My two and a half years at TASIS England eliminated any doubts about my making a living internationally. There had been much traveling in my life prior to my arrival at TASIS (living in the US, UK, Australia, Botswana, Sudan, and Israel), but here was a place where all of those people congregated and enjoyed what each brought to the multicultural table. The best aspect of these interactions was the end result of being able to make more informed decisions about the sorts of places I still wanted to go and what sort of life would suit me. Further, upon arriving in places such as Nigeria, something about my friendships with the Nigerians at TASIS England made the place feel a little less foreign.
I work with the Small Arms Survey, a highly unique organization based in Geneva among a myriad of NGOs, like Oxfam and the Center for Human Dialogue and IGOs, such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization. The Survey undertakes and makes available research on the issue of small arms and light weapons (or more generically, 'firearms') and their effects on developing countries. We also respond to specific requests from governments and UN branches to provide consultancies on countries currently experiencing conflict or its after-effects. Such work entails generating and considering data on public health and armed violence, refugee and internal displacement flows, arms shipments of both legal and clandestine type, public perception about their state of security, and the geopolitical concerns that come with one state arming another, either directly or by proxy.
In a year and a half at the Small Arms Survey, I have met with diplomats, arms dealers of both the licit and illicit sort, child soldiers, current and ex-combatants from several African conflicts and refugees, all of whom have been affected by or have responsibility to varying degrees for the grave problem of weapons use and proliferation worldwide. With a conservative estimate of some 800 million small arms and light weapons worldwide, there is no shortage of work at the Survey. Attempts at the UN level to bring an Arms Trade Treaty into force have most recently been thwarted by the sole dissenting vote, cast by the United States.
Most recently, I have been editing a book on armed groups and small arms in the Philippines and concurrently have spent much of the last few months researching in Nigeria for a publication on electoral violence in the country. Traveling to such countries has provided a more first hand insight into different peoples' different priorities, particularly with regard to human security. In Sudan for example, twenty-seven years of civil war has meant that an entire generation has not experience of living in peace. Despite this, Sudanese are most desperate to achieve such a state, but bands of AK-47-wielding youths (often inebriated by one substance or another) who shove their assault rifles into your 4WD at pitiful makeshift roadblocks do little to engender any sense of security. In the Niger Delta creeks of southern Nigeria, I spoke with a heavily armed and rather violent militia group who, it turned out when meeting them individually, simply wanted to return to their previous livelihoods of fishing, welding, and construction.
Particularly when a given conflict has lasted for so long, or when a country has descended into a 'gun culture', as in Yemen, Somalia, or Kosovo, it is tough to provide a reason for such combatants to give up those arms. They have little else in the way of life skills and, as a result no real way to make a living after a conflict's end - hence around half of all conflicts in recent years have rapidly slid back into violent situations.
I have little trouble in relating these sorts of localized conflicts and their truly global implications back to my experiencing at a multinational TASIS England campus. Issues affecting classmates and friends were brought into the classroom and dorm rooms, they were discussed and debated until commonalities became apparent and empathy seemed the only natural response. I express my thanks to TASIS England for this, and hope successive students can enjoy such experiencing from their moments at the school.
Photographs of children by Ron Coello, visiting artist and Fleming Gallery exhibitor, Autumn 2006.
This article first appeared in the TASIS England Today magazine, Autumn 2007 issue.