Tag: mental-health

To stay or to go – when there’s no easy answers

February 5th, 2026

During a barrage of drones entering the city, I had this thought: how does anyone rationalise staying here? It was nuts. Absolutely crazy. We were all, everyone in this city and throughout every Ukrainian city — like so many sitting ducks. How on Earth could anyone rationalise staying here? That was closely followed by another thought, which I will return to later. There was the sound of the drones, flashes of light, explosions. I cannot say I have become used to it – not entirely. It is still something that unsettles, even if it doesn’t shock in the same way that it used to.

Back in 2022, in Kyiv, I was shocked. All I had experienced up till then was four days of a peaceful city – a place that shimmered in the sun under a week of crisp, clear Autumn weather. The domes on the churches shone. The small lake I could see from the window sparkled. People went about their business. Apart from the soldiers everywhere, it almost felt like a normal life. Then, on a Monday morning, the missiles struck. I had read about this happening. Reading about something is by no means the same as experiencing it. I realised then, as the missiles hit Kyiv, that there were few situations like this where there was time to contemplate what might be the end of one’s life over a period of minutes. The other times when I had considered I might snuff it, there had been a matter of seconds between realising that fact and the outcome. This was different.

The 6^th or 7^th floor of an old, soviet-style apartment building in Kyiv did not feel like a good place to be right then. Explosions, some further away and some closer. What was the worst-case scenario? I have a tendency to think through worst-case scenarios – it has become something of a habit. Whether this comes from my early days in the mountains, or from an in-born mental tendency to anticipate the worst, I don’t know. Whatever the case, I did it then, in Kyiv. I visualised the building turning to a pile of twisted rubble. I remembered the old elevator – it wouldn’t work. There would be stacks of concrete, twisted metal and…and even as I thought all this, it occurred to me it wasn’t a helpful train of thought. Was there anything I could usefully do about it, right now? I thought of the eventual rescue workers who might come. I should probably have my passport on me. And with that I went back into the room – something a Ukrainian would later tell me was not something one should ever do having taken shelter.

On re-entering the room, I glanced out of the window. What I saw caused me to linger longer than was necessary, and that too was foolish. A plume of dark smoke rose from a building that had been hit. There were many thoughts this brought to mind. I have no idea how long I stood there. “What the hell is he thinking?” was one of my thoughts. “He” being Putin. What was he thinking? I don’t have such thoughts anymore. It seems to be nothing more than a case of maximising chaos while attempting to instil fear and terror. That’s the essence of it. Then two words came to mind: Russian roulette. I grabbed the passport and went back to the small alcove at the door where I’d taken shelter.

There were other things I understood in a way I hadn’t before on that morning. I considered saying goodbye to my nearest and dearest – but, there was a chance I would live to see another day. What were the odds? Better not to scare anyone unnecessarily, but still to say something. And again, there was the question of what one could usefully do in such a situation. I had come to Ukraine to help. I went online and donated money. Even as I did so, I felt the craziness of sitting in a room in Kyiv while missiles fell, donating money online. This made no sense whatsoever – zero. Nevertheless, it had taken this moment to understand some very fundamental points. One was the lived reality on the ground, as it unfolded. Another was that money would be absolutely useless to me if I were to die. A third was that the urge to donate freely had somehow needed a trigger like this. It had taken this much for me to really understand that for all my trivial scheming about possible tomorrows, and what I might need my money for, donating online was really the only thing I could usefully do at that moment.

When I finally decided to take a look in the hallway outside my room, I was struck by just how self-centred my musings to that point had been. There were two children sitting on cushions in the dark hallway. The power was off. They had their laptops out. This was, after all, just another Monday morning in Kyiv. There was nothing particularly unusual about it as far as anyone else was concerned. I could hear pots and pans being rattled around in an apartment down the way, and a baby crying somewhere. I had been told people had stopped going to bomb shelters. Even if there were shelters, it would be a trek getting to one from a place like this. It would be more than an inconvenience. Despite the official advice being to always take shelter, I could see that in many instances it just wouldn’t be practical to do so. Nevertheless, this was crazy too.

There was a time more recently when I heard drones and felt angry at them after the fact. This is about as useful as feeling angry at a thunderstorm, in that the anger doesn’t change the outcome. Yet there is a sense that this level of technology has rendered warfare incredibly passive in a deadly, horrifying kind of way. It was within my father’s living memory that bombers flew over England. One of his earliest memories was of his mother telling them to go and sit under the kitchen table with a cushion on their heads. In those days, someone still had to risk their pants and get into a bomber. Now, it is just these deadly, motorised things set into motion, but with no human agent directly invested in their dispersal. It is possibly the worst kind of assailant. Unless one is operating air defences, the average person is quite unable to take any useful action. That complete lack of agency is something I find disturbing.

Coming back to that night more recently when drones were motoring overhead and I was wondering how anyone could rationalise staying, the next thought was that leaving wasn’t the answer either. If getting people to leave was the intended outcome, which it would seem to be at least in part, then the very act of staying was a necessary form of resistance. On some level, it was like neither staying or going made total sense. Any drone or missile attack could potentially kill any one of us. It really was as random as that. I talked to a grandmother who said that as much as she liked seeing her grandchildren from time to time, she would feel better if they weren’t in Ukraine. I could understand that sentiment. But, she went on, that was a decision for the parents, not for her. Indeed, it is a decision for every individual, and not one that is necessarily easy or straightforward to answer. For some, leaving might not even be a realistic option even if it were a desirable one. For families, there is the question of whether to stay together, or to separate, given that most men are not permitted to leave under martial law. All of these decisions can carry significant consequences.

With time I resolved not to give the drones or missiles any more mental space than was absolutely necessary. Having considered the options, and the very limited things one can do in such a situation, it seems there is little to be gained from stressing over it any further. Music is a great thing at such a time. The sound of drones doesn’t harmonise well with anything, but at least a good song is a better focus than the sound of deadly objects passing overhead in the early hours of the morning. Even in writing this, I wonder if it is too negative. Is focusing on anything but the present moment a waste of time? If it is, then writing my thoughts as I do now, recalling past experiences in order to make sense of the present, is perhaps not time well spent. Then again, there is no escaping the negative realities of this world. Maybe it’s necessary to confront the nightmarish elements head-on in order to try and understand and move past them.
The Illusion of Military Necessity: A Critical Perspective

September 22nd, 2025

The photos are all much the same, and there seem to be a lot of them. Rows of — predominantly male – troops. Unsmiling faces aligned in the same direction. Firearms locked into symmetrical rows. The same haircuts. The same uniforms. Minor differences are to be found in the sewn-on country flags and maybe the type of firearm. The military. I look at these images and am filled with an overwhelming sense of dismal futility. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who has this feeling. There’s news of more military investment coming from all quarters now. New munitions factories are opening in parts of Europe. There’s even a sense that some feel it’s a productive and unifying endeavour to rally around investing in tanks and armaments.

I wonder dully what my paternal grandfather would make of it. He, and many others of his generation, probably thought that in fighting for the duration of WW2 they were effectively guaranteeing it wouldn’t happen again: that others wouldn’t have to; that all of the mess and chaos would somehow be worth it. Even if their own lives were never going to be the same again, it would stop with them. It was a sacrifice, they thought, to ensure that Europe would be free; that the world would learn and move on and never resort to this madness again. On returning home in 1945, my grandfather’s conviction that “Europe is rotten” was firmly held. The family would move away, as many did at the time, for a new start a world away.

The other side of the family lived under occupation. Without knowing the details, I would guess the experience shaped outlook and thinking in fundamental ways. The sense that persecution could be anywhere – that neighbours might disappear, ‘they’ might come for you, and even if ‘they’ didn’t – you’d better be on your guard because there was no guaranteeing anything. Threat was the norm. Food was to be rationed. And anything that might be of some use should be kept, just in case. Even tulip bulbs might take on a new life. My family’s experience was by no means unique. One could say they were fortunate – certainly a lot more fortunate than many others.

‘The Military’, then. Back in June I received an email bearing these two words in its ominous subject line. The preamble of the attached newsletter starts like this:

“International humanitarian law (IHL) represents a balancing of priorities that have often been seen as being in tension: military necessity, on the one hand, and considerations of humanity, on the other. Inherent in this balancing act is the idea that military necessity and humanitarian imperatives are equally valid priorities that can be accommodated under the same legal framework to achieve related goals, allowing the military to fight effectively while avoiding needless suffering and destruction.”

–IRRC Vol. 107, No.928: The Military

As is typical of academic language – “a balancing of priorities that have often been seen as being in tension” – it is careful to tread very lightly and hedge its bets at every turn. It does not say, as some might, that trying to balance ‘military necessity’ (whatever that might be) and ‘humanity’ while ‘avoiding needless suffering and destruction’ and ‘allowing the military to fight effectively’ represents a complete clutter-fuck of competing priorities that are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile. And as is typical of legal language, the terms tend to be slippery. Slippery, and superficially persuasive. What sounds good on paper may be quite different on the ground. I learned this early on through terms like ‘reasonable force’ and ‘restraint’. What is ‘reasonable’ and what constitutes ‘restraint’ is very much up to individual interpretation. To a lawyer sitting in their office with a view to the ducks floating on the pond outside, ‘reasonable force’ and ‘restraint’ are likely to be something inherently reasonable, moderate and well-intentioned. I’m guessing they might add something like ‘as a last resort’ or ‘as a preventative of greater harm’ if pressed to define the terms. To someone working in a detention centre, it could simply mean something they use in order to get their job done in a reasonable length of time. And if that means a bit of common assault or manhandling to get the job done, then to them that’s ‘reasonable force’ and ‘restraint’.

When we look at conflict, the reality might not be all that different. If a cranky little dictator decides he wants to expand his empire just that little bit further south, then there’s ‘military necessity’ as far as he’s concerned. Oh, but it’s illegal to resort to force in such a way, the lawyers and scholars might say. Jus ad bellum or jus in bello — the Latin terms, as well as the distinctions between imperial ambitions of territorial expansion or legitimate self-defence, don’t seem to matter a great deal in practice. And what’s more, reality doesn’t wait for the law. It bowls ahead and flattens a few more towns before anyone can say ‘IHL’. I suspect there are those who might say that even in the midst of these flagrant violations, the fact there is this ‘body of law’ means that there is a mechanism for accountability. Ha. The world could be waiting a very long time for every civilian death to be accounted for, for the destruction of every civilian building to be noted and remedied, for all the atrocities and violations to be painstakingly documented in courts of law, and for every victim to be fairly compensated as is their ‘right’. Again, experience would suggest that finite resources, limited political will and competing priorities will dictate that only the worst and most egregious cases are heard. As for the rest, well. Maybe they can take comfort in the fact that even though there’s no justice for them, there’s still this beautiful theoretical possibility and it’s called ‘IHL’.

It seems there is still this idea – and it may be closer to a delusion now — that somehow something like IHL and other paper-based rules and treaties are this gentlemanly thing that exists out there, in spite of the flagrant violations in all directions. Some would argue that it is still better than nothing, and maybe they hope that the doctrine of being a ‘proper gentleman’ in conducting warfare will one day prevail. This is despite plenty of evidence to the contrary suggesting that the likes of Putin and Netanyahu have no interest in being proper gentlemen, and are unlikely to suddenly be born-again in that regard. Maybe there is a sense that if the average soldier can be taught to respect and internalise IHL, then that’s something to be celebrated, never mind what the leader of his or her country might have in mind regarding total domination or wanton destruction.

I do not wish to go into the contents of that newsletter I received back in June. Suffice to say that after the initial preamble, the articles within largely seemed to glide effortlessly past the elephant in the room, broadly the elephant outlined above, to focus on various aspects of military development and practice. At a time like this, these feel like little more than distractions and diversions from the very large elephant that is currently lumbering about, looking at the next thing it might charge into. The newsletter describes its content as “topics of interest to both the humanitarian and military communities”, as if somehow these are two cosy little camps with their respective members gathering about the campfire to share interesting stories, both of them with equally valid, reasonable and worthy causes.

I think we need to be clear. Arguably there is no such thing as ‘military necessity’. Rather than blithely skipping ahead and looking at all these seemingly interesting side issues and the ramifications of various technological developments, maybe it’s necessary to take a step back and look at what exactly the options are. Parading the troops about, investing in arms, building munitions factories and focusing on gathering tanks and drones is one option. It is not the only option. And it is not necessary in the same way that humanitarian considerations are necessary. Without the basics of life, people die. Without an almost automatic recourse to violence and preparing for it, we have the possibility to think through what other options might be available. We can remember the Second World War, and rather than concluding that the answer is still the same as it ever was, we could think about what large-scale alternatives might actually look like. Impossible? Surely no more so than trying to reconcile the deadly consequences of resorting to war.

Image and Title Credit: AI
Sudan: victim of too many crises?

August 31st, 2025

“There should not be a competition between crises. But unfortunately we’re seeing with everything going on in the world, other conflicts, other humanitarian crises and other things making headlines, that unfortunately Sudan is – I wouldn’t even call it forgotten – it’s ignored.” — Leni Kinzli

Kinzli is right. Sudan is ignored. If we go by the numbers, 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance — that’s roughly two thirds of the population (ACAPS, 2025), 9 million displaced and 3.7 million acutely malnourished children (Goldhagen et al, 2024), then Sudan should be a lot more prominent in the media than it is. According to Oxfam, it is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. It should be making the headlines in ways that it isn’t. It should be up there alongside Ukraine and Gaza, yet it isn’t. When I read about Zamzam, I wondered why news of what happened there didn’t register back in April. Other things did. Somehow Zamzam escaped notice. Sudan wasn’t on the radar – or at least, not as prominently as it might have been.

Two things seem clear at this point: one is that media attention and press coverage do not necessarily converge according to numbers of people affected, or areas of greatest need. This reminds me of a lecturer I had at university, asking why most of us in a graduate zoology class were fixated on studying large, visually dominant vertebrates, when the most numerous species in the world were insects. Why, indeed? He called it species bias. The same could be said for geographical bias in terms of global attention and response to crises.

Maybe it’s human psychology to pay attention to things that are flashy and attention grabbing, or to focus our efforts on places that are felt to be like us, close to us, or somehow connected. How a crisis develops can have an impact too: the perceived level of injustice, or the suddenness of onset. Conflicts that are slow to develop, or long-standing, might garner less coverage than flashpoint disasters. A political element, such as the UK’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates outlined here in the case of Sudan, may be at play. Whatever the reasons, it would seem that the collective psyche should be on guard against this tendency to pay selective attention – and that moving towards analysis and investment based on numbers and need is a necessary correction.

Second is the fact that breaking news columns tend to feature an assortment of useless fluff amongst the range of grim realities. Competing with news of genocides and global conflicts, are stories about Taylor Swift’s new love interest, or some development in the personal life of Meghan Markle. For one thing, we only have so much time and attention. Weeding the news is time-consuming. It’s distracting. And it seems to suggest that the love interests of a musician are somehow equally deserving of our collective attention as life-and-death humanitarian emergencies.

Reflecting on those last two words humanitarian emergencies, it is possible to take a more philosophical approach. Calhoun (2010) does just that in an article titled ‘The idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis) Order.’ He describes what he calls ‘the emergency imaginary’ – a way of thinking that construes these as large, unpredictable events emerging out of nowhere, rather than the result of long-term political, economic, environmental and social factors coming to a head – a therefore predictable phenomenon. Coupled with that is the immediacy of news of such events, and how they are portrayed:

“This sense of suddenness and unpredictability is reinforced by the media, especially by television. The continuous stream of reporting on gradually worsening conditions is minimal and usually consigned to the back pages of newspapers and specialist magazines. It doesn’t make the cut for headlines—let alone half-hour broadcast news programs. So when violence or vast numbers of people lining up at feeding stations do break through to garner airtime, they seem to have come almost from nowhere.”

Again, I am reminded of a university lecturer, a different one this time, who predicted with an uncanny degree of accuracy the potential impacts of an earthquake occurring in a particular place. Five years later, the predictions came true – not through the major geological fault line he’d been referring to, but an altogether smaller and lesser known one. The combination of building in a particular area, a range of older, unreinforced buildings, and the human tendency to ignore low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios and fail to plan for them, combined with a natural event outside of anyone’s control. It had all the hallmarks of an emergency: unpredictable, devastating — yet very predictable in what the consequences might be if one had cared to look ahead and listen.

In light of this tendency to focus on emergencies, Calhoun describes who, or what, he believes ‘humanitarian’ has come to signify:

“The term “humanitarian” now is reserved for actions free from longer-term political or economic entanglements, actions deemed right in themselves, the necessary moral response to emergencies. It is something good to do without waiting for progress, even if you have doubts that progress will ever come. The emergency has become definitive because it is understood to pose immediate moral demands that override other considerations”

“It is the focus on immediate response suggested by the emergency imaginary, with its emphasis on apparently sudden, unpredictable, and short-term explosions of suffering. And it is sustained by the experience—or at least the hope—of altruistic work, of work embedded in direct moral purpose.”

Something good to do; the hope of altruistic work…with direct moral purpose. And, crucially, something good to do and by implication to feel good about, while wider circumstances, root causes and contributing factors are not addressed. It is not hard to see parallels, or similar ways of thinking, that take place in other settings. Take criminal offending and the justice system, for example. An offender is brought to trial. The offender is duly convicted and sent to jail. This too, is a reaction to an emergency of sorts: a moral and legal reaction to a criminal act. And while a judge might mention mitigating factors like the offender’s personal circumstances, the wider societal systems, and what might be a wide range of factors that lead to criminal offending, are left unaddressed. The emergency – or the offender – having been dealt with, life goes on until the next case comes along: another urgent response, another prison sentence or intervention, and maybe a sense that justice and morality has been served once again. Yet the long-term problems, the structural inequalities and issues that plague a society may persist, resulting in the same preventable things happening again.

Calhoun summarises this way of thinking as follows: “Emergency” thus is a way of grasping problematic events, a way of imagining them that emphasizes their apparent unpredictability, abnormality, and brevity and that carries the corollary that response—intervention—is necessary.’

We could look at Calhoun’s article about emergencies and point to the fact that these thoughts were written 15 years ago. Has the world moved on? From looking at the media today, it would seem that it hasn’t. We are still in a state of panning attention from one breaking emergency to the next, with what seems to be an ever-growing demand on our collective attention, and our potential for action. Attention is not necessarily given according to need, meaning that certain countries or regions, such as Sudan, are ignored and effectively left behind. The tendency to think in terms of emergency and urgent response, largely ignores root causes and the predictable, cumulative effects that build-up to create the next breaking ‘emergency’. The last word, too, shall go to Calhoun:

But transforming the global order—say, by making it more egalitarian as a way of limiting future suffering—is not on the manager’s agenda.

Reference: Calhoun, C. (2010). The idea of emergency: Humanitarian action and global (dis) order. Contemporary states of emergency: The politics of military and humanitarian interventions, 29-58.

Image Credit: AI
A Question of Personality

March 29th, 2025

This morning I was asked to describe my personality – in five words. The words I chose were: independent, diligent, caring, honest and empathetic. I picked these words on the spot, as it were, because someone had asked me to do so, and these were five adjectives that came to mind at that moment. When the call had ended, I turned these words over in my mind. Why had I picked them? Were they the right words? No, that was the wrong question. There wasn’t a “right” when it came to picking five words to describe my personality. But there was such a thing as better or worse choices, and more or less honest choices. So, why these five words? And was I even the right person to judge whether I lived up to any of these words?

The more I thought about it, the more I struggled to justify my choices, and this lack of clarity bothered me. I considered each word in turn. All have a degree of truth, but they aren’t the whole of it, somehow. What the hell is my personality anyway, even if I were to commit five paragraphs or pages to the topic? And should I distinguish between simple descriptions or traits, like the adjectives I’d listed, and a deeper, more abiding sense of self, character, or even that of ego? Now I felt like I was looking into an abyss. Five spindly trees clung to the precipitous cliffs: independent, diligent, honest, caring, empathetic trees.

If I was brutally honest, I wasn’t always particularly diligent. I might like to think I was, but there were times when diligence gave way to expediency, or even downright laziness. I could take issue with honesty too. I try to be honest, but I wasn’t sure that a certain amount of self-deception and censorship wasn’t at play, even here. For example, I wouldn’t always disclose that I suffered a traumatic and mind-shattering episode of something at the age of 22, if I thought it might jeopardise my chances of employment in the here and now. It wasn’t something I talked about much in general, come to that. Too complicated, maybe. Caring – I could be that, yet I could also be grumpy, bad-tempered, harsh and overly critical.

Actually, now I thought about it, hadn’t my personality as good as gone? It was like I had believed in a personality once, but now, looking back, personality seemed a strange, irrelevant and unwieldy concept. If we are truly changeable, then my personality probably wasn’t the same as it was ten years ago, or even yesterday. “We never step into the same river twice”. Who said it? I can’t remember now, but I suspect it must have been some philosopher of old. The saying captures a sense of constant flux and flow. Like that river, my personality might have moved on, grown, and then become less central or altogether irrelevant. I doubt that’s the same thing as ego dissolution, or what Buddhism might describe as the disappearance of an ‘I’ on the path towards enlightenment. I think that’s something else again.

Coming back to the words I chose, I tried to think of alternative choices. They actually weren’t too bad, I supposed, although one might wonder why I only chose the more positive descriptors and omitted to include any negatives. I was reminded of a headstone I came across in a cemetery recently.

Stumbling across that headstone and seeing the words at first glance, I had a strange feeling of something being wrong. These words were…no, these were not the words for a headstone! I stood still and read the inscription again. “Irascible, volatile, irritating, irritable”, tempered by “endlessly optimistic and kind”. And of Mr. Dunn: “Stubborn, contumacious” – whatever that was – I’d have to look it up, “limitlessly tolerant and patient”. These words were honest. And they were kind. “A perfect partnership”.

I wondered if the Dunn’s would have answered the personality question the same in life as they, or their family, clearly had in death.

Tag: mental-health

To stay or to go – when there’s no easy answers

The Illusion of Military Necessity: A Critical Perspective

Sudan: victim of too many crises?

A Question of Personality