An Interview with Chris Langdon, Managing Director of the Oxford Research Group (ORG)

The "Sustainable Security" approach has been developed by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) as a more sophisticated way to view global security. What does this approach entail? How can it be made more attractive to policy makers?

We challenge the dominant approach to global security, which continues to assume that instability can be prevented and controlled through military force or containment. Instead, we make the case for an approach that we call “sustainable security,” which attempts to identify the underlying and interconnected sources of insecurity and then tries to resolve them. We emphasise, in other words, preventative rather than reactive strategies, human rights and human security, and the breaking away from policy approaches that foster militarised and short-term ‘solutions’. We also emphasise addressing long-term issues such as climate change, competition over scarce resources (such as energy, water and food), and the growing inequality and disengagement between transnational elites and the rest of the world.

We have found through our quiet, high-level discussions with policy makers that many of them are indeed sympathetic to the sustainable security approach. The current UK National Security Strategy and the British military’s Global Strategic Trends analysis, for example, recognise the centrality of these kinds of security threats. Acknowledging the reality of non-traditional threats, however, is not the same thing as changing your policies. And changing the latter isn’t just a matter of critiquing them. It’s also a matter of showcasing and documenting alternative policies that have really worked. In this respect, on-going global events are helping us to build a case for our sustainable security approach, especially in emerging democracies such as Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Mexico or Indonesia. These are all countries where in the coming years our sustainable security team, led by Richard Reeve, will be working with our partners to influence national and global policies.

ORG develops tools and standards for casualty documentation in its “external pageEvery Casualtycall_made” programme. Why is casualty recording so essential?

Keeping a detailed record of conflict casualties affords victims a basic, but essential, recognition of their common humanity and ensures their lives will not be forgotten. By providing an official acknowledgement of death, such a record also permits the victims’ families to know the fate of their loved ones, as well as seek redress and assistance.

Accurate records of casualties also support post-conflict accountability processes by providing essential evidence of human rights violations for the prosecution of war crimes, the staging of national-level tribunals, and the effective conduct of truth commissions.

Finally, casualty recording provides vital information for humanitarian response planning, compensation processes, and the better protection of civilians in conflict, as highlighted in our most recent report, external pageThe UN and Casualty Recording: Good Practice and the Need for Actioncall_made, by Elizabeth Minor and Jacob Beswick,which we published on 16 April 2014.

You just mentioned the latest ORG report which investigates United Nations causality recording practices. What is the current state of this type of documentation within the UN system and how can it be improved?

We found that casualty recording is not generally done by the UN and the data that is available isn’t shared systematically among its agencies and offices. This is despite the fact that the staff we surveyed think it’s extremely useful in their human rights, humanitarian, and development work, and for victim assistance and advocacy efforts.

However, there are some happy exceptions to this paucity of data, particularly in the field work done by the Human Rights Unit of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which we looked at in detail for our report. Despite some shortcomings, UNAMA has not only done an effective job in documenting civilian deaths and injuries, it has used the data to encourage warring parties to change their behaviour, and thereby cause fewer casualties.

The bottom line here is that when the UN actually records the civilian casualties of conflict and then takes strategic action on this information it can help save lives. Because of this truth, we recommend that 1) the UN engage in civilian casualty recording as a consistent practice, 2) that it establishes common reporting standards across its agencies and offices, and 3) that it develops the systems and tools needed to make the system work. In performing this task, by the way, the UN wouldn’t replace or take on the role of the state – the latter should remain ultimately responsible for ensuring that the casualties of armed conflict are properly recorded and acknowledged.

The ORG project “external pagePalestinian Citizens of Israelcall_made” aims at involving Palestinians living in Israel into the country’s national dialogue. How and to what extent might this project give fresh impetus to peace negotiations?

The roles and rights of Palestinians living in Israel have long been a contentious political issue. They make up 20% of the country’s population and could play a major role in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. However, they have been a missing ingredient in all peace negotiations to date. With the failure of the US-led process we argue for a new approach that also includes the so-called ‘forgotten Palestinians’.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's insistence on Israel being recognized as a Jewish state, the drafting of a new controversial Basic Law based on this demand, and the Lieberman Plan to transfer Palestinan citizens of Israel to a new Palestinian state, have all inevitably drawn attention to Israel's Palestinian citizens and the 1948 roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These initiatives, however, have also had a paradoxical effect. They’ve undermined the idea that Palestinian citizens of Israel are strictly an “internal affairs” matter, and therefore should be excluded from discussions over the two-states-for-two-peoples formula, which is based on the ‘logic of partition’. This formula, of course, does raise serious questions about the status of Palestinians in the state of Israel.

Given this context, the overall aim of our project, which is led by Dr Refqa Abu Remaileh and Marzuq Halabi, is to seek options for sustainable and equitable Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian partnerships, and to look at the possibilities of living together as respectfully as possible and desirable.

We have been facilitating, since 2012, an all-inclusive, creative, dynamic, and self-driven group of Palestinians in Israel who have drawn on and developed ORG's strategic thinking methods. The group brings together all the constituencies around strategic thinking to develop a framework that allows them to map and analyse all available options – an effort not undertaken previously, for example, in the Future Visions documents published in 2006. Our aim is to build on this previous work.

The group aims to outline this year a new strategic vision for Palestinians in Israel. They will produce a first version with the working title “Palestinians in Israel – Where To?” In creating this document, the group's primary aim will be to communicate with their community, and then to engage with Jewish-Israeli society, the broader Palestinian community, the Arab world, and international actors. The document is thus a “living” one that will be constantly evolving, and we hope make an important contribution to national debates and future peace initiatives.

For additional information please see:
external pageORG News & Publicationscall_made
external pageORG Sustainable Security Programmecall_made
external pageORG Middle East Programmecall_made