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The Peace Report, Issue #9
By Louise Diamond, Ph.D.
Welcome to The Peace Report, an occasional set of reflections on world and national affairs in these times of change and challenge, as seen through a peace lens.
What Would it Take?
What would it take to transform the current culture of violence in our society to a true culture of peace? That is the question nearly 500 people asked of themselves at the Building a Culture of Peace conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico in mid-May, 2007.
In only two days, the conference (six Peace Councils, 67 break-out sessions, and four plenary speakers) came up with a surprisingly thorough collective answer, including five imperatives, 12 strategic priorities, and ten principles/practices. Taken together, these create a significant, if not complete, roadmap for actualizing a culture of peace in our society.
The Five Imperatives
- We must understand peace as more than the absence of war; it is socio-economic equality, and it will come about through concerted action.
- We must understand the pervasiveness of violence and its root in anger, and commit ourselves to living the way of nonviolence, and truly being the change we seek in the world.
- We must reconnect with the earth and the natural world, rebalancing the material and the spiritual, the masculine and the feminine.
- We must realize that we are one family of life, interdependent and interconnected; and that we are all in this together.
- It will take a long time, but we must practice perseverance, vision, and hope.
The Twelve Strategic Priorities
- Focus on peace education and related life skills in the schools and for parents.
- Encourage youth to create their own peace culture, and provide structures and resources for that.
- Reduce access to violent media for young people, and create and popularize peace-oriented media to replace it.
- Build alternative business and economic systems that are based on social responsibility and the common good.
- Get the message out that we are all connected; we are one; we need each other.
- Reinvigorate connections at every level, especially with the natural world, with spirit, with community, and with the seed of peace inside us all.
- Heal the historical wounds in our society.
- Encourage the use of art and ritual for peacebuilding, transformation, and healing.
- Teach people how to develop inner peace.
- Teach people how to see beyond the us/them split, to connect to the shared humanity in all.
- Support existing and emerging major peace institutions.
- Continue the work of Peace Councils for dialogue and action.
The Ten Principles/Practices
- Empathy
- Compassion
- Unity
- Appreciation of differences
- Service
- Connection
- Nonviolence
- Balance of masculine and feminine energies
- Meditation
- Interconnectedness
This roadmap, or template, is an important contribution to the existing global movement for a culture of peace, for it points to specific pathways for practical action.
Moreover, it opens an entirely new set of questions: How can we… accomplish each of the twelve strategic aims? How can we… embed the ten values/principles/practices in mainstream society? How can we… make the five imperatives common wisdom in our culture?
This set of outcomes, then, becomes a meaningful part of the next stage of our strategic journey to accelerate the global movement for a culture of peace, especially in the U.S., which is the prime exporter of culture around the world. It is a call to reflection, dialogue, and action, individually and collectively. Ideally, it will be an inspiration as well for all those who carry the flame of peace in these times.
May Peace Prevail on Earth!
Social Changenth
Humanity stands at an extraordinary point of evolution. Globalization, climate change, threats of terrorism – these and other circumstances provide us with an opportunity to realize that interdependence is the new reality, and we must learn to live for the well-being of the whole and all its parts or face dire consequences.
Exciting new ways of being together on and with this earth based on this understanding are emerging in every field. Those who are called to lead this shift are agents of Social Changenth, a wisdom-based process rooted in interconnectedness that can support an exponential leap toward creating a world that works for all.
Starting in January 2008 I will be offering an advanced training program, called How to Change the World, to cover the four core areas, or Four Wisdom Ways, in which understanding and skill are critical to the success of Social Changenth:
- Systems, the Way of the One
- Power, the Way of Right Relationship
- Transformation, the Way of Quantum Change
- Co-creativity, the Way of Synergy
In each area, we will blend lessons from nature, the social and physical sciences, and universal spiritual wisdom. We’ll consider key principles and practices; and focus especially on practical application and the role of the change agent. Our learning laboratory will be our own inner experience as well as the specifics of our work and life,
The course is offered as a year-long program of intensive study and training, structured on a seasonal basis. Each seasonal program, beginning in winter of 2008, consists of:
- A 4-day intensive workshop
- Monthly study materials
- Teleconference calls with experts in the field
- Online dialogue on specific topics
Participants may choose to take all of the seasonal programs for an integrated course, or any of them separately, space permitting.
More information, and the opportunity to register, will be forthcoming shortly. Meanwhile, you can learn more about the Four Wisdom Ways that we’ll cover in the course by clicking here. You can also still enroll in the prequel to this course, a four-month coaching program called You Can Change the World! Click here to learn more.
Oink, Oink, and Other News Bits
Oink, Oink. As Congress went off on its August vacation, news came out about the special spending bills, or earmarks, that various legislators managed to insert into legislation to ‘bring home the bacon’ to their particular state or special interest supporters. Every year we lament this situation, as we watch vast quantities of taxpayer dollars being doled out for local projects, so that our elected officials can be seen as taking care of their people, and thereby currying favor for re-election.
I can understand senators and congresspeople addressing the legitimate needs of their constituents, but this has gone way beyond any hint of legitimacy. One way to take the competition and inequality out of the game of who can get the most for their state, and to re-frame what otherwise looks and smells like greedy dealing, would be to simply set the same specific amount (population-proportionate) that each senator and representative can allocate to local needs. This would save the country millions if not billions, if the figure were set at a reasonable limit.
While this solution doesn’t take care of the problem of that money going to those with the greatest influence, best lobbying skill, highest donations, or closest friendships, at least it puts the spotlight at the state level on how each congress person and each senator allocates their set amount, so they can be held accountable by their constituents. And it reduces the current advantage that incumbents now have, based on their track record of providing for their people, which in turns opens the Congress up to new voices and visions.
The People Behind the Numbers. As we approach the September report on the progress of the surge in Iraq, I suggest we consider the possibility that we are not looking at the complete data nor asking the right questions. To do so would break our hearts. We can say that violent sectarian murders are down in Baghdad, but for each person killed an entire extended family is affected forever. We can say that fewer residents were ethnically cleansed this month, but for each individual that loses a home an entire family and indeed an entire neighborhood suffers.
The two million Iraqi refugees and the other two million internally displaced are not just numbers in a UN report – they are flesh and blood human beings whose lives have been shattered, and whose children and grandchildren will be affected for generations to come.
We can say how many American soldiers were killed this month, but each statistic represents a devastated husband or wife, a mother or father, a child, a brother or sister. We can say that more soldiers are surviving combat injuries due to advanced battlefield medicine, but each soldier wounded now faces the rest of their lives with devastating physical and/or emotional trauma.
We need to ask questions and make decisions about our presence in Iraq not on the numbers, but on the human suffering behind the numbers. Yes, it is true that our leaving may well produce more chaos and violence, but our presence is a direct cause of that violence. We can decry all we want the original folly and scandalous execution of this misadventure, but we cannot make wise decisions at this point without feeling deeply the human cost, on all sides, of this war.
In our arrogance, we have left a country in shambles and de-stabilized an entire region. Behind those words, ‘country’ and ‘region’ are real people, like ourselves, who only want to live a decent life and whose chances for that we have destroyed. Wars are fought for political reasons, but it is the people who suffer the consequences of politician’s ambitions.
As we prepare for the upcoming report on the surge, and the ensuing debate it will engender, let us cut through all the chatter and remember to think of the people behind the numbers. Only when we let our hearts break with the magnitude of the human pain we have caused, and feel deep compassion for the suffering of the real human beings behind the numbers, can we truly hold our own leaders accountable for what they have wrought and what they should do next.
In Tibetan Buddhism we are taught that to come correct, we need to first stop doing the harmful things we are doing and then insure that we do not repeat them but find the right way to go. It’s time to stop in Iraq. The tears of the people demand it.
Democracy?
Some in the Bush administration and in Congress are now voicing a desire to see Prime Minister Maliki replaced in Iraq. What an interesting modeling of democracy – when we don’t like the results of a free and fair election (that we organized and touted), we simply replace the elected leader.
When Hamas won the elections in Palestine (not because the people were especially aligned with their anti-Israel stance but because Hamas was feeding the people and promising to end corruption) we did the same thing. Our way of attempting to reverse that decision was to close off the Gaza Strip, effectively laying siege to the millions who live there and further impoverishing a society that was already being fed in large measure by the UN. We call it political pressure, but in international law it is known as collective punishment, and it is illegal.
What if it happened here, since our behavior as the superpower in the world gives permission for other countries to do as we do? What if China, which holds much of our foreign debt, decided they didn’t like the results of the next election, and decided to try to force a change by calling in all our debt? In the midst of our ensuing economic devastation we would surely cry ‘Foul!’
At the end of the war in Bosnia, Europe and the U.S. set about quickly to hold elections there and declare victory for democracy. However, those elections only legitimized the warring factions, now dressed in the guise of political parties.
And then there are all the questions raised by our own elections of 2000, and the ongoing challenges of the vulnerability of the electronic voting machines.
On many levels, we need to sort out the relationship of democracy and elections. Soon.
Peacebuilders Hall of Fame
There are people all over the world, from many walks of life, whose names we will probably never know and whose achievements we may never hear about, who are making a profound difference for peace. This column will highlight some of these individuals, both to honor them and to inspire and educate the rest of us about what is indeed possible.
 We honor Heidi and Guy Burgess, Co-Directors of the Conflict Research Consortium at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Peacebuilding flourishes in academia! Meet Guy and Heidi Burgess, peace researchers and professors extraordinaire.
In 1988 the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation established the University of Colorado Conflict Research Consortium, which Guy and Heidi have co-directed ever since. There they have been leaders in the effort to use rapidly- advancing information technologies to provide citizens in all walks of life with the information they need to deal with difficult conflicts more constructively. They see such efforts to enhance and mobilize the skills of the general population as critical to dealing with complex, society-wide conflicts.
The results are incredibly powerful web-based sources of knowledge about conflict and peacebuilding, available to private citizens, academics, and peace practitioners all over the world. One such web source, their Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project, addresses better ways of dealing with intractable conflicts (both domestic and international). Its website is www.BeyondIntractability.org. They’ve also created the Conflict Resolution Information Source (www.CRinfo.org).
Both these systems, designed and directed by Guy and Heidi and constructed with the help of more than 250 experts, offer succinct, executive summary-type articles on almost 400 topics, as well as links to recommended sources (web, print, and audiovisual) of more in-depth information.
In addition to consulting and teaching assignments, the Burgesses are now pursuing work on two new projects. The first, the Conflict Frontiers Project, both conducts and encourages others to undertake projects which address the hard questions at the frontier of the peace and conflict resolution fields ( conflict-frontiers.beyondintractability.org).
The CETR (Conflict Education and Training Resource) project builds upon the insights contained in the CRInfo, Beyond Intractability, and Conflict Frontiers knowledge bases to produce computer-based learning systems tailored to the needs of specific client/partners and the people that they serve (peace-learning-systems.beyondintractability.org). They also served as rapporteurs to the Building a Culture of Peace conference in New Mexico, and have developed the website that reports on that conference (www.worldpeaceconference.org).
Heidi and Guy both earned their Ph.D.s in sociology from the University of Colorado in 1979. They then did postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked for several years as public policy conflict consultants.
We congratulate Guy and Heidi Burgess for their excellent work in gathering and disseminating a wealth of information – encyclopedias, really – about how we can understand and address the most critical issues of violent conflict and peace!
Hummingbird Recommends
The hummingbird is considered by some Native American peoples to be a messenger of The Peacemaker, the man who helped bring peace to the warring nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (the principles of which became the basis of our own constitution). As one who can show us the deep recesses where the sweet nectar of peace resides, the hummingbird is a true peace leader in these times, and I have respectfully borrowed her name for this column.
This month we consider how we can learn profound lessons about international affairs and peace through fiction. Justine Hardy has written a novel about Kashmir that gives us an inside view on how the ongoing violence there affects the lives of all involved – the local residents, the militants, the soldiers, and outsiders.
The Partition of India in 1947 resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, and a lingering deadly conflict over the status of Kashmir, a beauty-filled mostly Muslim area that became part of India at that time, but whose status has been contested ever since. Like Israel and Palestine, Kashmir is one of the world’s long-standing and seemingly intractable conflicts that has resulted in the devastation of a community, the loss of many lives, and hair-trigger tension between nuclear India and Pakistan.
Hardy lets us see into this situation through the eyes of Hal, a British journalist who arrives at Nagin Lake (near Srinigar) to interview a British ex-pat, Gracie Madam. Gracie, once married to an Indian prince in the heyday of the British Empire, now lives a quiet, gin-filled life on a houseboat she rents from the Muslim family next door. Captured by the power of Gracie’s reminiscences and need for companionship, and equally by the grace and beauty of her young housemaid, Hal enters the shifting landscape that is Kashmir under Indian occupation, and so do we.
We see the effect of occupation on the soldiers that maintain it; on the people who live under it; and on the militants who seek to overthrow it. All this is presented ever so gently, as background to an unfolding and ultimately tragic love triangle that, while holding the central plotline, is itself a commentary on how we can find peace in our lives when all around us there is chaos.
It isn’t often we find good literature that at once educates us about parts of the world we may be unfamiliar with while also eliciting our emotional response to the human drama of those caught in the snare of violent conflict. I recommend The Wonder House to all who would broaden their horizons and travel with Hardy to the wonder-land that is Kashmir.
Interesting Peace Conference Web Sites
Building a Culture of Peace Conference
Great new material is now available on the Building a Culture of Peace conference website. Look especially for the narrative results of each of the Peace Councils, and also for highlights from the plenary addresses by Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Jody Williams, and Arun Gandhi.
www.worldpeaceconference.org
Engaging the Other: The Power of Compassion Conference
The second annual Engaging the Other: The Power of Compassion conference, sponsored by the Common Bond Institute, will this year be held in Dearborn, Michigan October 25-28. Multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural, the conference will examine how we can bridge the chasms we have created between us because of our differences, and re-connect with the shared beauty and humanity in all. I will be offering a one-day training in Right Relationship at this conference. Hope to see you there! www.cbiworld.org
From Racism to Reconciliation Conference
Call to Action (CTA) is a Catholic movement working for equality and justice in the Church and society. This year its yearly conference addresses From Racism to Reconciliation, November 2-4 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conference is all about identifying and dismantling racism at the institutional, systemic, and personal, levels. I will be presenting a short workshop on The Power Dynamics of Racism.
www.cta-usa.org
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