Rory Stewart on ‘How can Britain best play a role in building global peace and stability?’

On 29 September 2016 I attended an event hosted by International Alert, Conciliation Resources and Saferworld. This featured Rory Stewart giving his maiden speech as Minister of State for DFID.

I hammered out notes on my phone and spruced them up into the following summary for my Overseas Development Institute colleagues. It seems there’s a wider interest in what was said, so here it is in full.

Only the parts in quotation marks should be seen as what was actually said…the rest is my own interpretation at the time.

The panellists were:

• Owen Barder: Development economist and Director for Europe at the Center for Global Development
• ‘Funmi Olonisakin: founding Director of the African Leadership Centre and Director of the Conflict, Security and Development Group at King’s College London
• Francisco Lara Jr: Philippines Country Manager, International Alert
• Danny Sriskandarajah: Civicus [Chair]

Notes from Rory’s speech

Introduction: Conflict since 1989

Conflict work around the world is ‘difficult to communicate, difficult to achieve’.

We are facing “a pretty puzzling era in terms of conflict”. On the one hand we are safer and more prosperous. Yet with Iraq, the Middle East and North Africa — we couldn’t have imagined all this. All conflict raises deep questions about what we can do.

Since 1989 we’ve been through a few processes. From 1991–2001 we had some initial despair and then optimism we could resolve major issues, such as in the Balkans. Then we had 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan. These took us to a place that looks like as non-intervention. I tended to believe that less is more when I was working in these contexts. Agreed with Obama, who always said “what then?” But recent history has shown that problems haven’t resolved themselves, we thought they might naturally stabilise. So now what for DFID?

1. Lesson in self knowledge

We need to taking on board the challenges we found in Iraq and Afghanistan. These challenges are three-fold:

• Isolation: we find it really hard to engage at the local level. But how can you make policy and solve conflicts if you do not?
• Abstraction: we develop different forms of jargon such as rule of law, governance and conflict resolution. We are often redescribing a problem rather than offering a solution. We “often describe what people do not have, rather than how we will do it”, we describe project management. This is all rather than understanding specific local contexts.
• Unscrupulous optimism: when we perceive what feels like an existential threat, it often means we don’t challenge ideas. Often the solutions we want are not possible. List of 10 things a country needs doesn’t help — it matters what is possible. We have to remind ourselves again and again that “ought implies can…you do not have an obligation to do what you cannot do.”

2. Humility

Self-knowledge needs to imply knowledge to limits of legitimacy and power. This “cannot be a doctrine of pessimism, but ‘we have to be combined to show we can make progress”. This should not lead us to think all we do will fail. The Balkans showed that’s not the case. But we need to know enough about ourselves. In terms of DFID there are three ways we can acknowledge this:

• Focus on granular local political context: there is a programme in Nepal where people are doing conflict resolution in the Terai. The team had spent 6 months mapping and spoke the local language — they knew what they were talking about — this is what we need.
• Acknowledge regional dimension: it’s not enough to see these conflicts as internally driven. Examples from the Balkans and Syria show us that’s not the case.
• Rediscover the multilateral: This is a really important moment to rediscover the multilateral, to re-energise the United Nations. Preeti Patel has pushed to us to be practical. This is expressed in different ways such as value for money and more. We need get away from abstracts and focus on the how — we need to focus on the granular.

Comments from the Panel

• ‘Funmi: Can we get away from liberal peace?
• Francisco: We need hybrid conflict resolution structures, we can’t just focus on the local. We also need to define what we mean by multilateralism.
• Owen: If we accept we need humility, self-knowledge, what about the list of things that we can affect? Listed 12 things that could be changed, including selling arms to repressive regimes, closing tax havens and more.
• Danny: development industrial complex going in the other direction to local context and granularity: there are many private companies and big contracts being handed out.

Rory’s response

There is a big question of audience. As DFID ministers, we are operating with tax money. This provides a double challenge. We have a sincere moral obligation to money we’re taking from taxpayers. We also have a significant communications issue. We have to tell the public what we’re doing with their money. If you get that wrong you imperil our license to operate.

We often get in trouble because we lose a sense of simplicity.

There is an important distinction between what I can do with my money, my charities money and a government department — the innovative edge of this will need be funded by a West Coast philanthropist. I expect we have to be more straight forward in terms of what has worked elsewhere.

The answer to Owen is that those things that seem easy are connected with big P politics. The same granularity in South Sudan has to apply to the UK. In essence we are in a world where people are having to run very different types of agendas. If Owen and I were to swap chairs he would find out quite quickly why he couldn’t do it.

I’m being abstract and hypothetical. This is due to media attention being driven by a form of criticism. If I were give you a hypothetical about Ruratania — a corrupt country where our programmes haven’t worked — I could get myself in trouble. A minister isn’t quite an analyst. It is the role of organisations such as the ones here today to hold us to account.

To end with crass line. Key is focus on local humility and self-knowledge. But this cannot be about pessimism. “If we can often do less than we pretend, we can do more than we fear”.

At this point Rory left, and questions were put to the panel.

Key points from discussion

• One audience member stated that Rory has just joined a government doing the opposite of what he says. He is at the wheel of a car that is up on bricks. So what can he do?
• My own point was that DFID’s approach to delivering ‘results’ does not get us to self-knowledge and humility. It gets us to burdensome bureaucracy and abstraction. It gets us to badging UK aid. The kind of local research mentioned is rarely valued. Learning is not valued. So how can we work towards this together in the current context?
• Owen agreed saying that if you promise little, if you’re more realistic, you won’t get money. You’re crowded out by the charlatans. Owen also name checked Doing Development Differently and the Smart Rules, suggesting there are some moves in the right direction.
• Danny suggested we need to reframe accountability. Others argued this is a time for imagination and where change might be possible. Perhaps we should be optimistic.