Rebekah and Jillian's Post: Toulmin and the UN

The speech we are outlining was given by Gareth Evans, the president of the International Crisis Group (ICG) and Member of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change on 15 January 2005. The speech is entitled, "A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility." In the speech, Evans describes a document he and some other recently published containing 101 recommendations to the United Nations to better enable it to serve the world. The recommendations are categorized into these smaller groupings: "war within states; war between states; weapons proliferation; terrorism; organised crime; and, as a separate basket, the human security threats posed by poverty, disease and environmental crisis."

Stephen Toulmin describes an argument as needing six components: the grounds for an argument, a warrant for the argument and backing for it, modality and rebuttal, and finally a claim. The grounds for Evans creating the 101 recommendations is that "the security threats we face reach far beyond states waging aggressive war" - that is, that good war policies are not enough to provide security that the world needs. The backing for these grounds is that the recent tsunami affected the world globally - and yet not one nation was its perpetrator. The warrant, therefore, for the argument is that, because our world can be globally affected, it is imperative that we move towards operating together on a global level.

The modality and rebuttal are the sheer difficulties that an International Court is bound to face: to the doubts that an International Court can truly exist and function, Evans says, "Maybe it is wildly optimistic to think that any of this can happen, but many things can happen over time if you change the norms, the language, the expectations countries have of each other. If you just get the press asking over and over again, the same questions - and the right questions for once - better international behaviour might just conceivably be attainable."

The claim Evans ends with is that we are vulnerable, globally, and that it is no longer an option to deny our vulnerability and work as a global anarchy. He concludes, "the tsunami disaster, the world’s first truly global catastrophe, will prove to be that catalyst, demonstrating as it did that we are indeed one human family, ever more susceptible to common risks - and with a shared responsibility to tackle them."