As the ecosystems on which we all depend are being made more vulnerable by climate change and resource conflicts, the need for co-operation is more vital than ever.
Yet, at the same moment, the international system is becoming less effective -- or to be more accurate -- even more ineffectual, than ever, at meeting the needs of a world of eight billion people hoping for peace and prosperity.
Might is right keeps getting away with it untrammelled, without even lip service being paid to respecting international law.
Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza presently may garner the most global headlines, not only for their death tolls but because Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu have cynical domestic motives for prolonging deadly conflicts.
However, it must not be forgotten that thousands of people have also died in the last year amid the assorted conflicts afflicting the Sahel, Sudan, and Myanmar.
In a report on Sudan, Amnesty International has criticized the UN Security Council for failing to implement ‘the existing arms embargo on Darfur and not heeding calls to extend it to all of Sudan.’
One of the states it identified as violating obligations under the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty was the United Arab Emirates for helping to provide sophisticated weaponry, including drones, to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia widely accused of multiple war crimes in Sudan.
Even though the numbers are far smaller, with around a dozen people killed in the UAE as part of the fallout from the first month of the US-Iran conflict, there is a grim irony in the UAE being hit by drones.
It was in search of much needed hope then, that I attended this year’s Palliser Lecture at the Aga Khan Foundation behind London’s Kings Cross station. His Excellency Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, the current Brazilian Ambassador to the UK, delivered a talk called “A Multipolar Solution to a Fractured World Order - A View from a Rising Power.”
An experienced diplomat who has held the highest positions in Brazil’s diplomatic service, Patriota has also served as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 2011–2013.
Not surprisingly perhaps, his lecture brought together diplomatic erudition with the policies of Lula’s left-wing government and his own personal political ideals, passionately expressing the urgent need to revive international collaboration based on the rule of law in the context of an increasingly multipolar world.
Reflecting long standing views which he compiled in his book published last year, A Humanist Foreign Policy for a Multipolar World, he starts from a position of principled non-alignment with little appetite for hegemony, saying: “We have no nostalgia for unipolarity or for bipolarity -- and most of the Global South doesn't in that regard.”
The ambassador’s speech seems more relevant to Bangladesh than some recent foreign policy speeches made by Western leaders expressing concerns about multiple aspects of President Trump’s foreign policy.
Patriota explicitly states the need to seek a contemporary universal dimension to the humanist foreign policy he promotes and highlights the need to draw “inspiration from all cultural and spiritual traditions - in particular non-Western ones - in line with a transition to multipolarity.”
In the context of Brazilian politics, it is easy to see how this idealistic vision might still be bitterly contested. As we all know in a polarized world of culture wars and political divisions, it doesn’t take much to arouse opposition and hostility.
In 2022, Lula won his third term as Brazil’s President on 51% of the final round vote compared to the 49% secured by the then incumbent -- and since imprisoned for organizing a coup -- President Jair Bolsonaro.
This October, Bolsonaro’s son will be running against Lula da Silva, on the same platform of ideological alignment with the Trump administration practised by his father.
The latter’s Trumpian policies opened the way for Brazil to import more wheat and oil from the US. They also loosened protections for the Amazon, a move which adversely affected ratification of other international agreements.
Brazil’s elections this year, and the foreign policy that follows, may be as closely watched then as the election which recently unseated Victor Orban in Hungary.
As a country without Brazil’s continent straddling size or natural resources, Bangladesh could benefit even more from a better and fairer functioning global system.
Yet, despite having a similar end goal of friendship to all, it puts in far less resources -- 80 embassies, consulates and missions compared to Brazil’s 205 (or for that matter Turkey’s 250) -- to developing a pro-active rather than reactive foreign policy.
This needs to change. Humanity needs all the voices it can get.
In his speech calling for a humanist foreign policy, the ambassador highlighted a remark made during the coronavirus pandemic by French philosopher Edgar Morin, a man born in 1921, that “awareness of our common destiny on Earth should be the defining event of our century.”
That would be a good place to start.
Niaz Alam is London Bureau Chief, Dhaka Tribune.
