Thursday, May 31, 2018

Exactly 10 years ago disarmament activist Thomas Nash was in Dublin to celebrate the signing of a landmark treaty to ban cluster bombs. He had led the campaign for change.

Now, a decade later, he’s embarking on another ground-breaking role: Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Massey University, the first such appointment for any New Zealand university

Nash, also a leading strategist for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), officially starts his new role tomorrow (June 1). His brief? To inject new thinking as well as a grounded perspective on how to take action in bringing about meaningful social change.

While fostering world peace, or tackling poverty, inequality and climate change impacts might seem a tall order for the average young idealist, he is living proof that we can make a difference on the world stage.

He hopes that discussing solutions to daunting, complex and unprecedented humanitarian and ecological issues, and sharing his insights and strategies from high profile campaigns he’s been involved in, will inspire and fuel new thinking and action among this generation.

Profit before people and planet?

Nash says in his new role he hopes to “cook up some projects that really put Aotearoa New Zealand on the global map in pushing for a response to the greatest global challenges facing us today. The future is ours to make and, frankly, looking around at the state of the world and who is in charge, if we want a decent future we all need to get involved.”

The Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence role sits within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Its establishment there reflects a deliberate effort to challenge some of the existing thinking around business and commercial enterprise that has often put profit before people and the planet,” he says.

The creation of the role also puts Massey in sync with overseas institutions like Stanford University, Brown University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which all have resident social entrepreneurs. Nash sees it as an opportunity to generate rich discussion and ideas among staff and students – particularly those enrolled in Bachelor of Arts core papers – about creating change through organising and building campaigns and will challenge them to question existing notions of profit, ownership and power structures.

“There’s a feeling out there that everything has to be driven by profit or export growth, that it’s a dog eat dog world, that military power and economic strength determine influence and that we have to compete with each other to survive. Actually, that’s just one particular system that we have right now, and it might be that most of us would prefer a different kind of system. We need to think about that together and this role is a chance to do that.”

Climate change and plastic waste reduction are other key issues he’d like to get more people thinking about. “Massey has some world-leading thinkers on marine plastic pollution. Imagine a partnership between Massey academics, conservation and environment groups and businesses that want to move away from plastic.”

Mr Nash has ‘walked the talk’, having coordinated the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) where he was based in Canada, Peru and the UK (2004-2010), building up and leading a coalition of 300 NGOs. He also co-founded London-based organisation Article 36, which has played a leading role in international work against nuclear weapons, autonomous weapons and protecting civilians from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.

He is currently working on two start-up projects in New Zealand – one as co-founder of New Zealand Alternative, an independent organisation promoting a progressive role for New Zealand in the world, and the second is as a director of Shelter, a social enterprise seeking to shape the construction and housing sector with innovative models for construction, development and ownership.

Social change for ‘everyday people’

Nash’s achievements are a natural progression from his early life – he grew up in Palmerston North and remembers attending protest marches with his parents in the 1980s as a youngster. Being a child of Massey University academics who thought critically about power and society set the tone for his work.
“Growing up in the 1980s there was a sense of activism and protest in New Zealand. My mum took me to the protest marches against the Springbok Tour [in 1981] when I was a toddler. People were out on the streets fighting for a nuclear-free New Zealand, for Māori sovereignty, for homosexual law reform.”

While at Freyberg High School, he joined a delegation of Kiwis travelling to France to protest nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1995, as the youngest participant. “I raised funds around town for the plane ticket and headed over with Tim Shadbolt, peace activist Maire Leadbeater, Dame Augusta Wallace and others to meet up with French anti-nuclear activists. That was an inspiring trip.”

“When I studied politics [at university], it was about powerful institutions and strong (mostly) men that write themselves into history,” he says. “My experience of social and political change was everyday people organising together, building strong relationships and creating the spaces for change to happen. I’m keen to focus on politics as a process of social relationships beyond institutional mandates and monolithic ideologies.”

The chance to work on international disarmament came after he completed an honours degree in politics at Victoria University, and got a post as an assistant to the New Zealand Ambassador for Disarmament, based in Geneva.

“That was a crash course in diplomacy, the UN and international treaties and, after a couple years working for the government, I joined the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, through its Canadian wing in Ottawa. From there I ended up running the global cluster bomb campaign, moving to London and, in 2011, setting up Article 36.”

Nash recalls the buzz when the anti-cluster bomb campaign succeeded. “We were all working so hard right up until the last minute during the negotiations and when the Irish Foreign Minister gavelled in the decision to adopt the treaty, the whole room just erupted with joy, relief, exhaustion. At that point people left behind their negotiating positions and redlines – there was just a real sense of collective humanity.”

“We had around 300 campaigners there from all round the world over the two weeks, including many survivors of cluster bombs. Ten years ago this week, in Dublin we achieved some measure of justice for all those whose lives were shattered by these weapons – something many thought was impossible even two years previous.”

His interest in disarmament continues, with his concerns about emerging military technology the topic of a recent piece in The Spinoff calling for a ban on autonomous weapons. He has also written recent columns for the Dominion Post on Syria and chemical weapons, the Iran deal and North Korea and nuclear diplomacy.

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