Weekend Box: UNGA Pressure, Coup’s Next? & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
Photo credit: GPA Photo Archive/ Flickr
UNGA PRESSURE
What’s the point of the UN? Just a few years ago that would have seemed a silly question. But in the here and now, it’s one without a clear answer. Indeed, the UN appears to be stuck in a time warp as the world around it evolves at a rapid pace.
Being in New York this week brought the question into sharp focus. Sure there were the usual trappings of power: the motorcades, the accompanying traffic chaos and the different entourages popping up on every street corner. Delegations from the Middle East and Africa were especially noticeable, with one in particular making its presence felt as the Saudi National Opera took over the New York Met to perform for the great and the good on the opening night of UNGA 2023.
But this meeting of the United Nations General Assembly was noticeably different. Of the five permanent members of the security council, just one showed up. The leaders of Britain (consumed by domestic politics), France (too busy focusing on a royal visit), Russia (waging war on Ukraine), and China (not much interested in international engagement) failed to attend. That left President Biden as the sole representative of the so-called ‘Big Five’ to make an appearance.
Just a few years ago, UNGA was the place to be for any self-respecting world leader. Yet now, other international fora seem to matter more. Leaders of the G20 group of nations met in Delhi just a few weeks ago. The UK, USA, and Australia have just marked the two-year anniversary of the AUKUS arrangement. Even at UNGA, the US announced the formation of the Council on Atlantic Cooperation: a partnership of thirty-two countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean from Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Which rather begs the question: what’s the point of the United Nations? As this week showed, that is no longer entirely clear.
Image credit: View of Tatev Monastery in Nagorno-Karabakh, by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0
NAGORNO-KARABAKH CLAIMED BY AZERBAIJAN
Three years after a previous war, this week saw conflict return to the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, as Azerbaijan’s forces carried out an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against Armenian separatists. After intense fighting which is reported to have killed at least 200 people, and a ceasefire brokered by Russia, Azerbaijan now claims that it has taken the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has until now been effectively independent, with Armenian support, since a war ended in 1994. Conflict returned in 2020 when Azeri forces succeeded in fully surrounding the area before Russia brokered a ceasefire. They did so using drones from Turkey to great effect, decimating Armenian tanks and troops, in a taste of what was to come in other conflicts such as in Ukraine.
Recently the region, with a population of around 150,000 ethnic Armenians, has suffered shortages of food and medical supplies under an Azeri blockade, but as recently as last week both sides appeared to be talking about peace. Perhaps because of the last conflict’s outcome, the Armenian government on Tuesday appeared unwilling to send its forces directly into the conflict and called on Russia to stop Azerbaijan’s assault.
Russia has previously enforced an uneasy peace in the region but has been distracted by the Ukraine war, as noted by both sides in the conflict. Armenia’s relations with Russia have cooled, with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan complaining last week that Russia had failed to protect Armenia against “continuing aggression” from Azerbaijan. As if to make his point, Armenian forces held military drills with US forces last week, even while Russia has a base in Armenia and maintains a peacekeeping force for Nagorno-Karabakh. In response, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Armenia had brought conflict upon itself by “siding with NATO.”
Russian peacekeeping forces have reportedly begun to evacuate civilians from the region. There are fears that the conflict could “create tens of thousands of refugees,” while Armenia’s government have warned of the threat of ethnic cleansing. While some Karabakh fighters claim that they will not give up the fight for the region, the results of the conflict may have wider reverberations in Armenia, as there are calls for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to resign.
ONLINE SAFETY: DOES IT FIT THE BILL?
This week, the long-overdue, long-delayed Online Safety Bill has finally been signed off by the Houses of Parliament and will likely become law soon. It aims to make social media companies more responsible for their users' safety and introduce age-verification requirements and other rules to reduce hate speech, harassment, and illicit material.
The Bill began its life in the form of an Online Harms White Paper proposed by Theresa May’s government in April 2019 and has been in legislative deadlock ever since. Four years might not seem like a long time, but in the tech world, it's light-years. The internet has a billion more users, Facebook has become Meta, and as of this week, Elon Musk is recruiting for human trials for a brain chip.
It begs the question, how effective a tool can it be to legislate online harms if it fails to keep pace with technological change? As many have pointed out, the Bill does little to anticipate the emerging harms that we will see in the next five years. A product of years of back and forth, the Bill is a colossal 300 pages and walks a tightrope between those who want to see greater regulation of harmful content (such as child safety campaigners) and free-speech activists who want to see less. To please both groups, significant areas of the Bill are ill-defined, such as new requirements for websites to have policies that protect people from “harmful” or illegal content, but exactly what falls into ‘harmful’ under the scope of the Bill is unclear.
While it may be law, when and how the Bill will be enforced is another matter. The government has already had to concede it has no technical way to do what some of the policies demand. One major example is the provisions in the Bill that would allow encrypted messages on platforms like WhatsApp to be monitored for harmful and objectional content, which the government does not have the tools to enact. So Andrew Tate, who tweeted ‘The British government are coming for me’ when the Bill was passed, need not fear yet.
COUP’S NEXT?
As a string of coups rocks the African continent, Brazil’s President warns the world to look out for somewhere else where democracy is at risk: Guatemala.
On Tuesday, the South American President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, AKA Lula, alerted fellow leaders at the UN to the threat of a coup in the Central American country of Guatemala. His warning comes a week after president-elect Bernardo Arévalo, who won Guatemala’s second-round run-off elections, himself decided to temporarily suspend participation in the presidential transition process in response to raids by agents of Guatemala’s Public Ministry on electoral facilities.
The raids, which saw agents opening ballot boxes and photographing their contents, were in response to allegations that Arévalo’s Movimiento Semilla party used forged signatures when seeking authorisation as a political party. They are only the latest in a string of interferences that Arévalo, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, has faced during the elections. Shortly before his victory in August, his party was suspended over supposed “registration flaws.” This order was later nulled through October, though it is unknown what will happen beyond that point.
Arévalo is one of a number of international leaders struggling against opposition to bring about systemic change. Like him, Thailand’s would-be Prime Minister Pita Limjaroenrat has come up against his country’s own political establishment; the reformist politician resigned last week after parliament blocked his bid for power, despite his having won in elections. Meanwhile, Brazil’s Lula has had to face off demands from his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s party to reject ballots in the last Brazilian elections, as well as an attack on the Brazilian Congress by Bolsonaro’s supporters earlier this year.
For now, we can hope that Lula’s warnings of more and worse political chaos in Guatemala do not materialise.
BURBERRY: ‘NOT UP MY STREET!’
In the world of strategic communications, we are all looking for that lightbulb moment. The moment where you see the solution within the problem. Where you find that magic piece of data or uncover that genius piece of information that informs your whole campaign: the insight. Described as the ‘revelation that prompts action’, an insight to a strategist is like candy to a baby: it’s gold dust. But that’s what it needs to be: revolutionary.
However, commuters have certainly not found Burberry’s guerrilla marketing tactics revolutionary. In fact, many have found it at best discombobulating and at worst discriminatory.
The uproar regards the luxury Burberry brand partnering with TFL for the reopening of its flagship store for London Fashion Week (LFW). Chief Creative Officer Daniel Lee has expressed his vision by renaming ‘Bond Street’ tube station ‘Burberry Street’ and shading it in ‘Knight Blue’ (the brand’s new colour pallet) for the entirety of LFW.
Other assets to the campaign include the rebranding of the nouveau-riche greasy spoon Norman’s Café in Archway, as well as a few more food trucks sprinkled across London, along with chalk stencils of the ‘Equestrian Knight’ around the city’s parks and London black cabs painted with the brand’s ‘English Rose’. Some accused Burberry of cosplaying British working-class culture.
The criticism and outcry against the city becoming an advertising playground, although quite amusing, appear all a bit overblown. You could ask, how is this campaign too dissimilar to any other massive branding stunt?
Fundamentally it was a marketing team’s creative risk that didn’t deliver the desired effect, causing confusion and slight frustration. But although it didn’t work, there have been many brand partnerships that have been received joyfully: ‘Barbiecan’, for instance. So for the strategists among us, we should not bash the idea too harshly. For every good idea, there are a hundred bad ones. Time will tell if Lee’s rebranding works and re-boots the brand’s identity.
For now, though, Londoners have cast their vote.
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audleyadvisors.com.
For now, that’s The Weekend Box officially closed.