article one earlier on, are simply statements of faith.
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And contrary to evidence, it's clear we're not all born equal.
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No matter what I would have done, how hard I would have worked,
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whatever time I had spent training, I was never, ever going to be even a decent footballer.
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I chose the wrong parents in the first place and everything thereafter was downhill.
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We're not equal. We're different. It's crucial that we are fair.
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Not to pretend we are all equal is a false prospectus.
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The stability that we all want and crave can simply mean that some individuals and families will accumulate wealth and power,
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and the divisions between the haves and have nots will increase because there is no resetting of the system.
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This is not a new issue. In the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations.
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There were mechanisms for resetting or interrupting stability without wars.
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The Jewish year of Jubilee where every 50 years so seven, seven times seven Hebrew slaves and prisoners were to be freed,
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debts forgiven, and the mercies of God should be particularly manifest.
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Did it always happen? No. But there was an understanding of a fundamental principle, and it wasn't just there.
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The idea has been around a long time in that part of the world.
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We have many episodes of general debt cancellations.
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Famously, of course, King Hammurabi in 1792 B.C. forgave all citizens debts owed to the government, high ranking officials and dignitaries.
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Despite the Millennium Year of Jubilee campaign in 2000, adopted by some 40 countries and the Catholic Church.
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I'm not particularly suggesting that we should institute. This is a habit. That's not my point.
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I'm simply trying to point out that this implicitly recognises from ancient times until now that the idea of a stable,
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liberal democratic system producing equality and and and equity in society is actually a flawed perspective.
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It's a wish fantasy. And our world is immensely more complex and our population enormous in comparison with the ancient Middle East.
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But the issue the issue is fully resolved. Let me pick up the issue about equality.
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As I say, our genetic endowment differs substantially from person to person, whether measured in terms of physical, intellectual or social ability.
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We're simply not the same, never mind equal.
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And the wish to explain our differences entirely on the basis of environmental or social influences is wishful thinking.
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There is no scientific basis for it at all. That's not to say those aren't important.
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They are, of course important, but they are not the only thing. There are certain things that we cannot change.
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So for those who wish to be fair, it may, for example,
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be necessary to provide much greater assistance to those who have disabilities
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or less abilities in order that they may have a fair chance in equality.
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And that sense disadvantages those who are already disadvantaged, too.
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Fairness is a completely different thing from equality.
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I've already mentioned that the other principle that doesn't test to stand the test of time is the notion that we are entirely rational beings.
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That's probably not in dispute. We all recognise that, although we are very rational, it's other people that are not so rational.
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But the non-rational are not has generally been regarded since the Enlightenment as a problem, a feeling of the human condition.
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One of the ways in which artificial intelligence is actually going to become a threat to us because machines are not troubled by feelings.
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It's assumed that this is a weakness.
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However, we need to consider whether the fact of human evolution and survival until now may not be despite the capacity to operate emotionally,
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but may be due to that fascinating capacity to operate in ways that are not merely rational.
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One of our colleagues here in Oxford is publishing a book with Harvard University Press in a few weeks time.
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Dominic Johnson, also colleague of Change War Program,
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where he is showing that some of those things that we think of as limitations, the non-rational things like overconfidence.
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Fundamental attribution error. In-Group outgroup may contribute to success as much as the failure.
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He examines, for example, in great detail how Washington had clearly absolutely no chance of winning.
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He kept losing. The odds against him were unbelievable, and yet he refused to recognise it.
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And in the end the result was, of course, what we know.
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But had he not been overconfident? Confident to a point of unreasonableness.
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People to pack up and go home.
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So this this question, when we are involved in political life, I mean, I often say you've got to be overconfident to be a politician.
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There's no point in standing up and saying like you would as an academic research.
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Well, you know, I've got some interesting ideas. It's about how we might govern the country.
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And, you know, I don't have the answers to everything, but I've got some pretty good methods.
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And if you'd like to entrust me with the opportunity, we will try it out a few times and you won't even get that far.
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You've got to say I knew the answer, and if you vote for me, I will deliver.
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The problem, of course, is that people vote for the fantasy, and when the fantasy isn't fulfilled, politics itself suffers.
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Nevertheless, there is this business of overconfidence, not always being a disadvantage and other non-rational elements as well.
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So what does this say to us?
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It says to us that, as was the case a century ago, our reactions to terrorism may even contribute to us slipping into a third global conflict.
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Arguably, we are already in one in cyber. If the things that are happening in cyberspace already over the last few years were happening on land,
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sea, air or in space, it would already be declared a global conflict.
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We are slipping into this. But there is the possibility also that some of the fundamental principles on which we've been operating for the last
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four or 500 years may now be about to be superseded by we don't quite know what not just a few different ideas,
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but a fundamentally different way of thinking.
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This is enormously challenging and for many people, profoundly frightening.
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But there is also the possibility that we may be standing on the threshold of a major step forward in the understanding of humanity,
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a paradigm shift that takes us beyond a quite legalistic, rationalistic,
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linear approach to human rights and into the complexity science of large group relationships.
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You have to work very creatively on taking such a next step because not only are rights and freedoms,
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but perhaps even our very survival as a species may depend upon it.
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But it does give us a chance of finding something marvellously new.
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Thank you.
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Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Celebrity Lunchtime Seminar.
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I'm Dr. Oetker.
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I'm the director of studies of the Changing Conference Centre, and I'm delighted to have you here for the packed room today for the seminar.
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Today, I'm delighted to introduce our speaker, Lord John Alaniz.
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He's a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords.
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He's also here, Oxford, the director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict and Harris Manchester College.
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He's also a very close friend of CCW.
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He's on our academic board. He's also on the advisory board of countries, from conflict actors to architects of peace.
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Another project that we have might host at the CCW.
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He's also very much involved with our conflict platform project, thinking about how changing could dynamics influence conflict.
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But of course he also has a large, huge expertise experience.
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From his past involvement in politics. He was one of the negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement.
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He was the first speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly until 2004,
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and then one of four international commissioners overseeing the standing down of the terrorist group and organisation of Security an item.
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There's a long list that could go on and on,
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and I would encourage you to read his work as well and look up on what he's been doing in Northern Ireland and in other parts of the world.
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But today we're going to hear about terrorism and how human rights have recently developed in the context of terrorism.
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Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much indeed, Annette, for your invitation and kind welcome.
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Thanks to all of you for coming along as well. My involvement in in terrorism, of course, not directly practising it,
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but observing it and being affected by it came from being in Northern Ireland growing up whenever things were beginning to break down into violence.
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And my interest in human rights started around about the same time because I was the chairman of the Youth Committee of the Irish Council of Churches,
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and at that time the Irish Council of Churches established a human rights body
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to look at some of the practical issues that were emerging at that time,
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for example, human rights issues in prisons during the hunger strike, but also in lots of other areas.
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So these two issues of terrorism and human rights have been around for me for a for a very long time, since my late teens, early twenties.
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And indeed, in my international involvement there that I have mentioned in Liberal International,
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which is the the Federation or family, if you like, of liberal political parties, over 100 of them around the world.
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Before becoming president of of the international, I was the chair of the Human Rights Committee,
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which is the only permanent committee of Liberal International, apart from the the Bureau of an Executive.
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So human rights has always been a very important part. When we talk about the developments or recent developments in relation to human rights,
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you might therefore expect me to be coming along to speak about how things were improving or becoming more emphasised or whatever.
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But actually I am going to talk about how terrorism and those things that have caused it are
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flagging up some really quite fundamental problems for the whole notion of human rights.
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We'll come to that later. But let me go back to the start.
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So terrorism is is a crime, of course, but that can mask the fact that it's primarily a tactic of asymmetric warfare,
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often used by those who are less powerful against those who are, at least in formal terms, more powerful.
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The purpose of the terrorist is to use the creation of powerful feelings of fear, terror to leverage greater impact.
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Those who are the victims of a terrorist attack are not the targets of the campaign.
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The tactic aims to provoke governments or others in power and to lose their moral authority by overreacting against the community.
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The terrorists claim to represent and in this way,
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to undermine the sense that government have the capacity to protect those for whom they have responsibility,
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and maybe even more crucially, to damage the sense that those in authority have right on their side.
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And over the last century,
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the development of those measures of public morality that we call human rights have been intimately related to the reactions of governments,
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to the operations of war, the threat of social chaos, and the challenging use of terrorism against those authorities.
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It was a terrorist act, the assassination of Ferdinand, the Archduke Austria, on the 29th of June 1940.
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That was the trigger for the first truly global conflict.
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And the result was not just horrible violence but the dissolution of the old imperial order in the world, in Europe, first and beyond.
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During the 19th century, the understanding and use of terrorism had been developed by revolutionary
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anarchists as an effective tool in their campaign to subvert government governance.
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By the early 20th century, support for the underlying ideals and principles had wind.
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But other movements, not least nationalist and anti-colonial movements,
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then espoused what appeared to be a relatively effective, effective tactic for undermining those in power.
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The terrorist attack in Sarajevo in 1914 on these horrors that were inflicted and experienced on an unprecedented
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scale and resulted not only in the wholesale destabilisation of the Imperial World Order of the time,
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but impacted massively the intellectual life of the Western world.
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The optimistic political and intellectual liberalism and rationalism that had emerged centuries before
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from the Reformation and the Enlightenment received a very serious blue faith in human rationality,
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had led to extraordinary progress in science and technology and would continue to do so, not least in medicine, transport and communication.
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But it had received a profound setback.
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My professional background in psychoanalysis and Freud, for example, radically changed his theories after the First World War.
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Before that, he had focussed on the libido and sexuality and he said, I can't look at the trenches and attribute that to libidinal problems.
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And so he developed a whole new approach in theory based on aggression and then the death instinct.
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So that's just a marker of how really fundamentally it changed things.
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You know, I was going through a period of centenaries at the moment we can sometimes forget this was not just a war.
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It was the end of a whole order and a way of thinking about things.
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Enlightenment thinkers had hoped that a few generations of education and rationality would be a sufficient
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kerb on human aggression and violence and would result in the peaceful and stable progress of humanity.
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The First World War put a serious question mark against those optimistic assumptions.
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Initially, it was hoped that the problems that had led to Germany with probably the best,
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most rational and most orderly education system in the world at that time to engage in such destruction.
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Well, the hope was these were political problems, and they could be addressed by the application of more democratic principles.
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If human rationality had not in itself contained human aggression,
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then surely it was a problem of the old imperial political context of order and a new democratic constitution
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for Germany and international cooperation through the League of Nations could prevent a recurrence.
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Well, of course, you knew that the application of human rationality to governance in Germany's Weimar Republic
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and international cooperation through the League of Nations did not solve the problem.
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And despite improvements in the management and infrastructure of Germany,
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there was catastrophic inflation and a rise in political extreme extremism that
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resulted in a second and in some ways even more appalling global conflict.
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If human education in rationality applied to socio economic and political development did not prevent the disastrous violence of world wars,
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then it was hoped a new universal rules based approach might succeed.
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So with education wasn't enough, then let's have a new international rules based system.
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The result was the completion of the League of Nations by the United Nations,
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bringing countries together since the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions to address the challenges of economic instability,
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the running of the Nuremberg trials,
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to make clear that there would be no impunity for crimes against humanity which were not acceptable even in times of all out or absolute war.
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And very importantly, the setting out what one might think of as a new secular code of global commandments.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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The 38 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights started with a statement of belief in Article one.
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I quote it All human beings are born free, equal in dignity and rights, etc.
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Followed by the insistence that whoops, they are endowed with reason and conscience and.
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You'd up towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
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So this was a kind of foundational statement and context.
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These foundational beliefs were followed in articles 2 to 21 and in 27 by a set of potentially justiciable civil and political rights.
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But Articles 22 to 26 went further, setting down social and economic rights,
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which were described in legalistic terms, but of course, actually required economic and political implementation.
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And finally, Article 28 to insist on a social and international order and a set of responsibilities and
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prohibitions that are necessary for the implementation of the rights that had been set down earlier.
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Despite Article one. What the creation of this declaration recognised was that the freedom and dignity that
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every individual should be able to enjoy depended not only on human rationality,
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but also on conscience and the moral imperative of a spirit of brotherhood.
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And it was very clear that neither conscience nor the spirit of brotherhood had protected Europe against the calamities,
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not just once but twice catastrophic war within a generation.
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The human rights that had been declared by the humanists and liberals of the 18th
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and 19th centuries would not be guaranteed merely by an appeal to a rational,
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moral conscience. The new Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the new global body of nation states and embedded in an international
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rules based system and embodied in the new international institutions that it was hoped would ensure its implementation.
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Well, the decades that followed gave grounds for hope that humanity had indeed learned its
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lesson and that a new age had begun guided by universal values that went beyond religion,
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nationality or culture, and was founded on this new body of universal law,
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as it was thought to be based on human rights and give the possibility of a new international culture of lawfulness.
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International courts began to hold to account those found guilty of crimes against humanity.
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Countries that had been former enemies over many centuries came together first
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in Europe and then gradually in other regions to form transnational unions,
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which cooperated on economic, legal, cultural, scientific and political challenges, as well as the emerging global threats to the environment.
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Real progress was made in tackling infectious diseases and reducing poverty and hunger.
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The end of the Cold War saw serious efforts to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons and limit their further proliferation to new states.
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To some, especially in the West, it really began to look as though a new golden age was dawning.
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Then came Tuesday, the 11th of September 2001, and another terrorist attack of devastating significance.
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It was not, but this was the first major terrorist attack since the pre war campaigns of the old anarchists,
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though it was colossal in terms of the numbers killed and injured, but it was symbolically massive, too.
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Since the Second World War, there have been many terrorist campaigns as the colonies sought their freedom from imperial control and some that
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were also part of the victorious struggle between the United States and the USSR during the so-called Cold War.
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But since then, there had been warning signs of something new.
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Ancient feuds in the Balkans, frozen for decades within the sphere of influence of the USSR, started to re-emerge as the old Soviet system dissolved,
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and United Nations forces were unable to prevent some subsequent massacres, even when they were present in Africa, too.
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There were genocidal horrors that challenged the hope that in such situations,
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even the most fundamental rights could be protected by the international community.
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Even as the so-called second generation or socio economic rights were being pressed, new rights and responsibilities were also being promulgated.
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Group rights establishing no ethnic or religious minorities and first nation peoples should be treated were being added to the canon of human rights.
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The new Doctrine of Responsibility to Protect was endorsed by all the members of the states of the member states of the United Nations in 2005.
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If one was to judge on what was agreed on paper at a global level, enormous progress was being made.
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However, away from the chambers of the international institutions, of the libraries of global agreements.
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A different story was unfolding.
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Many people and communities around the world did not feel, but in reality, their human rights as individuals and groups were actually being protected.
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Nor did they believe that peaceful democratic politics were showing any evidence that matters would be satisfactorily addressed in that way.
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As a result, some countries have been experiencing the return of terrorism and not only in historic.
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To the unstable regions such as the Middle East in my own part of the United Kingdom, with all its history of parliamentary democracy,
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high intellectual and educational achievement, relative prosperity,
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and the role of the UK as a signatory and sometimes author of many international human rights commitments.
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But even within the United Kingdom, all was not well. From 1968,
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a terrorist campaign was brought by the IRA with the aim of breaking Northern Ireland away from the UK to create an independent socialist republic.
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Republicans insisted that the partition of Ireland had only been maintained through
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systematic injustices and the disregard of the rights of the Catholic nationalist people.
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There were civil rights marches in 67, but when these were confronted with pro-British protesters and violent loyalist mobs, the guns,
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which had been silent for some years,
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came back out again and physical force Republicanism returned to the tactic of terrorism it has employed in the past.
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But now, with an expanded arsenal and tactics upgraded from the outbreaks of violence
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in earlier centuries and the War of Independence in the early 20th century.
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Unless you think these things are all kind of separated from each other and local.
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So every time you hear about a car bomb going off in Afghanistan or Iraq, just remember it was invented in Belfast.
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Guy in the air, right. Was taking a carload of homemade explosive and he discovered it was becoming unstable.
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And so he decided to just exploded when it was in the centre of Belfast.
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And serendipitously, at least from his perspective, discovered this was an extremely effective form of bomb.
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And of course it went all around the world. So these are not merely looking for clues.
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Well,
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the initial reaction of Northern Ireland's Protestant Unionist Regional Administration in Belfast and subsequently the British government in London,
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two rounds of politically motivated violence or terrorism was a largely security response.
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But the more the local police force, later backed by the British army, tried to crack down on the terrorism and violence.
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The more the terrorists built their support in some pockets of the Catholic nationalist minority community,
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when the guns and bombs appeared in earnest, the political concessions that were offered were seem to be too little, too late.
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Soon, the British government found itself agreeing to the temporary suspension of some human rights,
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in particular the introduction of executive detention without trial known locally as internment.
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This polarised the community further and acted as a powerful recruiting sergeant for the IRA in the Catholic nationalist community.
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And since loyalists were internment as well, it also distanced many people in the loyalist community from the police and the British government.
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It took years for the British government to learn the lesson that while there is a security role in combating terrorism,
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the propagation of human rights and counter-terrorism is often wholly counterproductive, especially in open democratic societies.
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Once the government had openly breached some human rights for the use of internment,
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even in what could be regarded as extenuating circumstances, it became vulnerable to the accusation that it had also breached others.
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And not only did other major breaches occur, but importantly,
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claims of human rights abuses then became part of the propaganda struggle of terrorist organisations against the government.
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So it was possible to instrumentalize human rights claims whether or not they were the case.
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And it's because in sufficient numbers of cases they were the case.
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Northern Ireland was sliding back into the deep historic feud and it remained there for a generation.
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All attempts at normal political negotiation,
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social and economic development and incremental human rights improvements failed to end the terrorist campaign.
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Police and army chiefs repeatedly told the government, and some even said publicly that they would continue to do their job and contain the situation,
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but that there was no military or security solution to the problem of terrorism.
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It was, they said, a political problem that would have to be addressed politically.
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And it had been recognised, realised quite clearly by those responsible for public order and security.
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Terrorism was not just ordinary violent crime.
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And in can I say one of the reasons we then were able to move on to a peace process was
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that the IRA had also recognised that they could not be defeated by the British Army,
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but they could not defeat the British army.
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And so we had a hurting stalemate, not just a stalemate, not just a hurting situation, but a hurting student.
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And I remember working with Martin McGuinness in Iraq, who were meeting with all the various political parties there.
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And he said, you need to understand, you can fight for the next five years.
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For the next 25 years, it won't solve anything.
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You'll just kill more of your own people because this is a political problem and it needs to be addressed in that in that way.
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And of course, coming from Martin, that was a very powerful statement indeed.
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Of course, terrorism is a criminal activity and you can't go on a terrorist campaign without breaking the law.
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But while the ordinary criminal delightfully in Northern Ireland, often referred to as UDC or ordinary decent criminals,
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while ordinary criminals engage in crime for personal benefit,
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they try to ensure that no one finds out what they've done and they regard conviction and punishment as a disaster.
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But the terrorist generally seeks and gets no personal material benefit,
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ensures that the public knows that it was his organisation that carried out the
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atrocity and regards the failure of his cause as the ultimate catastrophe,
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not the compromise of his own umbrella, or even the loss of his own life.
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The failure of policing and security. Attempts to resolve the problem of terrorism.
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And then on. Astounding that we were dealing with a different motivation for a different kind of crime in Northern Ireland eventually led
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us to find a new way of analysing and understanding the problem of terror in order to find a new way of dealing with it.
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Human rationality was important, but it had to be applied to understanding the non-rational part of the human condition.
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That is the part that feels so passionately about values, principles,
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culture and identity that people are prepared to sacrifice their social and economic welfare and even their
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lives and those of their children in a struggle that is not in their best socio economic empowerment.
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This is really very important because for much of the 20th century,
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political science has suggested that people operated in in their best socio in power.
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What became very clear to us was that people were acting in ways that were not in their best social, economic and power interests.
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And so pouring money and economic benefits did not improve the prospects for ending the violence.
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In fact, we used to joke that all it did in Northern Ireland was create upwardly mobile Provos and give people more money to do what they were doing.
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It did not make people give up on their wish and vision.
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So it was necessary to start paying attention to human relationships, not just between individuals and within families,
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but much more importantly, the relationships of the various large groups that made up our divided people.
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The problem was not social economic development fundamentally, but it was three sets of relationships between Protestant,
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unionist and Catholic nationalists in the north, between the people of the North and the people of the South, and between Britain and Ireland.
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And the Irish peace process was then constructed on the basis of an examination of three sets of disturbed, historic relationships.
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The political represented, as the IRA said, they were only engaging in the violence because they could not find any other way to deal with the deep
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unfairness as they felt the history of humiliation and disrespect for their people and their culture,
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their human rights.
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If there could be a new way of writing these wrongs and building new relationships characterised by respect for human rights in all its fullness,
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and achieved through a new process of engagement and dealing with the legacy of the hurts of the past.
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Then perhaps a new beginning was possible.
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And while this process has followed a long and winding road with many hurdles and setbacks,
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it has ultimately been successful in helping the people of Ireland,
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North and South,
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leave behind a belief in the use of violence and physical force and instead commit to democratic politics and the human rights based rule of law.
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Brexit or Brexit, by the way, however, on the 11th of September 2001,
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as I was in Belfast and watched the unfolding atrocities in New York, Arlington and Stoney Creek,
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Pennsylvania, live on my television screen,
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I immediately sensed that something I recognised was underway but of an entirely different order of magnitude.
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We had known terrorism and political violence for over 30 years and experience told me that in addition to the
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individual casualties who had lost their lives and others who lives would be changed forever in the US attacks,
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there would be another unspoken victim the liberal commitment to a human rights based approach to communal problems.
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This attack on the United States of America on its home territory in such a devastatingly symbolic fashion,
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would almost certainly result in a fierce and violent response, as was intended by the terrorists who planned and executed the attack.
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That was its purpose.
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Although successive U.S. administrations had been involved in the Irish peace process and had been very considerable contributions to it,
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even as I watched the television screen and heard details of what was happening, my heart sunk.
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I had been in the Middle East enough to know that these attacks, which were so destructive of the lives and human rights of those in New York,
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at the Pentagon and elsewhere would almost certainly result in pressure for powerful punitive responses,
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which would test the limits of human rights elsewhere, and change the global dynamic from progress towards greater openness,
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freedom and human rights to an emphasis on security based on physical force.
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Confidence in the rule based system would likely begin to dissolve when in our province
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we were learning lessons about what worked and did not work in addressing terrorism.
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I could not help fearing that the counterproductive reactions I had seen as a teenager in Belfast.
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Would not be unleashed in a fierce reaction to the 911 attacks.
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Despite us having learned repeatedly at home that this was precisely the purpose and intention of the terrorists.
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Well, we did not have long to wait.
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The terrorists maintained that they were resorting to the use of terrorism as a tactic because they had learned from experience to have
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no faith in the instruments of international human rights law and politics to achieve the betterment of their people in their region.
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In turning to the the tactic of terrorism. They were breaching the criminal law,
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but they claimed they were doing so in the service of what they regarded as a higher law on behalf of their people,
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their values, their religion, culture and identity.
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As they struck back at the terrorist networks, the major global powers themselves increasingly disregarded the instruments,
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institutions and processes of the United Nations and human rights law.
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Military interventions were based on U.N. Security Council resolutions if they could be achieved.
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But not getting the UNESCO agreement was not regarded as an absolute prohibition.
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The justification for some of the military intervention soon came to be seen at home and abroad as dependent on untrustworthy information,
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even dishonesty. The use of extraordinary rendition and inhuman or degrading treatment were no longer seen as beyond the pale,
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even for some members of the Security Council when dealing with terrorism.
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And the term terrorism was increasingly used as a morally loaded descriptor,
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rather than the identification of a specific tactic of asymmetric warfare.
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The labelling of violent actions as terrorism became a justification in itself for almost any kind of aggressive military or other actions,
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even, and perhaps especially when they contravene human rights provisions.
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One of the singular strengths of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
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precisely that these rights are meant to apply to every single human being,
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wherever they are in the world, independent of domestic pressures or political systems within states.
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However, there is not only a legislature that sets down what is the law,
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but also a policing service that can move freely throughout the jurisdiction to investigate alleged breaches of the law.
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A justice system that makes judgements as to the guilt or innocence and handed down sentences
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as well as a penal system to administer the sanctions and say of those found guilty,
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not all of these key functions of a justice system apply fully in the case of international human rights law
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and increasing the number and complexity of human rights instruments without having effective implementation,
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begun to bring the system into disrepute and left some people feeling that in the absence of redress,
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they must eventually take matters into their own hands and respond with passionate and destructive.
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Bangor human rights enthusiasts have also felt that ensuring that a new right is adopted by the
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by international agreement is always a step towards its full recognition and implementation.
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However, it is here that the limits of human rationality and human rights become apparent,
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and the importance of human relationships and the psychology of large groups make their presence felt.
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If the statement of the human rights does not need within a reasonable time to its implementation,
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the whole notion of human rights begins to be undermined.
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The addition of too many rights introduced too quickly, sometimes in conflict with each other,
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can begin to produce a reaction against human rights as an approach.
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As a result, some people may turn to physical force again.
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Terrorism being one of the mechanisms to address the wrongs they feel human rights promised but failed to resolve.
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On the other hand, those opposed to the terrorists and the changes they want to see come to feel
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that so much focussed on the rights of terrorist suspects and communities
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from which they emerge becomes an obstacle to the recognition of the rights of the communities who are the victims of the terrorist campaigns.
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And they demand that their responsible governments take more and more strident
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action in what appears to be a fight for survival against an existential threat.
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In successfully frustrating the authority of the state and of the international institutions of cooperation,
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and by demonstrating the complexity of the implementation of the rights of every individual and community,
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terrorists have provoked increasing restrictions on rights and freedoms.
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They have dented the hopes for social, economic and social international order expressed in Article 20.
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It diminished the rights and freedoms, as well as the sense of respect and community set down in Article 20 and succeeded in diverting governments
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from their commitment to fully maintain undeveloped human rights and freedoms as set out onto the UN.
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Diar. It is of course crucial in such times that we maintain our commitment to human rationality and human rights.
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But we must also begin to understand that they do not in themselves represent the sufficient understanding of the human condition,
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how we function as individuals and groups, how we can evolve and progress to greater peace, stability and reconciliation in our world.
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We need to appreciate that emotions are not just feelings.
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They are part of the way our brains work.
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They are part of the way we think. Terrorism does not just frighten us.
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It affects the way our brains function. We know this from doing functional magnetic resonance imaging of people's brains.
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Different parts of the brain start to function with a different grammar and syntax, producing different sets of rules for thinking and action.
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We need to reflect the code during relatively peaceful, stable periods.
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Our understandings tend to proceed by incremental evolutionary development in times of crisis.
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Our whole way of thinking and being in the world is challenged, and it can become possible, sometimes even necessary,
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to take a leap into a whole new paradigm of understanding a frightening, challenging and dangerous time, but still one with opportunities.
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However, there are further quite fundamental problems about the rational, liberal, democratic, movement based order.
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It has been building for a long time that a stable, fair, merit guided system would lead to stability and equity.
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But this is not necessarily so.
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In fact, there are indications that stability benefits those who can best use stability to better themselves and their families.
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Statements about everyone being born equal, as we reflected in Article one earlier on, are simply statements of faith.
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And contrary to evidence, it's clear we're not all born equal.
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No matter what I would have done, how hard I would have worked,
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whatever time I had spent training, I was never, ever going to be even a decent footballer.
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I chose the wrong parents in the first place and everything thereafter was downhill.
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We're not equal. We're different. It's crucial that we are fair.
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Not to pretend we are all equal is a false prospectus.
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The stability that we all want and crave can simply mean that some individuals and families will accumulate wealth and power,
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and the divisions between the haves and have nots will increase because there is no resetting of the system.
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This is not a new issue. In the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations.
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There were mechanisms for resetting or interrupting stability without wars.
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The Jewish year of Jubilee where every 50 years so seven, seven times seven Hebrew slaves and prisoners were to be freed,
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debts forgiven, and the mercies of God should be particularly manifest.
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Did it always happen? No. But there was an understanding of a fundamental principle, and it wasn't just there.
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The idea has been around a long time in that part of the world.
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We have many episodes of general debt cancellations.
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Famously, of course, King Hammurabi in 1792 B.C. forgave all citizens debts owed to the government, high ranking officials and dignitaries.
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Despite the Millennium Year of Jubilee campaign in 2000, adopted by some 40 countries and the Catholic Church.
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I'm not particularly suggesting that we should institute. This is a habit. That's not my point.
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I'm simply trying to point out that this implicitly recognises from ancient times until now that the idea of a stable,
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liberal democratic system producing equality and and and equity in society is actually a flawed perspective.
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It's a wish fantasy. And our world is immensely more complex and our population enormous in comparison with the ancient Middle East.
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But the issue the issue is fully resolved. Let me pick up the issue about equality.
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As I say, our genetic endowment differs substantially from person to person, whether measured in terms of physical, intellectual or social ability.
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We're simply not the same, never mind equal.
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And the wish to explain our differences entirely on the basis of environmental or social influences is wishful thinking.
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There is no scientific basis for it at all. That's not to say those aren't important.
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They are, of course important, but they are not the only thing. There are certain things that we cannot change.
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So for those who wish to be fair, it may, for example,
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be necessary to provide much greater assistance to those who have disabilities
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or less abilities in order that they may have a fair chance in equality.
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And that sense disadvantages those who are already disadvantaged, too.
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Fairness is a completely different thing from equality.
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I've already mentioned that the other principle that doesn't test to stand the test of time is the notion that we are entirely rational beings.
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That's probably not in dispute. We all recognise that, although we are very rational, it's other people that are not so rational.
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But the non-rational are not has generally been regarded since the Enlightenment as a problem, a feeling of the human condition.
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One of the ways in which artificial intelligence is actually going to become a threat to us because machines are not troubled by feelings.
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It's assumed that this is a weakness.
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However, we need to consider whether the fact of human evolution and survival until now may not be despite the capacity to operate emotionally,
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but may be due to that fascinating capacity to operate in ways that are not merely rational.
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One of our colleagues here in Oxford is publishing a book with Harvard University Press in a few weeks time.
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Dominic Johnson, also colleague of Change War Program,
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where he is showing that some of those things that we think of as limitations, the non-rational things like overconfidence.
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Fundamental attribution error. In-Group outgroup may contribute to success as much as the failure.
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He examines, for example, in great detail how Washington had clearly absolutely no chance of winning.
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He kept losing. The odds against him were unbelievable, and yet he refused to recognise it.
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And in the end the result was, of course, what we know.
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But had he not been overconfident? Confident to a point of unreasonableness.
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People to pack up and go home.
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So this this question, when we are involved in political life, I mean, I often say you've got to be overconfident to be a politician.
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There's no point in standing up and saying like you would as an academic research.
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Well, you know, I've got some interesting ideas. It's about how we might govern the country.
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And, you know, I don't have the answers to everything, but I've got some pretty good methods.
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And if you'd like to entrust me with the opportunity, we will try it out a few times and you won't even get that far.
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You've got to say I knew the answer, and if you vote for me, I will deliver.
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The problem, of course, is that people vote for the fantasy, and when the fantasy isn't fulfilled, politics itself suffers.
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Nevertheless, there is this business of overconfidence, not always being a disadvantage and other non-rational elements as well.
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So what does this say to us?
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It says to us that, as was the case a century ago, our reactions to terrorism may even contribute to us slipping into a third global conflict.
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Arguably, we are already in one in cyber. If the things that are happening in cyberspace already over the last few years were happening on land,
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sea, air or in space, it would already be declared a global conflict.
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We are slipping into this. But there is the possibility also that some of the fundamental principles on which we've been operating for the last
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four or 500 years may now be about to be superseded by we don't quite know what not just a few different ideas,
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but a fundamentally different way of thinking.
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This is enormously challenging and for many people, profoundly frightening.
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But there is also the possibility that we may be standing on the threshold of a major step forward in the understanding of humanity,
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a paradigm shift that takes us beyond a quite legalistic, rationalistic,
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linear approach to human rights and into the complexity science of large group relationships.
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You have to work very creatively on taking such a next step because not only are rights and freedoms,
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but perhaps even our very survival as a species may depend upon it.
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But it does give us a chance of finding something marvellously new.
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Thank you.
