Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Celebrity Lunchtime Seminar.
I'm Dr. Oetker.
I'm the director of studies of the Changing Conference Centre, and I'm delighted to have you here for the packed room today for the seminar.
Today, I'm delighted to introduce our speaker, Lord John Alaniz.
He's a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords.
He's also here, Oxford, the director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict and Harris Manchester College.
He's also a very close friend of CCW.
He's on our academic board. He's also on the advisory board of countries, from conflict actors to architects of peace.
Another project that we have might host at the CCW.
He's also very much involved with our conflict platform project, thinking about how changing could dynamics influence conflict.
But of course he also has a large, huge expertise experience.
From his past involvement in politics. He was one of the negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement.
He was the first speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly until 2004,
and then one of four international commissioners overseeing the standing down of the terrorist group and organisation of Security an item.
There's a long list that could go on and on,
and I would encourage you to read his work as well and look up on what he's been doing in Northern Ireland and in other parts of the world.
But today we're going to hear about terrorism and how human rights have recently developed in the context of terrorism.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much indeed, Annette, for your invitation and kind welcome.
Thanks to all of you for coming along as well. My involvement in in terrorism, of course, not directly practising it,
but observing it and being affected by it came from being in Northern Ireland growing up whenever things were beginning to break down into violence.
And my interest in human rights started around about the same time because I was the chairman of the Youth Committee of the Irish Council of Churches,
and at that time the Irish Council of Churches established a human rights body
to look at some of the practical issues that were emerging at that time,
for example, human rights issues in prisons during the hunger strike, but also in lots of other areas.
So these two issues of terrorism and human rights have been around for me for a for a very long time, since my late teens, early twenties.
And indeed, in my international involvement there that I have mentioned in Liberal International,
which is the the Federation or family, if you like, of liberal political parties, over 100 of them around the world.
Before becoming president of of the international, I was the chair of the Human Rights Committee,
which is the only permanent committee of Liberal International, apart from the the Bureau of an Executive.
So human rights has always been a very important part. When we talk about the developments or recent developments in relation to human rights,
you might therefore expect me to be coming along to speak about how things were improving or becoming more emphasised or whatever.
But actually I am going to talk about how terrorism and those things that have caused it are
flagging up some really quite fundamental problems for the whole notion of human rights.
We'll come to that later. But let me go back to the start.
So terrorism is is a crime, of course, but that can mask the fact that it's primarily a tactic of asymmetric warfare,
often used by those who are less powerful against those who are, at least in formal terms, more powerful.
The purpose of the terrorist is to use the creation of powerful feelings of fear, terror to leverage greater impact.
Those who are the victims of a terrorist attack are not the targets of the campaign.
The tactic aims to provoke governments or others in power and to lose their moral authority by overreacting against the community.
The terrorists claim to represent and in this way,
to undermine the sense that government have the capacity to protect those for whom they have responsibility,
and maybe even more crucially, to damage the sense that those in authority have right on their side.
And over the last century,
the development of those measures of public morality that we call human rights have been intimately related to the reactions of governments,
to the operations of war, the threat of social chaos, and the challenging use of terrorism against those authorities.
It was a terrorist act, the assassination of Ferdinand, the Archduke Austria, on the 29th of June 1940.
That was the trigger for the first truly global conflict.
And the result was not just horrible violence but the dissolution of the old imperial order in the world, in Europe, first and beyond.
During the 19th century, the understanding and use of terrorism had been developed by revolutionary
anarchists as an effective tool in their campaign to subvert government governance.
By the early 20th century, support for the underlying ideals and principles had wind.
But other movements, not least nationalist and anti-colonial movements,
then espoused what appeared to be a relatively effective, effective tactic for undermining those in power.
The terrorist attack in Sarajevo in 1914 on these horrors that were inflicted and experienced on an unprecedented
scale and resulted not only in the wholesale destabilisation of the Imperial World Order of the time,
but impacted massively the intellectual life of the Western world.
The optimistic political and intellectual liberalism and rationalism that had emerged centuries before
from the Reformation and the Enlightenment received a very serious blue faith in human rationality,
had led to extraordinary progress in science and technology and would continue to do so, not least in medicine, transport and communication.
But it had received a profound setback.
My professional background in psychoanalysis and Freud, for example, radically changed his theories after the First World War.
Before that, he had focussed on the libido and sexuality and he said, I can't look at the trenches and attribute that to libidinal problems.
And so he developed a whole new approach in theory based on aggression and then the death instinct.
So that's just a marker of how really fundamentally it changed things.
You know, I was going through a period of centenaries at the moment we can sometimes forget this was not just a war.
It was the end of a whole order and a way of thinking about things.
Enlightenment thinkers had hoped that a few generations of education and rationality would be a sufficient
kerb on human aggression and violence and would result in the peaceful and stable progress of humanity.
The First World War put a serious question mark against those optimistic assumptions.
Initially, it was hoped that the problems that had led to Germany with probably the best,
most rational and most orderly education system in the world at that time to engage in such destruction.
Well, the hope was these were political problems, and they could be addressed by the application of more democratic principles.
If human rationality had not in itself contained human aggression,
then surely it was a problem of the old imperial political context of order and a new democratic constitution
for Germany and international cooperation through the League of Nations could prevent a recurrence.
Well, of course, you knew that the application of human rationality to governance in Germany's Weimar Republic
and international cooperation through the League of Nations did not solve the problem.
And despite improvements in the management and infrastructure of Germany,
there was catastrophic inflation and a rise in political extreme extremism that
resulted in a second and in some ways even more appalling global conflict.
If human education in rationality applied to socio economic and political development did not prevent the disastrous violence of world wars,
then it was hoped a new universal rules based approach might succeed.
So with education wasn't enough, then let's have a new international rules based system.
The result was the completion of the League of Nations by the United Nations,
bringing countries together since the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions to address the challenges of economic instability,
the running of the Nuremberg trials,
to make clear that there would be no impunity for crimes against humanity which were not acceptable even in times of all out or absolute war.
And very importantly, the setting out what one might think of as a new secular code of global commandments.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The 38 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights started with a statement of belief in Article one.
I quote it All human beings are born free, equal in dignity and rights, etc.
Followed by the insistence that whoops, they are endowed with reason and conscience and.
You'd up towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
So this was a kind of foundational statement and context.
These foundational beliefs were followed in articles 2 to 21 and in 27 by a set of potentially justiciable civil and political rights.
But Articles 22 to 26 went further, setting down social and economic rights,
which were described in legalistic terms, but of course, actually required economic and political implementation.
And finally, Article 28 to insist on a social and international order and a set of responsibilities and
prohibitions that are necessary for the implementation of the rights that had been set down earlier.
Despite Article one. What the creation of this declaration recognised was that the freedom and dignity that
every individual should be able to enjoy depended not only on human rationality,
but also on conscience and the moral imperative of a spirit of brotherhood.
And it was very clear that neither conscience nor the spirit of brotherhood had protected Europe against the calamities,
not just once but twice catastrophic war within a generation.
The human rights that had been declared by the humanists and liberals of the 18th
and 19th centuries would not be guaranteed merely by an appeal to a rational,
moral conscience. The new Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the new global body of nation states and embedded in an international
rules based system and embodied in the new international institutions that it was hoped would ensure its implementation.
Well, the decades that followed gave grounds for hope that humanity had indeed learned its
lesson and that a new age had begun guided by universal values that went beyond religion,
nationality or culture, and was founded on this new body of universal law,
as it was thought to be based on human rights and give the possibility of a new international culture of lawfulness.
International courts began to hold to account those found guilty of crimes against humanity.
Countries that had been former enemies over many centuries came together first
in Europe and then gradually in other regions to form transnational unions,
which cooperated on economic, legal, cultural, scientific and political challenges, as well as the emerging global threats to the environment.
Real progress was made in tackling infectious diseases and reducing poverty and hunger.
The end of the Cold War saw serious efforts to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons and limit their further proliferation to new states.
To some, especially in the West, it really began to look as though a new golden age was dawning.
Then came Tuesday, the 11th of September 2001, and another terrorist attack of devastating significance.
It was not, but this was the first major terrorist attack since the pre war campaigns of the old anarchists,
though it was colossal in terms of the numbers killed and injured, but it was symbolically massive, too.
Since the Second World War, there have been many terrorist campaigns as the colonies sought their freedom from imperial control and some that
were also part of the victorious struggle between the United States and the USSR during the so-called Cold War.
But since then, there had been warning signs of something new.
Ancient feuds in the Balkans, frozen for decades within the sphere of influence of the USSR, started to re-emerge as the old Soviet system dissolved,
and United Nations forces were unable to prevent some subsequent massacres, even when they were present in Africa, too.
There were genocidal horrors that challenged the hope that in such situations,
even the most fundamental rights could be protected by the international community.
Even as the so-called second generation or socio economic rights were being pressed, new rights and responsibilities were also being promulgated.
Group rights establishing no ethnic or religious minorities and first nation peoples should be treated were being added to the canon of human rights.
The new Doctrine of Responsibility to Protect was endorsed by all the members of the states of the member states of the United Nations in 2005.
If one was to judge on what was agreed on paper at a global level, enormous progress was being made.
However, away from the chambers of the international institutions, of the libraries of global agreements.
A different story was unfolding.
Many people and communities around the world did not feel, but in reality, their human rights as individuals and groups were actually being protected.
Nor did they believe that peaceful democratic politics were showing any evidence that matters would be satisfactorily addressed in that way.
As a result, some countries have been experiencing the return of terrorism and not only in historic.
To the unstable regions such as the Middle East in my own part of the United Kingdom, with all its history of parliamentary democracy,
high intellectual and educational achievement, relative prosperity,
and the role of the UK as a signatory and sometimes author of many international human rights commitments.
But even within the United Kingdom, all was not well. From 1968,
a terrorist campaign was brought by the IRA with the aim of breaking Northern Ireland away from the UK to create an independent socialist republic.
Republicans insisted that the partition of Ireland had only been maintained through
systematic injustices and the disregard of the rights of the Catholic nationalist people.
There were civil rights marches in 67, but when these were confronted with pro-British protesters and violent loyalist mobs, the guns,
which had been silent for some years,
came back out again and physical force Republicanism returned to the tactic of terrorism it has employed in the past.
But now, with an expanded arsenal and tactics upgraded from the outbreaks of violence
in earlier centuries and the War of Independence in the early 20th century.
Unless you think these things are all kind of separated from each other and local.
So every time you hear about a car bomb going off in Afghanistan or Iraq, just remember it was invented in Belfast.
Guy in the air, right. Was taking a carload of homemade explosive and he discovered it was becoming unstable.
And so he decided to just exploded when it was in the centre of Belfast.
And serendipitously, at least from his perspective, discovered this was an extremely effective form of bomb.
And of course it went all around the world. So these are not merely looking for clues.
Well,
the initial reaction of Northern Ireland's Protestant Unionist Regional Administration in Belfast and subsequently the British government in London,
two rounds of politically motivated violence or terrorism was a largely security response.
But the more the local police force, later backed by the British army, tried to crack down on the terrorism and violence.
The more the terrorists built their support in some pockets of the Catholic nationalist minority community,
when the guns and bombs appeared in earnest, the political concessions that were offered were seem to be too little, too late.
Soon, the British government found itself agreeing to the temporary suspension of some human rights,
in particular the introduction of executive detention without trial known locally as internment.
This polarised the community further and acted as a powerful recruiting sergeant for the IRA in the Catholic nationalist community.
And since loyalists were internment as well, it also distanced many people in the loyalist community from the police and the British government.
It took years for the British government to learn the lesson that while there is a security role in combating terrorism,
the propagation of human rights and counter-terrorism is often wholly counterproductive, especially in open democratic societies.
Once the government had openly breached some human rights for the use of internment,
even in what could be regarded as extenuating circumstances, it became vulnerable to the accusation that it had also breached others.
And not only did other major breaches occur, but importantly,
claims of human rights abuses then became part of the propaganda struggle of terrorist organisations against the government.
So it was possible to instrumentalize human rights claims whether or not they were the case.
And it's because in sufficient numbers of cases they were the case.
Northern Ireland was sliding back into the deep historic feud and it remained there for a generation.
All attempts at normal political negotiation,
social and economic development and incremental human rights improvements failed to end the terrorist campaign.
Police and army chiefs repeatedly told the government, and some even said publicly that they would continue to do their job and contain the situation,
but that there was no military or security solution to the problem of terrorism.
It was, they said, a political problem that would have to be addressed politically.
And it had been recognised, realised quite clearly by those responsible for public order and security.
Terrorism was not just ordinary violent crime.
And in can I say one of the reasons we then were able to move on to a peace process was
that the IRA had also recognised that they could not be defeated by the British Army,
but they could not defeat the British army.
And so we had a hurting stalemate, not just a stalemate, not just a hurting situation, but a hurting student.
And I remember working with Martin McGuinness in Iraq, who were meeting with all the various political parties there.
And he said, you need to understand, you can fight for the next five years.
For the next 25 years, it won't solve anything.
You'll just kill more of your own people because this is a political problem and it needs to be addressed in that in that way.
And of course, coming from Martin, that was a very powerful statement indeed.
Of course, terrorism is a criminal activity and you can't go on a terrorist campaign without breaking the law.
But while the ordinary criminal delightfully in Northern Ireland, often referred to as UDC or ordinary decent criminals,
while ordinary criminals engage in crime for personal benefit,
they try to ensure that no one finds out what they've done and they regard conviction and punishment as a disaster.
But the terrorist generally seeks and gets no personal material benefit,
ensures that the public knows that it was his organisation that carried out the
atrocity and regards the failure of his cause as the ultimate catastrophe,
not the compromise of his own umbrella, or even the loss of his own life.
The failure of policing and security. Attempts to resolve the problem of terrorism.
And then on. Astounding that we were dealing with a different motivation for a different kind of crime in Northern Ireland eventually led
us to find a new way of analysing and understanding the problem of terror in order to find a new way of dealing with it.
Human rationality was important, but it had to be applied to understanding the non-rational part of the human condition.
That is the part that feels so passionately about values, principles,
culture and identity that people are prepared to sacrifice their social and economic welfare and even their
lives and those of their children in a struggle that is not in their best socio economic empowerment.
This is really very important because for much of the 20th century,
political science has suggested that people operated in in their best socio in power.
What became very clear to us was that people were acting in ways that were not in their best social, economic and power interests.
And so pouring money and economic benefits did not improve the prospects for ending the violence.
In fact, we used to joke that all it did in Northern Ireland was create upwardly mobile Provos and give people more money to do what they were doing.
It did not make people give up on their wish and vision.
So it was necessary to start paying attention to human relationships, not just between individuals and within families,
but much more importantly, the relationships of the various large groups that made up our divided people.
The problem was not social economic development fundamentally, but it was three sets of relationships between Protestant,
unionist and Catholic nationalists in the north, between the people of the North and the people of the South, and between Britain and Ireland.
And the Irish peace process was then constructed on the basis of an examination of three sets of disturbed, historic relationships.
The political represented, as the IRA said, they were only engaging in the violence because they could not find any other way to deal with the deep
unfairness as they felt the history of humiliation and disrespect for their people and their culture,
their human rights.
If there could be a new way of writing these wrongs and building new relationships characterised by respect for human rights in all its fullness,
and achieved through a new process of engagement and dealing with the legacy of the hurts of the past.
Then perhaps a new beginning was possible.
And while this process has followed a long and winding road with many hurdles and setbacks,
it has ultimately been successful in helping the people of Ireland,
North and South,
leave behind a belief in the use of violence and physical force and instead commit to democratic politics and the human rights based rule of law.
Brexit or Brexit, by the way, however, on the 11th of September 2001,
as I was in Belfast and watched the unfolding atrocities in New York, Arlington and Stoney Creek,
Pennsylvania, live on my television screen,
I immediately sensed that something I recognised was underway but of an entirely different order of magnitude.
We had known terrorism and political violence for over 30 years and experience told me that in addition to the
individual casualties who had lost their lives and others who lives would be changed forever in the US attacks,
there would be another unspoken victim the liberal commitment to a human rights based approach to communal problems.
This attack on the United States of America on its home territory in such a devastatingly symbolic fashion,
would almost certainly result in a fierce and violent response, as was intended by the terrorists who planned and executed the attack.
That was its purpose.
Although successive U.S. administrations had been involved in the Irish peace process and had been very considerable contributions to it,
even as I watched the television screen and heard details of what was happening, my heart sunk.
I had been in the Middle East enough to know that these attacks, which were so destructive of the lives and human rights of those in New York,
at the Pentagon and elsewhere would almost certainly result in pressure for powerful punitive responses,
which would test the limits of human rights elsewhere, and change the global dynamic from progress towards greater openness,
freedom and human rights to an emphasis on security based on physical force.
Confidence in the rule based system would likely begin to dissolve when in our province
we were learning lessons about what worked and did not work in addressing terrorism.
I could not help fearing that the counterproductive reactions I had seen as a teenager in Belfast.
Would not be unleashed in a fierce reaction to the 911 attacks.
Despite us having learned repeatedly at home that this was precisely the purpose and intention of the terrorists.
Well, we did not have long to wait.
The terrorists maintained that they were resorting to the use of terrorism as a tactic because they had learned from experience to have
no faith in the instruments of international human rights law and politics to achieve the betterment of their people in their region.
In turning to the the tactic of terrorism. They were breaching the criminal law,
but they claimed they were doing so in the service of what they regarded as a higher law on behalf of their people,
their values, their religion, culture and identity.
As they struck back at the terrorist networks, the major global powers themselves increasingly disregarded the instruments,
institutions and processes of the United Nations and human rights law.
Military interventions were based on U.N. Security Council resolutions if they could be achieved.
But not getting the UNESCO agreement was not regarded as an absolute prohibition.
The justification for some of the military intervention soon came to be seen at home and abroad as dependent on untrustworthy information,
even dishonesty. The use of extraordinary rendition and inhuman or degrading treatment were no longer seen as beyond the pale,
even for some members of the Security Council when dealing with terrorism.
And the term terrorism was increasingly used as a morally loaded descriptor,
rather than the identification of a specific tactic of asymmetric warfare.
The labelling of violent actions as terrorism became a justification in itself for almost any kind of aggressive military or other actions,
even, and perhaps especially when they contravene human rights provisions.
One of the singular strengths of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
precisely that these rights are meant to apply to every single human being,
wherever they are in the world, independent of domestic pressures or political systems within states.
However, there is not only a legislature that sets down what is the law,
but also a policing service that can move freely throughout the jurisdiction to investigate alleged breaches of the law.
A justice system that makes judgements as to the guilt or innocence and handed down sentences
as well as a penal system to administer the sanctions and say of those found guilty,
not all of these key functions of a justice system apply fully in the case of international human rights law
and increasing the number and complexity of human rights instruments without having effective implementation,
begun to bring the system into disrepute and left some people feeling that in the absence of redress,
they must eventually take matters into their own hands and respond with passionate and destructive.
Bangor human rights enthusiasts have also felt that ensuring that a new right is adopted by the
by international agreement is always a step towards its full recognition and implementation.
However, it is here that the limits of human rationality and human rights become apparent,
and the importance of human relationships and the psychology of large groups make their presence felt.
If the statement of the human rights does not need within a reasonable time to its implementation,
the whole notion of human rights begins to be undermined.
The addition of too many rights introduced too quickly, sometimes in conflict with each other,
can begin to produce a reaction against human rights as an approach.
As a result, some people may turn to physical force again.
Terrorism being one of the mechanisms to address the wrongs they feel human rights promised but failed to resolve.
On the other hand, those opposed to the terrorists and the changes they want to see come to feel
that so much focussed on the rights of terrorist suspects and communities
from which they emerge becomes an obstacle to the recognition of the rights of the communities who are the victims of the terrorist campaigns.
And they demand that their responsible governments take more and more strident
action in what appears to be a fight for survival against an existential threat.
In successfully frustrating the authority of the state and of the international institutions of cooperation,
and by demonstrating the complexity of the implementation of the rights of every individual and community,
terrorists have provoked increasing restrictions on rights and freedoms.
They have dented the hopes for social, economic and social international order expressed in Article 20.
It diminished the rights and freedoms, as well as the sense of respect and community set down in Article 20 and succeeded in diverting governments
from their commitment to fully maintain undeveloped human rights and freedoms as set out onto the UN.
Diar. It is of course crucial in such times that we maintain our commitment to human rationality and human rights.
But we must also begin to understand that they do not in themselves represent the sufficient understanding of the human condition,
how we function as individuals and groups, how we can evolve and progress to greater peace, stability and reconciliation in our world.
We need to appreciate that emotions are not just feelings.
They are part of the way our brains work.
They are part of the way we think. Terrorism does not just frighten us.
It affects the way our brains function. We know this from doing functional magnetic resonance imaging of people's brains.
Different parts of the brain start to function with a different grammar and syntax, producing different sets of rules for thinking and action.
We need to reflect the code during relatively peaceful, stable periods.
Our understandings tend to proceed by incremental evolutionary development in times of crisis.
Our whole way of thinking and being in the world is challenged, and it can become possible, sometimes even necessary,
to take a leap into a whole new paradigm of understanding a frightening, challenging and dangerous time, but still one with opportunities.
However, there are further quite fundamental problems about the rational, liberal, democratic, movement based order.
It has been building for a long time that a stable, fair, merit guided system would lead to stability and equity.
But this is not necessarily so.
In fact, there are indications that stability benefits those who can best use stability to better themselves and their families.
Statements about everyone being born equal, as we reflected in Article one earlier on, are simply statements of faith.
And contrary to evidence, it's clear we're not all born equal.
No matter what I would have done, how hard I would have worked,
whatever time I had spent training, I was never, ever going to be even a decent footballer.
I chose the wrong parents in the first place and everything thereafter was downhill.
We're not equal. We're different. It's crucial that we are fair.
Not to pretend we are all equal is a false prospectus.
The stability that we all want and crave can simply mean that some individuals and families will accumulate wealth and power,
and the divisions between the haves and have nots will increase because there is no resetting of the system.
This is not a new issue. In the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations.
There were mechanisms for resetting or interrupting stability without wars.
The Jewish year of Jubilee where every 50 years so seven, seven times seven Hebrew slaves and prisoners were to be freed,
debts forgiven, and the mercies of God should be particularly manifest.
Did it always happen? No. But there was an understanding of a fundamental principle, and it wasn't just there.
The idea has been around a long time in that part of the world.
We have many episodes of general debt cancellations.
Famously, of course, King Hammurabi in 1792 B.C. forgave all citizens debts owed to the government, high ranking officials and dignitaries.
Despite the Millennium Year of Jubilee campaign in 2000, adopted by some 40 countries and the Catholic Church.
I'm not particularly suggesting that we should institute. This is a habit. That's not my point.
I'm simply trying to point out that this implicitly recognises from ancient times until now that the idea of a stable,
liberal democratic system producing equality and and and equity in society is actually a flawed perspective.
It's a wish fantasy. And our world is immensely more complex and our population enormous in comparison with the ancient Middle East.
But the issue the issue is fully resolved. Let me pick up the issue about equality.
As I say, our genetic endowment differs substantially from person to person, whether measured in terms of physical, intellectual or social ability.
We're simply not the same, never mind equal.
And the wish to explain our differences entirely on the basis of environmental or social influences is wishful thinking.
There is no scientific basis for it at all. That's not to say those aren't important.
They are, of course important, but they are not the only thing. There are certain things that we cannot change.
So for those who wish to be fair, it may, for example,
be necessary to provide much greater assistance to those who have disabilities
or less abilities in order that they may have a fair chance in equality.
And that sense disadvantages those who are already disadvantaged, too.
Fairness is a completely different thing from equality.
I've already mentioned that the other principle that doesn't test to stand the test of time is the notion that we are entirely rational beings.
That's probably not in dispute. We all recognise that, although we are very rational, it's other people that are not so rational.
But the non-rational are not has generally been regarded since the Enlightenment as a problem, a feeling of the human condition.
One of the ways in which artificial intelligence is actually going to become a threat to us because machines are not troubled by feelings.
It's assumed that this is a weakness.
However, we need to consider whether the fact of human evolution and survival until now may not be despite the capacity to operate emotionally,
but may be due to that fascinating capacity to operate in ways that are not merely rational.
One of our colleagues here in Oxford is publishing a book with Harvard University Press in a few weeks time.
Dominic Johnson, also colleague of Change War Program,
where he is showing that some of those things that we think of as limitations, the non-rational things like overconfidence.
Fundamental attribution error. In-Group outgroup may contribute to success as much as the failure.
He examines, for example, in great detail how Washington had clearly absolutely no chance of winning.
He kept losing. The odds against him were unbelievable, and yet he refused to recognise it.
And in the end the result was, of course, what we know.
But had he not been overconfident? Confident to a point of unreasonableness.
People to pack up and go home.
So this this question, when we are involved in political life, I mean, I often say you've got to be overconfident to be a politician.
There's no point in standing up and saying like you would as an academic research.
Well, you know, I've got some interesting ideas. It's about how we might govern the country.
And, you know, I don't have the answers to everything, but I've got some pretty good methods.
And if you'd like to entrust me with the opportunity, we will try it out a few times and you won't even get that far.
You've got to say I knew the answer, and if you vote for me, I will deliver.
The problem, of course, is that people vote for the fantasy, and when the fantasy isn't fulfilled, politics itself suffers.
Nevertheless, there is this business of overconfidence, not always being a disadvantage and other non-rational elements as well.
So what does this say to us?
It says to us that, as was the case a century ago, our reactions to terrorism may even contribute to us slipping into a third global conflict.
Arguably, we are already in one in cyber. If the things that are happening in cyberspace already over the last few years were happening on land,
sea, air or in space, it would already be declared a global conflict.
We are slipping into this. But there is the possibility also that some of the fundamental principles on which we've been operating for the last
four or 500 years may now be about to be superseded by we don't quite know what not just a few different ideas,
but a fundamentally different way of thinking.
This is enormously challenging and for many people, profoundly frightening.
But there is also the possibility that we may be standing on the threshold of a major step forward in the understanding of humanity,
a paradigm shift that takes us beyond a quite legalistic, rationalistic,
linear approach to human rights and into the complexity science of large group relationships.
You have to work very creatively on taking such a next step because not only are rights and freedoms,
but perhaps even our very survival as a species may depend upon it.
But it does give us a chance of finding something marvellously new.
Thank you.