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Imagining solutions: Responding to key challenges in our region
It is not easy to collectively examine the key challenges facing the Gulf States, the Indian Subcontinent, Central Asia, North and East Africa and the Levant. To find solutions to many of the grave problems facing the region is to realise that countries and peoples in the region both share problems and face unique challenges of their own. Problems arise when an attempt is made to bridge generalised socio-economic and cultural characteristics to socio-economic outcomes without taking into account all the intervening variables and situational contexts. And yet, an exploration of alternatives to years of under-development, bad governance and poverty requires that one is able to link the varied problems and find strands of commonality – strands that bind, define and highlight the socio-political realities that for too long have escaped the attention of the world.
The events of September 11th, 2001 overshadowed many changes that were already taking place in the polity and society of countries. That said, the re-alignment of world attention to countries in this region is a reversal of years of careless abandon. Since the American financed mujahideen contained and reversed what many feared was a Russian drive to the Persian Gulf in the 1980’s, countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan were cast adrift and forgotten, the pariahs of a post-Cold War order. Thrust deep in these countries are the festering ills of neglect and hopelessness– a region beset with Islamic fundamentalism, poor governance and inequitable distribution of wealth cannot be expected to be the harbinger of social development. And yet there is hope. America’s interest in the region has been rekindled and with it, the changing geo-politics have once again thrust countries in the region to the cynosure of world attention. It is thus a unique moment in history to examine challenges that face the region and examine how best countries in the region can meet them.
Globalisation and its discontents
From Sri Lanka to Syria, globalisation is a reality. One cannot escape it, or pretend it did not exist. Definitions of the term, however, are problematic. Globalisation as a single system (a global civil society, connected through capital and commodity markets, inter-connected through information flows) or globalisation as a ‘global age’ that we have already entered do not capture the essence of the idea or the concept of the word.
What we are witnessing is the impact of globalisation on a series of existing interdependent global systems, such as the global market and global politics. The sum of these systems does not yet constitute a system itself. Instead, we should see globalisation as a process which transforms without eradicating the institutions and features of the political landscape in which it is at work. It does not entail the end of territorial geography or ethnicity, much less so religion: these still co-exist in complex inter-relationships. It may be changing the nature of social structures such as the state and the nation but neither the state nor the nation have been replaced. Indeed, it may be that for countries like India, globalisation and open markets have only served to heighten identity and ethnicity, and successfully export it abroad – ‘rice and curry’ modified to suit a Western palette, is now a staple of the United Kingdom.
Far more importantly, as countries in the region amply demonstrate, not everyone is living through the global age. The impact of globalisation has been unequal: greater in the North than the South; in the younger generation than the older; in the professional class than manual workers. At present the gap between the globalised and the un-globalised is the greatest of all cultural divisions. It is much profound than any ‘fault lines’ between civilisations for it cuts across age, class and gender. Neither side understands the other. To the globalised the other often seems marginal; to the marginal, the globalised appear uncaring and exploitative. This difference is likely to be a growing source of tension in the future, and could even account for societal discontent, political instability and rise of religious fundamentalism in the region.
Countries that are unable to participate in the expansion of world trade or attract significant amounts of foreign capital risk becoming marginalized from the global economy and falling farther and farther behind the rest of the world in terms of growth and human development. This marginalization, in turn, poses the very real threat of economic stagnation and increasing poverty – the underpinnings of discontent and seeds of terrorism.
The failure of governance, the accumulation of socio-economic problems and the invasion of the new values of globalisation have aggravated an identity crisis among the new generation in the region. Countries must address this crisis, and the demarche for more accountability, transparency, and the need for a more active civil society working to enlarge the public space and defend basic freedoms - for it is only through engagement, and not through resistance, that countries in the region will be able to address the challenges of globalisation.
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Sanjana
Sanjana Hattotuwa is a Rotary World Peace Scholar presently pursuing a Masters in International Studies from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The views expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at hatt@wow.lk.
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