Thought-provoking stories at the intersection of faith and critical global challenges, found in our bimonthly Global Briefings. 

 

“The Swimmers”: A movie of Syrian sisters and resilience

The earthquake in Syria is a devastation on top of the devastation of March marking 12 years of the Syrian war, which has killed 600,000 people and left 13 million Syrians displaced, half of whom were forced to flee the country. The 2022 movie “The Swimmers” (available on Netflix and nominated for Outstanding British Film by the BAFTAs) puts human faces on this in the inspiring (and true) story of teenage sisters Yusra and Sarah Mardini who fled the war and, while crossing the ocean to Europe, swam alongside a sinking boat of refugees to lighten it and help 18 refugees to safety in Greece. Yusra would go on to swim at the 2016 Olympics on the Refugee Olympic Team. “The Swimmers” will move your heart and mind with both the complexities of the refugee crisis and the resilience of Syrian people in the face of unimaginable suffering.

 

 

(Recommended reading from our March 2023 Global Briefing)

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North Korea: The power of conciliatory action

This July will mark 70 years since the armistice that ended the Korean War but has left the Korean people deeply divided and isolated between North Korea and South Korea to this day. How might a breakthrough happen? In a Foreign Affairs article, “Don’t Isolate North Korea: Why Another Pressure Campaign Would Be a Mistake,” Frank Aum of the U.S. Institute for Peace (formerly with the U.S. Department of Defense) argues that in 2023, “The United State has an opportunity to offer something that is both truly audacious and in its own interests: a push for peace.” Aum contends that the “pressure-based, coercive approach” has failed to stop North Korean nuclear weapons development, improve diplomatic relations and enhance mutual understanding, and “does not engender positive behavior.” In contrast, he writes that “unilateral conciliatory gestures can help dissolve mistrust and spur rapprochement, especially when offered first by the stronger country.” Aums calls for diplomatic risks, an end-of-war declaration and points to precedents for unilateral U.S. gestures leading to détente. From the view of MCC’s front-row seat the United Nations, no country or UN body is taking the lead in offering such a “positive peace” approach. After 70 years of a divided Korean people, it is time for that to change.

 

(Recommended reading from our March 2023 Global Briefing)

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Ukraine focus can overshadow Myanmar

While the Russian military invasion of Ukraine remains of great concern, hidden from headline news is ongoing pain from the unending 11-year war in Syria to deaths and arrests in Myanmar. Myanmar democracy activist Nilar Thein writes in a moving article in the New York Times that her “worst fears” are coming true in her country. Thein and her husband met in prison, and knowing the consequences of their activist commitments, she says she apologized to her daughter when she was born. In 2021 her husband was executed by the military junta which seized power. And now Thein is on the run, separated from her daughter. In “Myanmar’s Christians Fight for Peace,” Christianity Today tells the story of outspoken actress Angel Lamung, and reports that Christians in Myanmar have been outspoken against the junta takeover. Drawing on the biblical stories of Exodus and Daniel’s captivity, churches raise money and support civil disobedience, and “never before [have] Buddhists, Catholics, and Protestants [been] so publicly involved at once, bringing faith and prayer into their protest.” Yet Christians struggle with helplessness and to find hope, and to reconcile the way of Jesus with effectively opposing military power. “You can still love your enemies by protesting, resisting, and even fighting,” says peacemaking leader Mana Tun. “Love is always standing up for good.”

 

(Recommended reading from our March 2023 Global Briefing)

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Fresh Asian voices

In his short book The Burnout Society, Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that the “signature affliction” of our global age is depression and exhaustion, captive to the illusion that “the more active one becomes, the freer one is.” Read an interview with Han here, including what the drama series “Squid Games” reveals about society and how smartphones have become like rosaries. Asian Christian Ethics: Evangelical Perspectives (co-edited by Bernard Wong of Hong Kong, a leader in the Northeast Asia Reconciliation Initiative, an MCC partner) features chapters from 15 scholars across Asia on themes including Asian creation care ethics, the church and political engagement, wealth and poverty, and “How Should Asian Christians Behave That Just Peace May Prevail?” by Mennonite theologian Paulus Widjaja of Indonesia (the publisher, Langham, is a prodigious promoter of books from the Majority World church). For lovers of mystery and crime novels, Qiu Xialong’s Inspector Chen novels follow a poem-quoting and truth-seeking Shanghai police detective as he navigates both murder and Communist Party politics. It’s both riveting reading and a penetrating peek inside today’s China.

Evangelical Perspectives' co-edited by Bernard Wong

Book cover for 'Asian Christian Ethics: Evangelical Perspectives' co-edited by Bernard Wong

(Langham Publishing)

 

(Recommended reading from our December 2022 Global Briefing)

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World Cup: the good, the bad, the ugly

Held every four years, the World Cup is watched by half of the world’s people, the vast majority calling the sport football (see this humorous commercial “Is it Called Soccer or Football?” featuring British “soccer” great David Beckham and American “football” great Peyton Manning). The World Cup is the United Nations of football, a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly – and all were on view in Qatar this month. Regarding the World Cup’s governing body, the 2022 four-part Netflix documentary “FIFA Uncovered” tells an astonishing story of widespread corruption, bribery, and unchecked power and greed – including how Qatar was awarded the tournament, and issues of human rights and mistreatment of migrant workers in the country. Still, for most of the world it remains “the beautiful game,” played in every corner of the planet and epitomized by the majestic skill of Argentina’s diminutive Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest player in history. Read how he spends most of every game walking, and yet “only Messi has figured out how to win matches by moving less than everyone else… For Messi never really walks, he prowls.”

 

(Recommended reading from our December 2022 Global Briefing)

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How do we make peace beautiful?

See When Spring Comes to the DMZ, an illustrated book inviting young readers into the natural beauty of the Demilitarized Zone which Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and Republic of Korea (South Korea) – a 2.5-mile-wide, 150-mile-long corridor where animals thrive but no human may tread. Of the lively paintings and story by creator Uk-Bae Lee, Plough Publishing writes, “Lee shows the DMZ through the eyes of a grandfather who returns each year to look out over his beloved former lands, waiting for the day when he can return. In a surprise foldout panorama at the end of the book the grandfather, tired of waiting, dreams of taking his grandson by the hand, flinging back the locked gates, and walking again on the land he loves to find his long-lost friends.” (See this starred review and video).

Cover of book 'When Spring Comes to the DMZ' by Uk-Bae Lee

Cover of book 'When Spring Comes to the DMZ' by Uk-Bae Lee

(Uk-Bae Lee, Plough.com)

 

(Recommended reading from our August 2022 Global Briefing)

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Sculpture honoring the memory of former MCC worker Michael J. Sharp and his UN colleague Zaida Catalán

On August 3, a sculpture honoring the memory of former MCC worker Michael J. Sharp and his UN colleague Zaida Catalán was dedicated in a ceremony at the United Nations in New York City. Titled “Abused Ammunition,” the sculpture was commissioned by Sweden and the United States. Speakers included UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the Swedish Foreign Minister. The 13-minute video of the ceremony includes a moving statement by the artist. The sculpture is part of the permanent disarmament exhibit at United Nations Headquarters in New York, and will be seen during all UN visitor tours.

(Recommended reading from our August 2022 Global Briefing)

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Ukraine and nonviolence

Six points of view. First, MCC Canada Executive Director Rick Cober Bauman responds to a question many have asked him: Does MCC’s voice of non-violent, non-military responses to violence have credibility in the face of Russian military aggression? Second, Anabaptist World editor Paul Schrag writes that Mennonite Brethren pastor Maxym Oliferovski wouldn’t condemn fellow Ukrainians who take up arms in the fight. “For his people,” writes Schrag, “the hard questions about pacifism — ‘what would you do if . . .?’ — are not hypothetical now.” Shrag notes that in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, Mennonite men organized armed selbstschutz (self-defense) units to defend their villages. Third, in an open letter to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, the president of the Mennonite World Conference wrote that “When Peter pulled out a sword, Jesus told him to put it away.” Fourth, Marie Dennis of Pax Christi International and the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative argues that Ukraine shows we must reject the possibility that any war can be just. Fifth, in Parsing Pacifism: Ukraine’s Mennonite Heritage Shapes Evangelical Responses to Russia, Christianity Today magazine reports on Anabaptists wrestling with the challenge of trauma and forgiveness, and differing views on nonviolence between older and younger generations. “Most people in our churches will not pick up a gun, but we will not condemn a soldier,” says one pastor from the Association of Mennonite Brethren Churches of Ukraine. Finally, justice and peace scholar Eli McCarthy at Georgetown University offers five ways to support non-violent resistance in Ukraine, including not dehumanizing adversaries even when they commit great wrongs.

(Recommended reading from our April 2022 Global Briefing)

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Ukraine and the shadow of Syria

Casting a grim shadow over Ukraine is a playbook used by Vladimir Putin in Syria: targeted killing of civilians, mass destruction of cities, igniting a refugee crisis, appearing at the peace table as a stalling tactic. Unlike Ukraine, the world’s voice was largely silent in responding to Syria’s devastation, where half the population of 25 million has been displaced, Russia allegedly supported chemical weapon attacks and the war is in its twelfth year. “The Russians are willing to devour the green and the dry,” a Syrian activist told the New York Times, using an Arabic idiom meaning to destroy everything. “They don’t care about the international community or anything else. We saw that in Syria. Burning schools is not new to us. It’s land they want to take, and they will take it.”

(Recommended reading from our April 2022 Global Briefing)

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Sanctions: Non-violent tool or lethal weapon?

Unprecedented sanctions have been taken against Russia — what stance should the church take? Can sanctions be non-violent? Three pioneers of nonviolence used boycotts and sanctions as critical tactics of resistance. Mahatma Gandhi organized mass boycotts of British goods and institutions in seeking independence for India. Archbishop Desmond Tutu supported harsh sanctions against the South Africa apartheid regime, and some believe they played a critical role in bringing change. Led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, played a pivotal role in the U.S. civil rights movement. Yet in the more recent case of Syria, according to analysis by MCC and UN experts, U.S. and European Union sanctions have had widespread, devastating effects on vulnerable people. Asking whether sanctions are a non-violent tool or a lethal weapon, the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns offers an excellent two-page reflection including moral guidelines and the varying effects of sanctions in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and South Africa.

(Recommended reading from our April 2022 Global Briefing)

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Ukraine and the call for UN reform

In a live-streamed April 5 message, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for the UN to close down if it cannot act against Russia’s invasion against Ukraine. “Do you think that the time of international law is gone?” he said. “If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately.” Two hundred former senior UN officials wrote an open letter to UN Secretary General António Guterres, warning that the UN risks irrelevance if he doesn’t do far more to mediate a peace. Pope Francis has added his voice of UN criticism as well. CNN’s Ashely Semler offers concise analysis of why the UN is paralyzed, and two former UN officials from Turkey and Colombia offer a compelling proposal to make the UN more effective by reforming the veto power which Russia used to block action. "This is the single biggest crisis to hit the UN since the end of the Cold War," says Richard Gowan, the UN director for the International Crisis Group. "It is possible that this does mark the beginning of a sort of fundamental rupture amongst the great powers that will make UN diplomacy see vastly harder days going forward."

 

(Recommended reading from our April 2022 Global Briefing)

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Russian priests who speak boldly against the war

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church is widely seen as a Putin ally and having endorsed the war and laid the spiritual groundwork to justify it, and the New York Times tells how Orthodox Christians are dividing in Russia and across the world. But around 300 Russian Orthodox priests signed a letter opposing the “fratricidal war” and warning God’s judgment awaits those “who give murderous orders.” One Russian priest signatory, Father Ioann Burdin, was arrested and prosecuted for preaching an anti-war sermon. “I don’t consider it possible to remain silent on this situation,” he said. “It wasn’t about politics. It was about the Bible.… If I remain silent, I’m not a priest.” In the statement, BBC’s Russian service reports that the priests say that “We, Christians, cannot stand idly by when a brother kills brother, a Christian kills a Christian. Let’s not repeat the crimes of those who hailed Hitler’s deeds on Sept. 1, 1939.” – a reference to the German invasion of Poland after a speech by the Nazi leader.

Woman receives needed supplies from UMAN

A woman receives needed supplies on March 15 when MCC partner Charitable Foundation Uman Help Center (UMAN) distributed MCC relief buckets, hygiene kits and blankets in Uman city, at a Baptist church, along with other humanitarian supplies.

(MCC Photo, Photo courtesy of UMAN)

 

(Recommended reading from our April 2022 Global Briefing)

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Remembering Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1986, who passed away on December 26 at age 90

While known for his ebullient smile and spirit, this BBC story tells how Tutu was despised by both white supporters of the apartheid system and later by post-apartheid ANC government leaders who Tutu scolded for their decline into corruption. Rev. Michael Battle, author of a spiritual biography of Tutu, writes that “What grounded him, enabling him to bear up under these maelstroms, was God. What made Tutu holy was God.” Dr. Peter Storey, a Tutu colleague as the white leader of South Africa's Council of Churches, tells the BBC, "Tutu wasn't a front for political movements. I think that's what gave him his moral and spiritual freedom… Desmond could point out to them - if you claim to be Christian, how can you possibly treat my people like this?" Storey says Tutu “had the ability to channel people's anger, and then the ability to say 'we are better than those people who are up against us, we don't have to be like them.’” This BBC photo and video essay capture Tutu’s powerful spirit and voice, from clips of preaching against apartheid, to dancing with joy, to crying with victims testifying during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was a rare witness who embodied Psalm 85:10: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”

(Recommended reading from our February 2022 Global Briefing)

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Hope for swaying people doubtful about climate change

Canadian climate scientist and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe says in a New Yorker magazine profile that, “We often assume that the tribes that form around climate change can be sorted into two categories: them and us.” But she says studies show that only eight per cent of Americans are “dismissive” of climate change, and that many more who are considered “doubtful” can be swayed. “It’s not about the loudest voices. It’s about everyone else who doesn’t understand why climate change matters or what they can do about it.” Her new book Saving Us offers effective strategies for communicating about climate change across the political divide. Telling stories of impact on real people can be persuasive, such as the rural Kenya community in this moving PBS Newshour video who face the worst drought in decades, with their livestock dying and children without sufficient milk, and farmers carrying automatic weapons to guard against invading pastoralists from Uganda fighting for scarce water.

(Recommended reading from our February 2022 Global Briefing)

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Stories of public courage

“I am just an ordinary person whose voice could not be heard” says Rev. Evan Mawarire, pastor of a small church in Zimbabwe. His 2016 “enough is enough” video went viral and started #ThisFlag Citizen's Movement to challenge corruption, injustice, and poverty in his country – leading him to be harassed and arrested. Watch Rev. Mawarire’s story in the CNN opinion series Voices of Freedom, brief videos and testimonies of public courage including a Guatemala judge who refused a bribe, a U.S. whistleblower, and a Hong Kong student-activist elected at age 23 to the legislature and unjustly removed from office. “The reason I am a proud citizen of a nation,” says Rev. Mawarire, “is because I am a contributor to the building of that nation. And contributing is not just working a job and contributing to the economy… it’s contributing to ideas… How I would like my society to be run … the kind of laws I want to be a part of, the kind of leaders. It’s about the participation of everyone and the respect for that participation.”

(Recommended reading from our December 2021 Global Briefing)

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Coffee for peace

For a story of hope, this video tells how coffee is creating power for peace in the Philippines. Lessons from this effort were shared in the September 31 MCC UN global student seminar by Coffee for Peace Senior Vice President Tala Bautista (a member of the Sumacher First Nation in Kaliga, Philippines, with a masters from Eastern Mennonite University). Other specialists in the seminar said climate change is an increasing driver of conflict as people lose valuable land and water. A diplomat from Niger noted that the United Nations Security Council (of which Niger is a member) is putting new attention on the relationship between climate and peacebuilding. For a deeper read, see Making Peace With the Climate, a November 2020 paper from the European Institute for Peace (seminar speaker Oli Brown was a contributor)

(Recommended reading from our December 2021 Global Briefing)

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Burned-out millennials from U.S. to China

As the U.S. and China amp up global competition, millennials in both countries and beyond may be growing weary of the endless race for achievement. A New Yorker article on burnout as the new condition quotes the 2020 book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation that, “increasingly among [U.S.] millennials... burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.” In China, a 2020 video went viral of a university student riding his bike at night while working on a laptop perched on the handlebars. Public reaction described a new condition and one of the most commonly used Chinese words of 2020 – involution (see “China’s ‘Involuted’ Generation”) – described by one Chinese anthropologist as “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless” and becomes an “endless cycle of self-flagellation.” Despite prosperity in nearby South Korea, young people there are known as the “seven-give-up generation,” believing they will never find love, marriage, childbirth, human relations, homeownership, personal dreams and hope. In his 2015 book, the Korean-born, Germany-based philosopher Byung-Chan Han calls the burnout society the “signature affliction” of this age. One sign of resistance from young Chinese feeling beat up by society: a new “tang ping” or “lying flat” trend of not overworking and being content with more attainable achievements, which has met governmental opposition in the drive for self-reliant, global advancement. One reviewer writes that philosopher Han provides another alternative, “the God of the Sabbath - the holy day on which we are invited not to achieve, not to produce, but to stop. It's a day not to. It's an interval in which uselessness and idleness are celebrated. We can be tired on the Sabbath, a tiredness that Han concludes is a blessing because yielding to it precipitates peace and calm.”

(Recommended reading from our July 2021 Global Briefing)

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Moral Persuasion and the Intractable Israeli-Palestinian Problem

Is moral persuasion the only way forward to resolve the 73-year conflict between Palestinians and Israelis? Political commentator Fareed Zakaria contends that Israel is now the Middle East superpower and “doesn’t have any practical reasons to make a deal with the Palestinians.” Sri Lankan public intellectual Vinoth Ramachandra adds that “Israel is the last remaining European colonial power” somehow able to be “the only country in the world that does not have internationally recognized borders.” If no political or security resolution is possible, what then? “It can only be resolved through moral persuasion,” writes Zakaria, calling for Israel to live into a greater mission: “The only hope—and right now it looks remote—is that those forces will gain strength and one day lead the country to give the Palestinians a state of their own. That would finally fulfill Israel’s historical mission to be, in the words of Isaiah, ‘a light unto the nations.’” In a similar vein, Jewish American journalist Peter Beinart, calling for Palestinians to be granted the right of return to homes they were driven from, writes: “There is a Hebrew word … Teshuvah, which is generally translated as ‘repentance.’ Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is ‘return.’ In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees—far from necessitating Jewish exile—could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba [or “catastrophe,” used to describe the Palestinian displacement] has evicted from organized Jewish life.” Yet a New York Times columnist – noting a rash of anti-Jewish attacks and harassment in the U.S., London, and Brussels (Germany also has disturbing signs) – contends that pro-Palestinian progressives “will have to come to their own reckoning about what to do about the burgeoning anti-Semitism in their midst.” At the same time, Ramachandra notes that there “are also courageous rabbis and human rights activists within Israel who are opposed to the abuses heaped on the Palestinian people by the Israeli army and right-wing Jewish colonists.”

(Recommended reading from our July 2021 Global Briefing)

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Why some vaccines (and vaccinated people) get warp speed and others don’t

“The idea that private ingenuity and naked competition produced the [successful COVID-19] vaccines is a complete fantasy,” contends David Whyte at the University of Liverpool. Earlier coronavirus diseases SARS and MERS – costly for the East Asian economy – had no vaccine, and it took 16 years to approve the Ebola vaccine, an epidemic estimated to cost West African countries more than 50 billion dollars. Pharmaceutical companies “follow the money,” he says. “Previous viruses did not threaten the economy of the developed countries to the same extent.” Yet “most advanced economies stand to lose at least 4.5% of GDP as a result of this pandemic. So we needed COVID-19 vaccines to save these economies.” In addition to nationalist economics, says Whyte, the use of public funds shaped the response to the virus, writing that research and development and direct subsidies “were mobilized on an enormous scale” for COVID-19 vaccines. “Governments used public funds to place huge advance orders for vaccines that removed all market risk from future sales… This investment will, of course, be followed by unprecedented profits.” One hidden cost pharmaceutical companies did not pay for is an “infrastructure that produced the COVID-19 vaccines [which] was nurtured in publicly funded universities, in public institutes and heavily subsidized private labs.” How does what Whyte calls this “knowledge that we hold in common,” yet benefitting only the privileged, speak to the disturbing fact that 75% of global vaccine supply is now held by 10 countries while 99 percent of people in low-income countries have not received a single dose? Sri Lankan writer Vinoth Ramachandra, citing the words of early church father Basil of Caesarea (“That bread which you keep belongs to the hungry”), writes that “Christian theology has long held that the right to life trumps the right to private property. If I have food or life-saving drugs in my home that I don’t need for my survival, yet my poor neighbor is starving or seriously ill, then if the latter were to break into my home to take what he needs for his survival it is not an act of theft. Rather, it is I who am guilty of theft by withholding it from him.” With others, on July 20 the MCC Washington Office organized a global interfaith prayer service advocating for vaccine equity.

(Recommended reading from our July 2021 Global Briefing)

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Wrestling with roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict 

For a dive beneath the escalating Palestine-Israel conflict into root causes, see this Associated Press explainer and a brief history in this VOX video. MCC has been present in the land since 1949, and this 15-page MCC Frequently Asked Questions booklet has sections including recent history and what the Bible says about Palestine and Israel. To go in-depth, see Inhabiting the Land, a short book by Alain Epp Weaver, who worked with MCC in Palestine for over a decade. The question of how to describe the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is crucial and contested. The UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice consider the occupation a serious violation of human rights and international law. Yet violations are often not criticized by the U.S., which blocks UN Security Council statements on Israel in ways similar to China on Xinjiang and Syria. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu of South Africa recently declared a moral responsibility to intervene with the European Union, United Kingdom, and USA, “all of which have consistently provided military support and diplomatic cover for Israel’s violations of international law.” 2021 reports from two leading human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli agency B'tselem, contend that Israel’s discriminatory policies have crossed a threshold that meets the United Nations definition of apartheid. It is also important to recognize the alarming rise in antisemitism in the world, noted in January by the UN Secretary General. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism provides guidelines to identify and oppose antisemitism while protecting free expression and supporting justice for the Palestinian people and lasting peace for all. Finally, a glimmer of light amid the inter-communal violence, a Times of Israel article about Jews and Palestinians pushing back peacefully.   

(Recommended reading from our May 2021 Global Briefing)

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The problem is not government but bad government 

Israeli historian and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari writes in Financial Times of startling technological and scientific progress (such as the COVID-19 vaccine) during the pandemic. But he contends that “science cannot replace politics,” citing examples of bad political decisions and mismanagement and three lessons for the future. Similarly, Yascha Mounk of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change argues that “populism has proven lethal” and “the longer the pandemic has dragged on, the more the quality of governance has turned out to matter.” One proposal for a better kind of politics comes from two authors at Foreign Affairs magazine. While rivalry today between powerful nations often results in multi-lateral paralysis, they argue for “microlaterialism.” Why not let small countries take the lead in international relations? “Drawing on smaller nations’ particular strengths – Scandinavian countries’ long history of conflict mediation, for instance, or Jordan’s experience dealing with extremist groups – allows for a productive division of labor that combines deep expertise with the kinds of resources that larger, more influential countries bring to the table.” They cite Estonia on digital governance and Costa Rica on conservation. 

(Recommended reading from our May 2021 Global Briefing)

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Myanmar military rule: Unprecedented resistance, but in danger of being normalized

The military junta’s February 2021 overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Myanmar, also known as Burma, was followed by intense repression (see “what is happening on the ground” here). But resistance has been unprecedented, widely supported, spearheaded by brave youth (with women and girls central to the movement), and one that Myanmar journalist Zwe Mahn says could remake future society for the better. Indeed, writes Thant Myint-U, author of The Hidden History of Burma, “Over recent months, a new generation of leaders have come to the fore and many have rejected the ethno-nationalism at the heart of Myanmar politics, seeking fresh alliances across racial, ethnic and religious divides.” Yet the economic and health care system has collapsed and 3.4 million people may face hunger in coming months. While Mahn writes that the “battle is lopsided,” yet “with action from international community is winnable,” in “No One Is Saving Myanmar,” Atlantic writer Timothy McLaughlin writes that foreign governments and “organizations such as the UN have been left looking ineffectual and paralyzed by inaction.” Two authors from the Center for Strategic and International Studies write that “[The military] has set the country down a violent path toward either revolution, repression, or collapse. The people of Myanmar have overwhelmingly chosen resistance.” Alarmingly, Myanmar is already fading from global headlines, and former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Yanghee Lee warns that “there is a dangerous sense that the coup is becoming normalized, even accepted, as the new status quo.” We have seen this happen between the two Koreas over 70 years of division, over ten years of civil war in Syria, and recently between China mainland and Hong Kong: division or absorption by violence is viewed first as unacceptable, then tragic, then inevitable, then normal. Where are the international leaders with sufficient courage and influence to declare otherwise, and act accordingly? 

(Recommended reading from our May 2021 Global Briefing)

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How is the January 6, 2021 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol an opportunity to learn from other contexts?  

Two authors who worked on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda draw parallels to Rwanda where, through hate speech and disinformation, “the seeds of genocide were planted by the media in the years leading up to the explosion of violence.” Public speech has consequences in mobilizing fear and anger, they say, and early warning signs must be taken seriously. Another parallel is South Korea, where in 2017 a crowd of supporters of President Park Geun-hye stormed the presidential grounds after she was removed from office. Since then, while contentious, there have been attempts to address a “cozy relationship between large corporations and the government” and certain media groups which “increasingly resembled an entrenched disinformation campaign.” Misinformation, Disinformation, Fake News: Why Do We Care? from the Episcopal Church Office of Government Relations is an in-depth resource which explains the differences between disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, which collectively pose a global challenge of “information disorder.” It includes biblical commentary and a “What can I do?” section including how to create a list of trusted sources. Also see Social-Media Algorithms Rule How We See the World for exactly how Facebook and Twitter pose a danger. 

(Recommended reading from our March 2021 Global Briefing)

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What the COVID vaccine tells us about holding together innovation and ethics 

From the COVID vaccine to the internet, artificial limbs to satellites, many of the biggest technological breakthroughs in recent history have not sprung from the private sector, but from collaboration between federal governments, business, and science. One economics correspondent writes that while free market economies can make huge contributions, they come up short in solving enormous problems. And How Science Beat the Virus (and What It Lost in the Process) discusses both the contribution and the “all-too human frailties of the scientific enterprise.” Big global challenges like climate change, too, will depend on public-private partnerships. Yet these authors overlook the critical role of ethical knowledge from civil society, as seen in Reading While Black author and Anglican priest Esau Mccaulley’s writing of Martin Luther King, Jr. going beyond preaching for justice to work for policy change to address structural disempowerment. The warning, given the problem of vaccine inequality: technological innovation also needs moral imagination.

(Recommended reading from our March 2021 Global Briefing)

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Will the poorest be trampled in the vaccine stampede?
Rich nations representing just 14 percent of the world’s population have bought up 53 percent of all the most promising vaccines so far. Facing the problem of “vaccine nationalism,” growing numbers of charities and churches contend there is a moral responsibility for vaccines to be shared far and wide, to the neediest first, and there is a campaign for a People’s Vaccine. “No one should be blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine because of the country they live in or the amount of money in their pocket,” says one leader. “But unless something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 for years to come.” See an in-depth analysis of the problem, a country-by-country chart of the vaccine supply problem, and Scientific American on how to distribute a COVID vaccine ethically.

(Recommended reading from our January 2021 Global Briefing)

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