O, People of Good Conscience
How many times have we heard persecuted Palestinians call for rescue by crying out “جماعة خير يا” (o, descent people) reaching out to the world’s few remaining humans of good conscience. This is the same call to “all men and women of goodwill,” echoed in the Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The call to people of good conscience has never been more urgent. And where are they in this poly-crisis of moral and structural collapse?
You can find them represented on these pages of Land Times/أحوال الأرض issue 35.
Answering the call to “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln did 165 years ago, this issue reports civil efforts to remedy current and historic injustices that deny peoples’ their human habitat, so much under siege by demonic forces.
With a southwestern Asia/North Africa focus, Land Times/أحوال الأرض projects the region’s civil society initiatives, with those in the global sphere, to build and defend a human rights habitat. Opening the line up of articles is HLRN’s address to governments at this spring’s Arab Forum for Sustainable Development, reminding of the priority issues involved and values at stake under Sustainable Development Goal 11, promising to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable by 2030. That special theme of this year’s High-level Political Forum (HLPF) will accompany the full review of eight of the region’s states for their performance of the 2030 Agenda so far, as also previewed here.
However, the reality of conflict and displacement overshadows much of the progress, leading to Lessons of Urban Warfare conveyed by experience in the region since 1948. Local civil society has a long record of opposing and warning of war, which has assumed atrocious dimensions since Europe’s inter-war colonization of Palestine. The use of starvation as a weapon looms prominently in the resulting hellscape, which lead to the call to “systemic transformation.” This is reflected in the prospect of implementing the recent 3rd Global Nyéléni Forum’s “Common Political Action Agenda,” with a focus on the region’s priorities as posed by HIC-HLRN.
HIC Member News features the Go Green Sudan organization, whose profile shows how civil initiative seeks to fill a need for environmental protection, even in the context of the most severe war-and-displacement crisis on the planet. HIC and its Members also seek partners to achieve an elusive human rights habitat, including through a new Memorandum of Understanding with UN Habitat, reported here, to join forces in that pursuit in the framework of that agency’s Strategic Plan 2026–2029 and the New Urban Agenda, which turns 10 years old in this mid-point year.
Also on the global level, issue 35 turns once again to the pattern of housing and land rights violations mounting in the Indian-occupation territory of Kashmir over the previous seven months. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan takes on a special focus with a new HLRN publication on housing and land rights issues there since the turn of the millennium. The summary article in this issue focuses on the capital Baku, which played host to this biennium’s 13th World Urban Forum (WUF) under the theme “Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities.” HIC’s numerous activities at WUF13 are memorialized in a companion article, among which was HIC’s 50th anniversary party, sharing the auspicious occasion with UN Habitat, which also was founded at the first UN Conference on Housing and Human Settlements at Vancouver, B.C., in 1976.
Among the issues covered by HLRN at WUF13 was the phenomenon of “green evictions.” The resulting eponymous article provides an analysis of the patterns emerging from cases across regions, whereby nature conservation or climate-change projects involve the forced eviction and dispossession of the most-vulnerable people in their path.
Those indirect victims of climate change are mostly in rural and remote locations, but this report of civic action also crosses city limits with HIC’s active engagement on behalf of the urban food insecure constituency in the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism for relations with the Committee on World Food Security (CSIPM). This period marks a turning point in several respects as HIC’s representation undergoes a renewal at a time when engaged stakeholders prepare for the coming reform of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN (FAO).
That timely process follows the failed Summit of the Future last year, but brings us full circle to the call to all people of goodwill to correct the world’s current wayward course and realize needed systemic transformation.
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