James Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Executive, Aegis Trust, on the power of a coordinated global system of universal obligations that create inclusion and reverse vulnerability.
"How do you eat a marshmallow the size of an elephant? One bite at a time.
That is how we have to approach preventing genocide. We can’t expect to do it next year, in five years, in ten years--it’s a multi-generational project--and it needs thousands of people from world leaders down to the grassroots level to understand their role in it.
Whether it’s educating, raising awareness, developing government policy, working with grassroots, dealing with economic issues, dealing with environmental issues of that population. All of these need to be coordinated and brought together.
The people who are at risk of genocide are those people that fall outside the universal obligation, that universal, moral obligation. In other words, they are marginalized, they’re excluded from a community, from a society--their neighbors don’t feel obligated to them, the police don’t feel obligated to them, their governments don’t feel obligated to them, the international community doesn’t feel obligated to them--and so they’re vulnerable.
If somebody decides to remove them, destroy them, then they have no chance of survival. Therefore, to reverse this vulnerability, what we have to do is bring people back to this universal obligation. How do you do that?
It’s just simply people seeing whether they’re in our community--people on our street, people across in another country, people who are in faraway lands--that they have the right to live. Everybody has the right of not only survival, but the right of life.
If we can just change that one aspect of human nature--that we don’t just turn a blind eye, that we can find ways to bring them in, connect to them. Whether it’s connecting people through communications, whether it’s connecting them through businesses. Whatever it might be, we need to find, always find a way. How do the most vulnerable people on earth... how do we connect them?
To bring genocide to an end we all have to play a role. It’s a responsibility of individuals. The weakness of one other pledge their responsibility to protect against genocide, is that it’s about the collective responsibility. But when we talk about collective responsibility, what that gets translated to is a diffused responsibility. If it’s collectively all of our responsibility, then it becomes nobody’s responsibility.
So to bring genocide to an end, we, we all--individuals, politicians, people on the street--we all have to see that it is our problem. It’s not somebody else’s problem. Once we begin to see it as all of our problems then we can all take our own individual responsibility to create a world without genocide."
Retweet