embassies are now usually the slowest way to get information, unable to compete with lightning-fast media reporting and exhaustive country analyses prepared by NGOs and risk consultancies.と辛辣に書いています。
The embassy, at least in its traditional form, is facing an existential crisis. The global transformations of the twenty-first century have dramatically changed the way nations practice diplomacy. The rise of digital communications, diminishing resources, and growing security threats all raise the question of whether the traditional embassy is still relevant.
More than half of the developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have reduced their diplomatic footprint over the last decade, according to our research at the Lowy Institute, where we have constructed the Global Diplomacy Index, which charts almost 6,000 diplomatic posts across nearly 660 cities around the world. As government budgets shrink, embassies and diplomats seem more like expensive luxuries than political assets. It doesn’t help, of course, that diplomats are stereotyped as overpaid and ineffectual cocktail-circuit regulars and that foreign ministries frequently fail to reflect the times. They generally lack diversity and are slow to embrace innovation, even social media. Australia’s diplomats in Indonesia, for example, were still not using social media in 2010, even though Indonesia is the site of one of its most significant embassies, the largest recipient of Australian aid, and one of its most important neighbors in Asia. Despite being described as a “digital dinosaur” in 2010, the secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs admitted in 2012 that he still did not consider digital diplomacy a high priority. And with the rising importance of economic diplomacy, governments are more inclined to open trade offices and innovation hubs than embassies. For example, our research indicates that between 2009 and 2015 the United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office shed almost 30 diplomatic missions, while its science and innovation network expanded its coverage from 24 to 28 countries.
Once the government’s eyes and ears abroad, embassies are now usually the slowest way to get information, unable to compete with lightning-fast media reporting and exhaustive country analyses prepared by NGOs and risk consultancies. The digitally connected world allows governments to communicate directly with their counterparts, and some world leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have become prodigious users of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, speaking to huge domestic and foreign audiences without even telling their embassies.
All of this doesn’t mean that embassies do not have a significant role to play in foreign relations. There are plenty of reasons why we still need these foreign outposts. They are their nations’ shop fronts: a physical interface between the home nation and the host country. Good diplomats forge relationships with governments that would otherwise be tough to reach; they navigate local power dynamics, gather and interpret information, help businesses steer through foreign legislation, and connect with local civil society.
JAKARTA, Indonesia—President Joko Widodo is trying to shake off early political setbacks and press ahead with his pledge to bring infrastructure and development to the farthest corners of his sprawling archipelago nation.
In particular, remote and impoverished Papua has caught Mr. Widodo’s attention.
For the second time since taking charge of Southeast Asia’s largest economy last year, Mr. Widodo this month visited the far eastern region, more than 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) from the capital, Jakarta, to suggest the restive area is turning a page on history, poverty and a tenuous connection to the rest of the country.
ILLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR John Anari is a West Papuan independence activist. Tom Bleming is a retired American gunrunner. Together, they want to win the South Pacific's next great freedom struggle. BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK
Words checked = [5529] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [79%]
In the summer of 2009, John Anari, a young political activist from the Indonesian region of West Papua, created a Facebook page. He did it using an old desktop computer with a dial-up Internet connection, in a one-room apartment in Manokwari, the provincial capital situated on West Papua’s northeastern coast. The page wasn’t a personal profile. Anari, who prides himself on being tech savvy, had created one of those the year before. The page was the first of what would become several online outposts for the West Papua Liberation Organization (WPLO), a group that Anari had founded to agitate for his homeland’s independence.
“Most freedom groups in Papua cannot access the Internet or don’t know how to use it,” Anari, now 35, said recently. “I wanted to show the world Indonesia’s crimes.”
On the WPLO page, Anari posted unclassified diplomatic cables related to West Papua’s colonial past, updates from exiled independence activists, and videos of defiant rebel leaders training for armed struggle in remote highland camps. He also shared gruesome photos of West Papuans who reportedly had been beaten, shot, or tortured by the Indonesian security forces that have controlled the western half of New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island, since 1962. Because foreign journalists and NGOs are rarely granted entry to West Papua and are closely monitored when they are, the page opened a rare, real-time window into one of the bloodiest and best-kept secrets of the South Pacific.
武力を使っても独立を勝ち取ろうとするグループと住民投票で実現しようとするグループがあるようです。Economistの動画に登場していたBenny Wendaさんは穏健派のようです。 Benny Wenda, a prominent, Oxford-based West Papuan exile, similarly downplayed Anari’s talk of a military solution. Wenda’s Free West Papua Campaign advocates an independence referendum to end the crisis in his homeland. He is also the spokesman of the recently formed United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a coordinating body for several of the larger pro-independence groups. Anari’s organization is not one of them. “The WPLO is just an affiliation group, a small group,” Wenda told me. He noted, “All leaders [of independence factions] have a full mandate to advance the freedom cause. We are very weak at the moment, and it is important that we speak in one voice to demand the right of self-determination, the same as any nation.” In a separate conversation, though, Wenda seemed to reserve the final voice of authority for himself. “If Anari tells you anything,” he said, “call me and I will clarify.”
Will Malala's Nobel Prize Backfire? BY ELIAS GROLL OCTOBER 10, 2014 - 03:28 PM For Satyarthi, the award brings recognition to decades of work on behalf of child laborers, but for Yousafzai, the prize arguably comes with risks. As my former colleague Josh Keating writes at Slate, the media's treatment of Yousafzai often obscures the West's complicated relationship with Pakistan, one marked in recent years by an aggressive campaign of U.S. drone strikes and huge amounts of U.S. aid. That coverage often strays toward a condescension that reduces the West's relationship with Pakistan to, in the words of technology researcher Zeynep Tufekci, to "finding a young woman we admire that we all want to take home as if to put on a shelf to adore."
That attitude -- summed up by Jon Stewart's quip that he wanted to adopt the young woman -- risks obscuring the more institutional, boring work to find peace in Pakistan.
Moreover, in some quarters of Pakistan, Yousafzai has become a symbol of Western interference in the country, and conspiracy theories abound that her story was in fact created by the CIA, which carries out ongoing drone strikes in the northwestern parts of the country. That's of course far-fetched, but the praise that she has received in the West has been equally matched in her home country. The Peace Prize will certainly elevate her stature -- and also increase animus against her in some parts of Pakistan.
今回のタイトルはマララさん親子が西洋的価値観を代弁していることを"they are dancing on the tunes of West."と表現している人からとりました。
That strain of thought remained alive and well on Friday. "I condemn this decision in the strongest possible words," Tariq Khattak, an editor at the Pakistan Observer, told the BBC. "It's a political decision, a motivated one, and a conspiracy to invoke [sic] people in the Muslim countries. And the father of Malala and Malala have done nothing at all. Her father is a good salesman, that's it. And the daughter has also become a salesgirl. And they are dancing on the tunes of West."
この記事の終わりには、マララさんの反対派は態度を硬化させるだけではないかと指摘しています。
If anything, those in Pakistan who are hostile toward Yousafzai may only harden in their opposition now that she has received the Peace Prize. That may set her work back more than it advances her cause.
There is something irritatingly smug and condescending about some of the coverage of “the bravest girl in the world.” It was a particular low point when, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said “I want to adopt you” to a young woman who’s spoken very publicly about the support she’s received from her father—a pretty brave guy in his own right.
But that’s our problem, not hers. My guess is that someone’s who’s comfortable telling the president of the United States to his face that his military policies are fueling terrorism isn’t going to let herself be reduced to a cuddly caricature. And in any case, it was probably wise for the Nobel committee to pair the very young global celebrity with a relatively unheralded activist with years of work behind him.
去年の受賞の際に話題になったエントリーが以下のようです。“What the world is desperately lacking, and the Nobel Committee, for once, rewarded, is the kind of boring, institutional work of peace that advances the lives of people. Everyday. Little by little.”という指摘は肝に銘じたいですよね。
Yes, I am amazed by Malala. How can one not be? Her courageous young body, shattered by Taliban bullets, her strong, kind stance in that Jon Stewart interview everyone on my Facebook timeline shared.. It is hard not to be moved by her.
But she is but one courageous person. Fortunately for the world, there is no shortage of such brave, courageous individuals. In fact, there is an abundance of them, especially in poor, authoritarian countries. If you think Malala is rare, that is probably because you have not spent much time in such countries. Most Malala’s, however, go nameless, and are not made into Western celebrities. (That interview’s most telling moment was when Jon Stewart said “I want to adopt you” to her right after she repeatedly mentioned how great her own father was–such a striking sentiment in which our multi-decade involvement in Pakistan is reduced to finding a young woman we admire that we all want to take home as if to put on a shelf to adore).
What the world is desperately lacking, and the Nobel Committee, for once, rewarded, is the kind of boring, institutional work of peace that advances the lives of people. Everyday. Little by little. But without which lives are shattered and countries crumble (as they do now),
What the world needs more of is many, many more institutions like the “Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons” which are crucial to destroying weapons that destroy lives millions of Malalas. We need organizations and institutions that uphold ceasefires, that observe elections, that document human right abuses, that provide the infrastructure for education, for health, that destroy weapons (conventional and unconventional) and that can act as the institutional capacity of much that is good in international human rights law (which we also need to improve and hold up).
我々がスッキリするだけのfeel good charityになることだけは避けたいものです。やはり日々の積み重ねこそが大事なのですから、この方の指摘はごもっともだと思います。
（Urban Dictionary） feel good charity When you do something for charity more to make yourself feel good than to actually change anything. Someone giving a homeless person a free meal for xmas, and then doing nothing the rest of the following months, is feel good charity. It benefits in the very short term, and mostly does nothing, or even make things worse in the long term. by skayjay January 17, 2012
ちょっとパキンスタンの例でないですが、Foreign Policyの記事でナイジェリア出身の作家Teju Coleのインタビューを思い出しました。Bring Back Our Girlsという動きがアメリカで話題になりましたが、Boko Haramが悪で、政府が善という態度になってしまう危険性を指摘しています。
Epiphanies From Teju Cole The Nigerian-American novelist discusses the pitfalls of hashtag activism, the destructiveness of U.S. foreign policy, and that time he dreamed about meeting Obama at a Brooklyn house party. BY SEYWARD DARBY SEPTEMBER 4, 2014
"Bring Back Our Girls" became a thing that united Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, a bunch of young Nigerian kids, a bunch of American kids, people in Britain, people in India, the Nigerian police, the Nigerian government, and everybody in the world. They were all on one side, and Boko Haram was on the other side. A neat binary. But unfortunately, the world is actually not divided that way. The Nigerian Army is brutal and commits a lot of human rights violations, including mass killings. The Nigerian government is highly incompetent, better known for corruption than for actually serving its people. America has its own foreign policy agendas, which are both good and bad.
