Inter Vivos
The world we live in is increasingly interconnected. My corner of the universe is really quite small but somehow I manage to meet someone new or learn something every single day. At the click of a button, I talk to my mom, who lives across the country. I go to work and get reports from events in Mongolia. I get assignments handed down to me from a boss in Tunisia. I collaborate with counterparts in Bangladesh.
I know, I know. You’re probably thinking “Maddie, you work at international programs division. Of
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I’ve spent several weeks working on something called the GDPR. The GDPR is a regulation that was passed by the European Union but has the power to affect organizations around the world, even those not physically present in the EU. Because of growing global interconnectivity, I sat in hours of meetings discussing how to bring NCSC’s various privacy policies into compliance. Despite a marked lack of EU presence, we still find ourselves affected.
I also spent the week studying the conditions of women incarcerated in Honduras. According to the World Prison Brief, Honduras has a total prison population of approximately 18,950. In 2014, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) found that detainees often exert more power than the prison staff. They also found situations of men and women sharing cellblocks and military weapons being used in riots. Females have been identified as particularly vulnerable to human rights violations in the corrections setting. Females are also identified as the “fastest growing segment of the world’s prison population.” Approximately 4.3% of persons incarcerated in Honduras are female.
And the living conditions of these women are dictated (theoretically, at least) by rules made worlds away from where they actually live. The UN has created treaties on civil and political rights, conventions against torture, and even a compendium of criminal justice standards, all of which stretch into the corners of the world. In particular, they adopted a set of standards known colloquially as the Minimum Rules (known officially as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners) and four additional sets of rules all designed to impact prisoners and protect their rights. The Bangkok Rules specifically address the rights of women affected by the criminal justice system. The women in Honduras are supposed to be protected by these rules that were created literally thousands of miles from the country they live in.
One major concern of our interconnectivity is global security. On Thursday, I attended a conference hosted by the Center for a New American Security. While there I heard numerous discussions on how to use our defense “toolkit” and debates over what the best approaches were. They expounded on China’s recent technological advancements in their wartime capabilities and hypothesized about when exactly they might surpass us. Russia is making power plays in the Middle East and we need to be pragmatic in our approach to U.S.-Russian relations and maintaining a strategic stability. They elaborated on what U.S. strategies should be for the 2018 NATO Summit and how hard we should push for burden-sharing amongst members.
All of these talks were affected by a balance. We want to maintain our position as a player in the global community but our presence there opens us to security risks.
I continued to work on reports for the Justice For All program in Bangladesh. It’s been a couple of weeks but I’ve been part of evaluating how the program has played out for the past six years. It’s amazing to see all of the things they have accomplished and
I worked in Arlington, Honduras, Bangladesh, and Morocco all just this week. My work takes me around the world and keeps me connected to it.
Remember earlier when I said I was working with counterparts in Bangladesh? I got to meet one recently. She came back to the home office for a couple of days and we finally met in person. It’s insane to I finally met someone I had been working with for weeks.