A Conversation with HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan

welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online good morning good afternoon and good evening i'm john alterman senior vice presidents vignette berzinski chair and global security and geostrategy and director of the middle east chair of middle east program at csis it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's seminar which is inspired by a report we put out in may entitled sustainable states environment governance and the future of the middle east for that report we're grateful for the encouragement and support of the embassy of the state of qatar ambassador sheikh masha bin hamad athani and i also want to thank for today's event the ambassador of jordan her excellency dina kawar for her help arranging today's program today's guest is a very special guest and i have to say that as i read his five-page biography it seemed to me that even five pages didn't do him justice his royal highness prince hassan bin palau has been adviser to kings an organizer and convener and humanitarian of the highest order much of his work has focused on human dignity environmental sustainability and youth and as we think about the themes of the sustainable states report what is the role of environmental sustainability the delivery of services effectively and efficiently to broad populations for some of the larger governance issues we see in the middle east we couldn't think of a better guest than his royal highness prince hassan bintalal who has been working on these issues for decades so your royal highness welcome to css and thank you for joining us thank you very much i'm delighted to be with you i'd just like to start if i may by saying that in terms of human dignity i i've always been attracted by the acronym mad mutually assured destruction versus mass mutually assured survival and this of course came to my notice in the context of weapons of mass destruction however i would suggest that maybe as a point of departure we should focus not on the anthropocene but on the humidor scene a politician was once described as being a very humble man and someone remarked well he's got a lot to be humble about and i don't mean that frivolously at all i feel the more misery that i see the more systemic humiliation the more eco side you know the ecosphere says it all says what daisako is mentions the sokka gakai international as we look east to japan from west asia he talks about value creation in a time of crisis so um i i would like to suggest that ecocide is more than the environment it's also people and uh sharing our relations with our habitat and with each other rather than cultivating hatred towards each other and polarity which is degrading our sociosphere means also degrading our ability to think and to reflect our cogito sphere and i find this extremely uh worrying because of the new terminologies that have appeared as a result of all of this which are tantamount to necro politics if you will a phenomenon identified by the cameroonian intellectual joseph who writes in our contemporary world various types of weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death worlds so my question to myself every morning is are we really the living dead or do we have something to contribute to the improvement of the sustainable development goals which remarkably 17 as they are are still individual goals we still talk about water individually from uh human beings that is a migrants nationals and refugees as though each silo is meant to stay apart but at the same time the climate pressures the climate imperative in a region where we are living at least in the arab event with four other countries arab countries who are the most affected by water stress i just wonder whether the world resources institute is not going to be proven right then when they go on talking about water and stress they talk about the top 30 countries high levels of water stress by 2040 are in the region including all six countries of the levant and let me add to that uh israel which obviously has to be extremely concerned we started in 2010 with the mumbai group in india we can't talk to each other unless we bring an independent observer from another country and another region and we started what was then the mantra process many of our members of declined to participate or simply have been physically incapacitated because of internal war and as you know i live in a rough neighborhood and as i said to you earlier an israeli politician once said to me we're surrounded by enemies and i equipped immediately saying well you think you have a problem we're surrounded by friends well actually unless we can talk about shared commons there is very little that we can present in terms of respect mutual respect for each other's identity and it is all about us and the others isn't it it's all about identity and this is something that really worries me but how can we move from talking about individual identities to uh sharing water scarcity and and the unicef statistics for example we're told that the water sharing issue makes us the world's second water poorest country and at the same time of course let me remind that school children are suffering from the effects of of climate change and pollution we live between two of the most polluting areas in the world uh oil and related energy on the one side and uh the mediterranean and israel on the other we see a large black cloud of harman every morning every every every dawn so my question to myself and and to you and your audience is when and how can we move like the european union from then that case a a community of coal and steel in our case to a community of energy and water i think the two have to complement each other both in the context of the uh levant the land of the rising sun descartes said if everything in this world is west where does the sun rise and uh of course that applies to us and points east but continuing from this thought i would like to suggest that last month the international panel on climate change made it abundantly clear that even in the best case scenarios the warming of the earth's atmosphere at current rates is likely to exceed the threshold of two degrees which means that this region this levant region will become uninhabitable in decades older than your centuries so the proposals that i would like to share with you today are those relating to mutually assured survival thank you for giving your opportunity to make these introductory mods thank you very much um there's a lot to chew on there as somebody who has been deeply involved in jordan's development plans the five-year plans going back to the 1970s what is the piece of the planning process that hasn't been there that needs to be there to meet the sorts of imperatives you're talking about what needs to be baked in now that hasn't been baked in for the last 40 years oh i could think of a number of points among them cultural affinity being able to talk to people in their own language in their own idiom in their own priorities and i go back to a born-again peacemaker bob mcnamara when he came out to see us as the head of the world bank we were talking about enabling and empowering citizens but the fact is that in the last decades we've moved from 2.3 million people in my tiny country to 11 million people and that's not because of anything other than the open door policy that we have had to refugees and of course syrians alone we are in the order of over one and a half million assyrians so i would say that elven gujarat in arabic ontological identity or ontological security has to illustrate the consequences of rapidly changing environments in 67 it was people coming over from the west bank and that is of course up to a million uh refugees we had the social order to address which were through a bumpy ride in 1771 but by the end of 71 we were in the beginning of the 70s literally on our knees but what stood us in good stead was that we had the good track record we were aiming for economic takeoff in 1970 were it not for the ghastly 1967 war so i think that what we do not emphasize today as anthony gidden has put in it put it very clearly the first a person's fundamental sense of safety in the world which includes the basic trust of other people we cannot relinquish our services safety how much we however much we admire our ability of our military and security in the region as a whole which is uh the best footwork forward particularly since 9 11 if everybody talks about security in terms of working against something in this case we have to work for something and i'll quote chiara botticie who elucidates she says in the light of the continual change in their present conditions human beings are impelled to go back to their political narratives can we break out of plato's prey cave can we break out of the political narratives and can we look at revising these narratives in the light of new needs and new exigencies how much of what you're talking about is principally a domestic imperative and how much is an international imperative what role needs what role of that that human security piece needs to be delivered to jordanians in jordan and what needs to come from outside well in terms of deliverables i i don't think that governments can do it without the judiciary in jordan and for that matter the legislature i certainly don't think they can do it without civil society that is to say to bring about a consensus of what has been called being in the world in the world in which we live jordanians are with maybe up to a million in the diaspora both in north and south america and of course our relations with the brain uh drain vis-a-vis as against the brain gain so i think that we are more specifically in in a world where we have to give greater attention to talking to people not talking down to them but encouraging dialogue and i think that the noble art of conversation is an art that has to be developed in jordan we have a figure of a million and a half syrian refugees but at the same time we have 53 different nationalities who flocked to jordan as a result of regional wars and i i would like to say that because the constructing an era as the buddhist ikeda has put it of human solidarity means moving away from antagonistic security my security begins within my my volume within my slum within my suburb of uh the big city in relative terms amman in this instance to security from and of course the move towards collaborative security means in my humble opinion not working only against crime against narcotics against the awful uh burden of a very young population as seen by some i see it as an opportunity i see the kind of security that we have to work towards is in rehabilitating people to pursue their talent and their aptitudes and in that sense i just want to say that when the europeans receive on their borders millions of refugees they apply algorithmic waiting so they await the talents and aptitudes of the people coming in relation to the needs of their economy it's about time that we started waiting uh the value the human value of individuals uh with their different talents and uh in that sense i think a professorial colleague of yours georgetown although femi taiwo is quoted here as talking about the talent to produce buy but to hold for all i mean it's wonderful to talk about the young jordanian who sold this company for two and a half million two 105 million dollars the other day a startup but how much is this startup uh created in terms of a beacon for others to follow the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer and and this uh polarity has to end and this is why we are absolutely in need of empirical facts for the region i don't know john if you realize all your listeners know that this region has no crisis prevention center this region has no barometer in terms of west africa they have a regional development barometer the arab league is sleeping on the job i'm sad to say and escort the economic and social commission uh is uh focusing on projects rather than a regional vision for change and in that context i think we need many yesterdays ago an ecosoc an economic and social council that needs it every month of the four months of the year every quarter to develop our priorities but of course to do that we have to speak to each other president of syria is in moscow today the king of jordan is in the united states we're all flying after regulating our priorities in terms of our relations with others outside the region we should be encouraged to talk to each other thank you i want to remind our our viewers that if you do have a question for his royal highness there's a button on the webpage on the css webpage that you're viewing the event and you can send a question and it comes to us and we'll ask because we're a highness in that sort of approach to changing the relationship with people the poor getting poorer what is the role of public utilities that governments provide in reshaping that conversation in in changing the relationship between governments the the governors and the governed in creating patterns of trust in creating patterns of honesty i mean where do you see public utilities which people in public policy don't like to talk about because as you say everybody likes to fly around the world and go to conferences and and talk about the great and the good where did the sort of daily issues of water electricity sewer and waste disposal where those fit in to this equation that you're talking about well i think there is an optimal um commitment to what the international community has described as belong beyond the poverty line below the poverty line and the question of absolute hunger uh of course is is raised but i just want to say if you compare the vision four countries poland uh so slovakia czechia and hungary with the countries of the levant including israel you're talking about 38 000 per capita in their region and this applies to israel of course and it applies outside our immediate region to the gulf states and the best that we can achieve in this region is short of 15 000 given the fact that we spend so much on our defense and on our services and i personally think that the time has come to recognize that water policy which is a continuing theme with the world bank report talks about ebb and flow and we talk about ebb and flow in terms of uh services without talking about the old adage attracting population to urban centers and pushing deliberately into other regions of of the country uh water deficit explained ten percent of the increase in global migration between 1970 and 2000 so as we were sitting planning for ourselves looking at the census figures how many above and below the poverty line we have found that in terms of water alone as a utility or public service the climate changes induce 10 to 20 percent reduction in water supplies and this impacts on jordan's gdp by a negative seven percent on iraq's gdp by four percent lebanon's by negative two percent and syria's by negative ten percent i have been calling for the creation of a land bank i've been calling for the creation of a water bank whereby people become stakeholders in their future we are no longer talking down to them and telling them what their priorities should be but they should take their future in their own hands bearing in mind that man against nature is so unpredictable and syria has been a cautionary tale in this respect with over a million people who lost their livelihoods and we tend to forget this point when drought precipitated the failure of props in syria between 2066 and 2011. those who've studied the wider near east will remember that over a century ago the mass exodus of people from the eastern mediterranean to the americas came from uh our part of the world and in fact arabs are still referred to in certain latin american countries as turpos because they carried turkish travel documents so it's a it's a a huge task to address the subject of services versus development but we have to move from a vulnerability-based approach band-aid solutions to a development approach even in micro terms to develop the capabilities of our embedded energy particularly among the young and to invite them to participate in every possible way in creating the stability that we that we see and and can i ask what's the vehicle for that is it as individual citizens with relationship to the state is it on the municipal level with municipalities trying to organize and then bargain with the central government is it tribal in jordan the tribes as you know have have significant sway in in many issues what is the what is the vehicle by which individuals plug into institutions that serve their future their destiny i i think that uh in terms of local government and regionalization these are only words on paper unless we recognize that the basic three challenges that we are facing are one the question of governance which means that with over 30 percent of our population under the age of 15 we simply have to begin with education and with the relevance of educational syllabus to development priorities and heritage priorities understanding the past if you want to understand the present secondly i think that in terms of a national census of opinion paul it would be unreasonable to continue to say um given the polarity of the so-called opposition of the iraq which is the young today call for reform reform reform and i say yes but what kind of reform i mean i don't say it publicly because um i'm a husband but i like to say well look where i has been i happened to be in 1968 on the on the bridge in paris and and uh actually i was going crossing the bridge to um help a french friend who had been a paratrooper in algeria uh find a dominican priest who would accept that a muslim could be the godfather to his son so it is partly interfaith dialogue that i was trying to develop across the same but uh i i think that the issue basically is that so many hateful issues have clubbed together the continued occupation of palestinian lands the whole issue of uh the the involvement in the destruction of baghdad and damascus and cairo in in in the last few decades the main seats of california will have been destroyed there's a lot of pride in this part of the world but it is misdirected in the sense that we have to get people down to basic issues they can't only be aspiring politicians by talking about the glories of the past the second issue of course is that i think church related organizations and mosque-related organizations have to be more aware of the priorities of development and human dignity and in that sense i think that they have to stop preaching from the pulpit only in terms of religious narrative but also have to pick up day-to-day issues and lastly i think that the rotating as you mentioned the tribes and and the big families uh positional elites as they've been described by one author missile gamal i wrote wrote a wonderful book on the positional elites in nazarite egypt and i think the time has come to recognize that the positional elites are not in step with a regional dialogue with the result that such pursue few uh people so few people turn up for elections the percentage of participation in national election is pitifully low and there's no indication of a pulse-driven uh democratic process as yet i ask you the second one you describe the role of religious organizations in providing services and economic development that's been one of the criticisms of hezbollah hamas the muslim brotherhood is these organizations have taken on a combination of religious roles social and economic roles and political roles is that something you think is basically good but they should leave politics at the door or is there something about the whole enterprise that you think corrupts the enterprise well i think that the second part of what you're saying is certainly true from the point of view of the uh security establishment and for that matter the judiciary of course you have shariah you have civil law you have tribal customary law and you have humanitarian law and it's very difficult to get them to see the the nexus between what is good in the this proposed value system but in terms of the um i mentioned not only the muslim or so-called muslim initiatives it's not what i intended when i referred to the church related organizations in in palestine for example let's just say the territories and in israel 48 the palestinians of 48 there is a big role for uh church-related organizations of which we have at least 14 different uh denominations in eastern christianity alone and uh i love the progression that they make um rowan williams the former archbishop of canterbury wrote a brilliant book called looking east in winter in which he describes the values of eastern christianity as as summarized by olivier clement the philosopher of the last century personhood we have to develop in san ankuli as we would say in terms of a muslim the whole human being the holistic approach and liberty which means that we have to develop self-discipline the claiming from the pulpit or from the member is not a form of self-discipline nor is it an invitation to work with other related disciplines health education youth modeling and certainly not women participating in the workforce women graduates of universities over 54 of our universities but our women in the workforce are less than two percent and this is absolutely outrageous we can't continue to talk about quarters and women's rights being pushed by press pressure groups unless the attitude of society itself changes and they begin to recognize the relevance of this inclusive role i i want to go to audience questions momentarily but but it does seem to me that that in a way what you're talking about is profoundly political but it doesn't really have a political coloration you don't talk about a a system into which a different kind of political relationship exists how should we think about how this this this translates into politics in a political framework i'd prefer to talk about uh policies which are absent rather than politics which are all pervasive and if you talk about education reform for example you need at least a decade before you begin to see the the the returns if you talk about agricultural land use in terms of the waste that there is at the present time in terms of geography and geology mining and different parts of the country create turning the country into a dust bowl there are many issues that have to be addressed with the holistic view if you talk about the colorado river as a comparison of the imperial valley as a comparison with the rift valley which runs through jordan it's called the jordan rift valley this rift can only heal as someone has put it by a an overall uh view of better management in that sense if at the peak of the cold war the danube commission can manage that mighty river why is it that the regional commission cannot address the issues which are otherwise treated away by political political uh discussions i mean one will never know whether the two canals being suggested for the dead sea have been uh taken off the agenda for political reasons within countries and and within their constituencies that blatantly ignore the policy drive that is needed to stabilize what is a major feature of our part of the world i mean we have a danube commission a nikon commission a senegal commission but all these mighty rivers even an amazon commission believe it or not why can we not uh take policy which is thematic out of the political sphere because we have nothing better to do all we do is to talk politics and until we enable and empower people to become stakeholders as in the bodensee the sea of constance where since 1954 300 towns the people of 300 towns have owned the water and managed it i don't think that we're going to make the progress we need because patronage invested interest which you call politics frankly will always be there first so let's go to audience questions one is from uh raymond haddadin from the wanna institute how do we create mutual interests on a regional level in a region that is infected with conflict this is going to the policy question as you said how do you get out of the politics on the regional level well once again i i think that the regional issues have never been sufficiently articulated to build trust and i would suggest that maybe articulating regional issues is to bear in mind what finland did so successfully since 2011. they started a helsinki citizens process whereby the baltic countries and their neighboring central european countries deserved and bought a commission for the regions uh devised by the european union and in that sense they don't meet uh to personalize issues as we do i mean the minute you start talking about improving relations with iran or improving relations with israel or improving relations with saudi arabia you irritate somebody and and please somebody this disjudgmental attitude the public opinion is uh basically a very different difficult burden to be carrying at the same time as trying to manage and this is why i think that in terms of the regional information base i mean i've lived through data in the 70s which became called which was called informatics 20 years later which is now industry for and essentially you you have to have a a keen awareness of what the french call and aminagemon the territorial in terms of the managing and the administration of regions for the purposes that for which they are intended so but if we continue to destroy our environment by pushing roads and pipelines through areas that need the greater attention to social participation such as desert tech which we were talking about decades ago to bring sunshine from the gulf across north africa desalinating water as we go in marginalized communities rather than bringing hydrocarbons from the gulf uh simply to fill them here and there how can we optimize the value of our earth minerals of agriculture but most importantly optimize the value and the return on our human capital that's the basic question i think related to that henry lee from adc energy asks what are the principal strategies to prepare for the accelerating global transition from petroleum-based resources to renewable energy is there a special role for jordan is there a special impact that jordan can have in that challenge well i just like to point out that in terms of blue peace this mumbai strategic foresight group supported by the swiss agency and the swedish international development corporation were managing an initiative which was transported to our region in 2018 and has become the first regionally owned water cooperation mechanism in the history of the region with iraq jordan lebanon turkey and iran represented and in baghdad only a couple of months ago i addressed a conference speaking about the tigressy of freity's basin now we're talking about the nile basin not very successfully i'm sad to say but we're talking about a basin approach which i would like to see in the rift valley and in terms of blue peace it's now moving into the green blue peace concept a water and energy community and i would like to say that also across lines there is a lot of interest that i hear from time to time from echo peace middle east uh environmentalists from jordan israel and palestine who who are trying to work against all odds from all sides because after all settler colonialization has meant that the water table has been affected the water table that the palestinians derived their livelihood from and a regional water and energy community of course is still debated by the different conflicting projects i mean i think southern lebanon is waiting for tankers to bring oil from iran to give them electricity and then at the same time you find the discussions between egypt uh iraq and and and jordan so the different sources of power have to be addressed and i'd like to say to the participant to ask the question what's particularly interesting in the report that i referred to earlier the green blue deal for the middle east was the contention that although both palestinian israel israeli negotiators link water to sovereignty and borders and water quantities needed of refugees and central and settlements this is the beautiful line the fungible nature of water as a resource where technical technological advances have altered the very rationale for why water was considered a final status issue in the first place means that water quantities can be agreed upon in a manner which takes into account complexities and still represents agreement to full palestinian water rights water is a human right this is a development that we have to recognize and i hope that a critical mass of initiatives including the world bank uh most recently the ebony flow could maybe lead to a world back bank trust fund someday where we can talk about linking far-flung regions to one another and so i hope that that's enough of an answer yes thank you very much uh telemechilsky director for pan-buck asks your thoughts on opportunities and challenges for the middle east and north africa for multilateral cooperation or sort of collaboration to confront climate change and is there leadership role in that for jordan well i think that jordan can act as a catalyst and possibly as a as a thought provoker and a convener but um i i always take the um inspiration from the asean region which according to pascal army a few years ago is probably the most successful example of cooperation despite the heterogeneity of regime types which of course you have in this part of the world and a kind of connectedness which stays clear of the interference which in west asia has so often consumed our attention and i think that in terms of the possibility of progress um i i think that um the meetings to which i've been invited which have been cancelled twice conducted by oxford university on oil policies in the region and the offshoot of oil policies in terms of the corporate world is something that should be taken more seriously in fact what we seem to need in terms of uh jordan's impartiality in a sense but also dependence deep dependence in another sense is an ability to turn jordan as a a country that understands uh and and and is qualified uh to make the necessary pro progress where uh a semi added to arid climate and uh we are on the periphery and i'll just tell you that years ago i visited japan merchant and uh he was still a member of uh of the japanese attire and uh who had just become one of the leading figure in his party and he said well we understand that you're part of a western zone of influence and i said well that is very true historically but i've been asked by that western zone of influence to look for japanese support because we are also a hinterland country and the levant that i'm talking about is the hinterland to oil if the hinterland is unstable if the quality of its manpower is unreliable then that has an immediate effect but if on the other hand we can talk about the hinterland complementing in what i call intra-independence i respect your identity and your respect mind regardless of whether you're stronger or weaker and we work together on regional commons that is the trick i think so we've worked very hard and for a very long period of time to achieve this understanding maybe it'll achieve in my my lifetime or in later years the main thing is that we've shown the seeds of better understanding of the present and the future is there a u.s role that needs to be played that isn't played correctly is being played inadequately i mean you're talking to at least partially a washington audience today there's been a lot of commentary about the us view of the middle east and how it's changing is there something that that washington needs to hear and take away from your from your views well let me put it this way i was talking to the issue of mental health today i mean you know we hear about trauma and uh the the the returnees from uh war zones and so forth and god knows we have had our own and in every aspect i mean i went to new zealand to visit after the moscow's attacks with the people of prayer in 2018 i believe it was and i asked them what about trauma or they said water accidents and i said no shooting and bombs and whatever and we established some form of cooperation the uk and the us unfortunately do not want to get involved in issues relating to trauma that is to say the official programs and i think that that is a crying shame because whether it's climate change drought or urban livability if you will the united states knows all of these different uh uh forms of stress with the fires that you faced with the drought conditions that might be invited by climate change and and the suffering of crops i would suggest that global warming of 2 is global warming it's not californian warming or arizonan warning it is governed by the arid lands uh cooperation and i remember years ago sending a couple of bedouins to new mexico and the local paper said arab terrorists arrived in new mexico and i said well can your usaid help us produce a short film and we produced a film called [Music] potatoes without borders and here were these arabs and their towel heads or whatever derogatory statement is made about them and their corresponding american mexican with their enormous hats working together on producing potatoes so i think that we have to cut the cackle and get down to actually working together if we want to build a better future for our youth we've gotten a couple of questions one from rula atar and one from faris lattar about corruption ruler asks to what extent can really development take off and be sustainable in the absence of good accountable governance and the vast prevalence of entrenched corruption in the middle east north africa region what can we do to enhance governance and faris asks given that you have rising citizen distrust in decision-making centers in government exacerbated during covid how can you reduce this feeling of distrust to get positive input from fellow citizens how do you change that part of the relationship well i i had the opportunity of working with transparency international and transparency extractive in industry international which deals with minerals and in terms of actually bringing the chickens home to roost it's very difficult for me to comment given the fact that i mean with all due respect to the two who asked me the question you you don't have the basic handicap of carrying a title which i have had all my life so i don't want to it's not in the best interest of you or high for me to rock the boat and to become the champion of a a lost cause and i say it's a lost cause because everything that we do in terms of corruption is to judge uh from a distance or to take judgmental attitudes towards a particular section of society or whatever i think that the accountability of the legal system simply has to come into into play and the judiciary have to develop a better understanding of what is expected of them if we are going to address the subject of the the law addressing cases of corruption but let me also describe corruption as poor governance and that is where i uh really worry that in terms of for example i worked with the intellectual property organization and i can't tell you whether the lacrosse crocodile is on the left or on the right in terms of the sweatshops i saw but i said to my colleagues in the ipo can't you help bring some of these products online and recognize the fact that you are creating employment instead of looking at the the very narrow returns above excluding them the same applies to plants of course and we've had our run in with the help of vandana shiva from india who deals with over 400 plants that have been taken out of south asia and brand names assigned to them by international pharmaceutical agencies and of course it's very difficult to talk about the regional role in a tiny country but when you were talking about regional wheat and the drought in syria and you see all the wheat seeds going to svalbard the famous reserve in the frozen north for a day when syria might come back online and syrian seeds would be used you wonder whether literally the lifeblood of agriculture as we know it in this in this region is being spirited away and in return for what as we've seen in certain parts of west asia and central asia is drugs going to be the new phenomenon so corruption is um is is obviously there in its different forms but i think we should we we need to sit down and have a a solid conversation on the spillover of instability in the region the new rich the war the war rich if you will and uh many of these issues which are cross-cutting even in terms of an american audience and the other component of that versus australia asks uh about how you gather high-level political will there's a corruption problem there's a political will problem there's a how do you how do you begin to build a political conversation that creates either an imperative or even a pathway toward uh toward different distribution of resources like that well i mean you're addressing me and saying how do you john i would say how do you also correspondingly because it's you and i together that can address this issue it's you and the think tank of community that can move from recommending and reflecting uh to actually proposing that maybe cooperation can be considered let me give you an example when the late sheriff uni who was one of the founders of the international criminal court invited us to syracuse in sicily there was a participation from judges from different parts of the world many parts of the united states and so forth and the issues of course between what i would call a mature institutional perception of corruption were discussed in a mature institutional manner when corruption was uh uh believed to be uh a criticism if there was what i would call an empty vessel someone who couldn't hold water or advance an issue simply because he didn't have the institutional depth then obviously it was a non-conversation and i think we see those non-conversations even in the international criminal court in the hague because either you have a system of laws or you don't and therefore taking people out of the blue and presenting them to the hey criminal court you sometimes sometimes wonder what the what what is going on so i mean the we need a toolbox an idiot proof toolbox of understanding what it is that we're talking about and i go back to the earlier question about corruption and say we need citizens advice based on that toolbox because uh i mean are we relating it to human deprivation which means that corruption is depriving uh people i mean the uk they have a human deprivation index for example does corruption lead to human deprivation of basic needs is it corruption in terms of um uh doggy dogs in in you know i've always said the problem with the rat race is that the rats are winning the fact that they are winning winning presumably means a certain form of corruption but um i i honestly think that the way to begin is to have solid accountable conversations between respectable universities think tanks chambers of commerce and industry and so forth i mean we produced who we i mean a group of us thinking about the issues of ethics in religion we produced a a document a few years ago out of oxford out of st george's house windsor uh where um believers of different base i think we were nine faith groups came up with a code of ethics in industry so i mean either there's an ethical approach to industry or there's no if we want to talk about weapons of mass destruction chemical and biological are they ethically approved or do they have a a corruption tag uh to them in the sense of the broader picture so this is a very interesting subject and i don't think it should be um pushed under the carpet yeah and if i hey i mean this is this was a central theme in in sustainable state yes how do you create trust and and in these daily encounters between people and government services is there a way to to build a different pattern of relations i couldn't agree more we're running out of time but but there is an interesting question from ian stewart from the royal scientific society what's the role of science in reimagining or revitalizing political narratives in the region does science provide a way to come from outside the equation and change the equation in a really positive way the visit i made to one of our labs quite recently indicated to me clearly that when empowered and enabled young people from the different universities in jordan can participate in i'm sorry my grandchildren are banging on the window that they want to come and say hello to grandpa so i'll i'll try to dissuade them anyway uh the the participation in this exercise was uh thrilling for me because here are two young people from different parts of the country not there because of their belonging to this family or that family who didn't know anyone apart from recognizing their universities and working in uh scientific experiments they even got me to put on a blue robe or a white robe or something and to fill a test tube with something or other which i have no clue what i did but apparently i did something scientifically important and these are kids who are actually going to produce copyright or refereed papers in international international community and this is where we i feel that enabling people scientifically is one aspect of the great scientific debate but coming up with miracle solutions which don't necessarily concern people they don't feel no sense of achievement is not necessarily making stakeholders so i think that the best approach for true stakeholding is empirical fact to start with and then empirical facts to continue in the different levels of participation whichever profession professional approach is required a scientific and a professional barometer is required to know exactly what our universities are doing and if they're not doing something relevant why shouldn't they be doing something else science is not a profit making exercise royal highness thank you very much for honoring us uh with your wisdom today again i would encourage our audience we can download sustainable states from the css website thank you for joining us thank you your highness for joining us thank you great to see you and i remind also your viewers of the importance of winning the human race perfect thank you very much have a good day thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 275

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics, Jordan, sustainability, Prince Hassan, Hashemite, King Abdulla, environment, Middle East, water, energy, clean energy, power

Id: Cz-HwL7zjBs

Length: 57min 25sec (3445 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021