Choose Your Own Peacebuilding Adventure

Over on the Peace and Collaborative Development Network, Craig Zelizer posted 10 Actions for Peace in 2009. In general, I think his list is a bit... academic. Nonetheless, his item number 10 was, basically, create your own, so here goes.

Assuming we're talking about positive peace, with its implicit reduction/absence of structural violence, and bearing in mind that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," we can start to think of promoting peace in much more activist terms. Regardless of where we are in the world, most of us can probably walk down the street or drive down the road and see signs of injustice right around us. Those could include the shoddy state of schools in poor areas, veterans panhandling on the street, prisons full of men of color, referenda held on the rights of particular groups, watching the news and seeing civilians being killed by advanced armies, or companies where white men take the offices while women and people of color fill the cubicles and the production lines. So what, then, can we do?

Though this blog and my own interests remained focused largely on international issues of peace and justice, we should be mindful not to ignore the injustices we encounter in our own backyards. As Martin Luther King pointed out throughout his career, we cannot have peace locally, nationally, or globally, when unjust structures and systems are holding somebody -- anybody -- down. If we sit and think about it for a moment, that makes the absence of peace in this world seem massive, and it is, but rather than be daunted by that, we must instead rise to the challenge it presents.

In my day job, we discuss and promote the international exchange of students and scholars, and I believe strongly that promoting the international exchange of ideas is important to promoting international peace and understanding. Yet at the same time, discussing national policies and their international impacts seems a bit stratospheric. It's sometimes hard to feel connected to the effects of your work when you're merely a ripple in an ocean. Thus over the summer I started to get involved in activist work to ensure that the DC government complies with and enforces its own human rights law, which is one of the most progressive in the nation. My particular efforts, with many friends and seasoned activists young and old, have been around ensuring that the law is respected as it applies to transgender inmates in the DC jail. This issue is leaps and bounds away from my day job, but it's important. It's an "injustice anywhere" kind of issue, and it matters to world peace, even if you can't immediately see the connection (and I assure you, it's hard to make the mental jump).

Over the holiday, I read Lisa Schirch's Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding (an even shorter introduction to her concepts can be found here), which was a helpful reminder of how big building peace really is. In the book, she describes the concept of justpeace, which assumes that peace cannot exist without justice, and that if justice is pursued through violent means, it undermines peace. She goes on to describe how maximize resources and foster collaboration to ensure a successful peacebuilding process.

I've often thought of building peace as being similar to building a house. You draw a plan, prepare the land, lay the foundation and work up from there. It's not a small undertaking, and it can't be done singlehandedly, but each of us can find a way to help a friend build a house, just as we can each find a way to build peace in the world. The size of the task is sometimes incomprehensible, but collectively, we have the means to finish the job.

Peace Deals and Bombings in Somalia

In case it doesn't make headlines in the current media market, which is still saturated with talk of Obama, McCain and the Economy, I thought all our readers might be interested to know what's been going on in Somalia this week. On Sunday, warring parties in Somalia signed a Peace Deal. According to the UN, "The Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) signed two accords today in neighbouring Djibouti after three days of talks backed by the UN and the wider international community."

Just four days later, a series of suicide attacks hit two towns in Somalia and killed at least 22 people. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks, but many blamed a militant Islamist group called the Shabab. This setback in Somali peace highlights a serious problem when peace talks are conducted at the exclusion of spoilers. Not that I'm suggesting all terrorist groups in Somalia (or elsewhere for that matter) should be legitimized by being included in peace talks. But the result is all too often the same -- excluded groups overshadow the progress made at talks by perpetuating more violence. Indeed, in its report on the peace talks on October 27th, the New York Times highlighted the progress the talks had made with several militant groups, but also noted, "the most fearsome wing of Somalia’s Islamist insurgency, the Shabab, has shunned the peace talks and vowed to fight on." And fight on they have. Now nearly all the news stories on Somalia have returned to focus on the violence with very little mention of the progress that was made just days before.

Somalia has been entrenched in an intractable conflict for seventeen years. For a discussion of the situation and prospects for peace in Somalia, read a Q&A by Reuters.

Nobel Peace Prize Announced

This past week, the Nobel committee has been busy doling out its annual prizes in chemistry, literature, physics, medicine, economics and, of course, peace. I can’t help but feel like this prize perhaps more than any other, lends legitimacy to peace as a serious and respected discipline. Unlike the other prizes, however, the peace prize is generally awarded to individuals or organizations for their ongoing work or overall contributions to peace rather than a single past achievement.

In recent years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to former President Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Mohammed Yunus, and former Vice President Al Gore, among others.

This year’s prize went to former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, for his work as a widely respected international mediator in places such as Namibia, Kosovo, Indonesia and Northern Ireland, among others. Some of his most important accomplishments include helping to bring independence to Namibia and a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Aceh province of Indonesia. See the New York Times article on his nomination for more.

According to Time, by awarding this year’s prize to President Ahtisaari, “the Norwegian prize committee is returning to its original mandate of honoring those who help in the resolution of conventional armed conflicts.”

While I agree that it is important to recognize the largely “behind the scenes” peacemaking through mediation, I also believe that awarding the prize to figures like Al Gore and Mohammed Yunus was an important step in broadening our understanding of peacemaking. By awarding the prize to environmental and economic peacemakers, the committee recognized the less traditional components of peace. Building peace is not just about addressing ongoing conflicts and bringing them to an end, it is also about recognizing the root causes of conflict and attempting to draw attention to them and prevent them before they cause more widespread conflict.

By drawing attention to global climate change, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were contributing to peace through enhanced understanding of a significant threat to environmental stability. Through this prize, the committee recognized that significant environmental change has enormous potential to cause widespread conflict though massive population movements, depletion of resources, and competition for remaining scarce resources.

Similarly, by awarding the prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, the Nobel committee recognized that providing microcredit loans to the world’s poor is an enormously important way to address global poverty and reduce the economic causes of conflict.

So, while I applaud the Nobel committee for this years choice because it draws attention to the highly important role of conflict mediation, I disagree that the committee should stick to these “traditional” forms of peacemaking in future prizes. As a practical peacenik, I think it is invaluable to draw attention to less traditional forms of peacemaking and, perhaps even more importantly, to advancements that have the potential to prevent future conflict rather than focusing just on conflict resolution.