Whatever happened to saving the world? There was a time when the latest top-level report on the future of society had the power to stop millions in their tracks and provoke energetic promises to implement its recommendations, writes Paul Cullen.
The Brandt Commission in 1980 and the Bruntland Commission in 1987 were just two ground-breaking reports that fired generations of internationalists to work towards making the world a better place.
What, then, should we make of the silence that has greeted the latest doorstopper to emerge from the United Nations system this month? The report of the Commission on Human Security took over two years to complete and involved some of the world's leading figures, including Ireland's former EU Commissioner, Peter Sutherland. Chaired by the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, Human Security Now dealt with a subject that, on the face of it, could not be more relevant to current challenges.
As the report says, human security means "protecting fundamental freedoms - freedoms that are the essence of life". Yet many states are now failing to protect their people and even becoming a source of threat to them: "That is why attention must now shift from the security of the state to the security of the people - to human security."
But with the UN despondent and in disarray, and the world's eyes turned to the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the international media ignored the report. There was no one to listen to Ms Ogata's assertion that "the UN stands as the best and only option available to preserve international peace and stability as well as to protect people".
It's not that anyone violently disagrees with the report and its call for human security to be mainstreamed in the work of international organisations. Nor do people reject its call for protection for people from conflict and the proliferation of arms, its encouragement of fair trade and minimum living standards everywhere and its emphasis on education and good healthcare.
Let's face it, though, we've heard all this before, in a hundred other reports. Piety, or even pieties, will not save the world from itself. The UN and its number-crunching departments are excellent at churning out figures that illustrate the extent of our global problems - 800,000 people dying violently each year, 16 million refugees, 800 million without enough food in the developing world, and 24 million in the developed world, and 24 armed conflicts being fought out in 2001.
But the international system is less effective at prescribing specific cures, and it is even weaker at ensuring that the medicine is taken. That may be no fault of the UN, but by now the lesson might have been learned that it is better not to bite off more than you can chew.
Fortunately, another, very different type of report came out this week. In contrast to the UN's woolly pronouncements, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy takes a hard-headed look at the causes of civil war and at ways of counteracting it.
Dr Paul Collier, an adviser to the World Bank, brings to his study the rigour and cold objectivity of an economist, ill-inclined to accept conventional wisdoms unless they are backed up by scientific evidence. "Every time a civil war breaks out some historian traces its origin to the 14th century and some anthropologist expounds on its ethnic roots," he says. "Some countries are more prone to civil war than others but distant history and ethnic tensions are rarely the best explanations."
Instead, Dr Collier looks to a nation's recent past and its economic conditions as the causes of conflict. In place of ethnic tensions and ancient political feuds, he blames entrenched poverty and heavy dependence on natural resources.
His conclusions emerge from a study of 52 major civil wars that occurred between 1960 and 1999. The typical conflict lasted seven years and left a legacy of persistent poverty and disease. But its negative effects extended far beyond the actual fighting, to neighbouring countries and even the rich West.
Leaving combatants to fight it out among themselves is not only heartless but foolish, he says. Most of those who suffer have little say about the war, and the risk of a recurrence of conflict is high. Then there are the wider consequences: refugee flows, infectious diseases, higher military expenditure. Dr Collier says the problems of hard drugs, HIV and international terrorism are all the byproducts of civil wars.
Some 95 per cent of illegal drugs are produced in civil war countries, he points out. The initial spread of HIV was closely associated with the civil war in Uganda in 1979, and the large number of rapes carried out along the border with Tanzania. Al-Qaeda chose Afghanistan for its training camps because of the lack of controls arising from the civil war there.
Dr Collier makes specific, implementable recommendations that governments should heed. He wants more and better aid, targeted on the poorest countries most at risk of conflict.
The international management and protection of natural resources should be improved, he says. Rich endowments of diamonds, oil and other natural resources are all too often associated with conflict and bad government, partially because they provide a tempting source of revenue for would-be rebels. The World Bank study proposes shutting rebel organisations out of international markets. Poor countries should have greater protection against shocks in the price of the commodities they produce, and there should be greater public scrutiny of the revenues of oil companies and others exploiting the resources of developing countries.
Finally, he suggests co-ordinated cuts in military spending to prevent regional arms races. If these measures were introduced, he says, the number of countries in civil war at any given time would drop by half. Dr Collier's study may be optimistic and it mightn't save the world, but it could make it a better place.