In 1999, after a string of terrorist attacks on US embassies, the UN Security Council called for international cooperation to “fight” terrorism, as if it were an enemy in itself rather than a tactic enemies use against each other. After 9/11, it adopted a resolution calling on states to criminalize assistance for terrorist activities, deny financial support and safe haven to terrorists and share information about groups planning terrorist attacks. Important steps as these are, they are also an extension of the pattern by which the US made unilateral into multilateral policy, as with the Monroe Doctrine and Open Door. In the case of terrorism, the unilateral policy is called the Shultz Doctrine, put forth in 1984, which instituted counterterrorist tactics of pre-emptive attacks, forceful retributions and antiterrorist military aid; its world correlative today is the “war on terror.” National and global counter-terrorism measures remain directionless unless endgames of peace are predefined and prepared for, and retrogressive until coordinated with proven peace principles and practices on ground and high levels, among them:
1. Recognizing and addressing terrorist motives as well as acts;
2. Meeting the needs of victims of terrorism to avoid its perpetuation;
3. Incentivizing the replacement of violence with negotiation;
4. Pre-determining interests in and purposes of negotiation, not outcomes;
5. Negotiating with those who have the authority to end violence on all sides;
6. Planning for and implementing post-negotiation peace scenarios;
7. Inducing weapon handovers and cessation of incitement to violence;
8. Reconciliation-based trial and punishmentof terrorists, including reintegration;
9. Transforming (counter-) terrorist infrastructures into productive nonviolent ones;
10. Preventing terrorism through rather than around legal systems.27
Terrorism’s chief challenge to peace may be one identified in the Cold War, and which applies to terrorist and counter-terrorist forces alike: “The infrastructure knows no boundaries and observes no borders: the battlefields are virtually everywhere. Scores of nations are linked. . . all of them are on the front lines. Just as the distinction between war and peace is blurred, so is the distinction between military and civilian.”28 As an extension of Adorno’s definition of peace, the most effective response to terrorism may prove to be one based on a “new universalism, both recognising and promoting plurality. . . based on a relational ontology, in which universalistic principles dominate procedures.”29 Thinking about it and actually doing so requires a “dialogic ethic, in which procedures allow for the possibility of developing a common discourse between different and unequal partners.” Among the greatest vehicles and inhibitors of this kind of discourse are technological innovations in peace and peacemaking.
Vital to understanding and maximizing recent technological innovations in peace and peacemaking are metaphors and methods put forth by media theorist Marshall McLuhan in War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) and two previous works. “Electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village,” that is, new media, in his day television, cinema and radio, in ours, satellite communication and the internet, are able to reflect, shape and integrate cultures on scales and with speeds compared to which print pales.30 Coining “the medium is the message,” he argued further that these media shape not only the messages they convey, but the societies in which they do.31 But in War and Peace he tempered positive connotations many began to ascribe to these notions early on, just as many do today to the point of triteness, by drawing attention to the fact that the mobilizations and integrations new media vs. old allow can be military- as well as peace-oriented. Other critics have argued that disparities in technologies, communicative or otherwise, are in themselves obstacles to peace.
New media may be the sharpest double-edged swords regarding peace and peacemaking in our times. Magnitudes and targets of terrorist attacks are correlated to the media attention they get because they assure higher viewer ratings, which in turn brings in more advertising revenue for media outlets. To symbiotic relationships between merchants, manufacturers and mercantilist governments have been added those of terrorists, counter-terrorist operations and the media. At the same time, however, the ability to nearly instantaneously become aware of threats and breaches of peace around the planet allow for reaction times and dimensions aimed at peace-maintenance and against war previously unimaginable, let alone implementable. United for Peace and Justice, a US anti-war umbrella group, reported that its webpage listing hundreds of planned local demonstrations even before the Iraq War was declared received over 1.5 million hits daily in March 2003. MoveOn.org, an internet-based anti-war campaign, has carried out non-violent “virtual protests,” bombarding government offices with e-mails, faxes and phone calls urging peace, and raising $400,000 in 48 hours through online fundraising. A Canadian backpacker in Myanamr who witnessed the Buddhist-led protest for democracy began a blog, and in days had over 100,000 signatories to his petition, causing the autocratic regime to shut down national internet access. New media’s hazards to and opportunities for peace and peacemaking are just starting to be documented, analyzed and employed. But there can be no doubt that “Cyberspace subverts spatial boundaries, including those of territorial political communities at all levels. It empowers affinity groups that cut across jurisdictions, and vastly increases the possibilities of forming temporary or longer-lasting collectivities,” peaceful and not.32
Other technological innovations that cannot be overlooked or over emphasized in relation to the presents of peace and peacemaking are developments in means of transportation. Like long-range ships forever transformed peace in the colonial-imperial eras, trains since the nineteenth century, automobiles since the first half of the twentieth century and airplanes since the second have not only made modern peacekeeping possible, but have allowed for persistence and deepening of personal interactions between policymakers as well as peace activists otherwise impossible. Even outside these small circles and despite their use in warfare, these new transportation means are sine qua non of globalization’s commercial and cultural networks, and any alternatives however peaceful that do not take equally full advantage of them will probably not prevail. But the boons of modern transportation to peace and peacemaking cannot be accurately assessed without considering their banes in the overconsumption of natural resources as well as the detriments to the environment. As tensions related to control over energy resources mount between nations, so has the awareness that the ecological harm their exploitation is causing may parallel that which specters of nuclear war do only potentially, thus similarly putting not only the survival of peace at risk, but also the survival of humanity itself. This parallel partially explains why sustainability organizations today are recognized as being intrinsically and increasingly explicitly aligned with contemporary peace organizations, to which we now turn in closing.
There are thousands of peace-related organizations in the world today, and no complete, up-to-date register and analysis of all of them or their precursors exists. Such a project would be invaluable to understanding and making the most of the human and material resources globally devoted to peace and is vital to the purposes of this book but far beyond its scope. Instead, what follows is a summary of three major types of peace organizations today. The first is research-based and activities include funding peace-related studies by individual and groups of scholars, organizing forums to present their research to each other and the public, otherwise disseminating results and serving as advisors to policymakers. Usually structured as foundations, institutes or centers, they include think tanks which tend to be highly partisan, university departments which tend to pretend that they are not partisan, and a priori partisan government bodies. The second type of peace organization fulfils peace advocacy functions, serving as watchdogs of threats to peace, promoting particular approaches to peace, popularizing the results of research-based organizations, sometimes
collaborating with them or conducting research themselves. The main difference between the first and second type is that experts and knowledge are the bases of the one while actual or aspiring political or other kinds of leaders and causes are the driving forces of the other, though distinctions are often blurred. The third and last type of organization to be discussed here continues the tradition of peace activism, i.e., doing things for peace in addition to or aside from thinking and talking about what can or should be done, specialties of the first two. Demonstrations, grassroots and door-to-door campaigns, ploughshares, coordinated publicity and mobilization, voter initiatives, non-violent direct action, civil disobedience, non-cooperation, providing for needs which if unmet could threaten peace, are just a few of their purposes and tactics, most of which is done on a voluntary basis by their members.
One movement adeptly combining elements of all three of these organizational types, as most do to varying degrees, is the global Department of Peace Initiative. Its aim is to establish such bodies, wholly dedicated to peace programs, within national government frameworks so that tax funds can directly supplement the donations and endowments required to support all these organizations and synchronize their efforts for maximum effect, just as is done for national and international military organizations and in the hopes of replacing them. The Solomon Islands was the first to create a Department of Peace, Nepal the most recent. What these organizations taken together suggest is an ever-widening acknowledgment that “violence among humans has never solved any problem without creating new ones; enduring solutions arise from continuous voluntary co-operation.”33 The emergence of peace professionals such as researchers, advocates and activists, paid to advance peace in different ways even aside from governmental mandates, does not take away but adds to the spirit of voluntarism vital to peace as a condition of survival since the origins of humanity. What remains to be seen is whether they will meet the fragmented fate of the nineteenth-century organized peace movement or collectively rise to meet the challenges of a new millennium and make it one in which the final chapter of this world history of peace can serve as an introduction to a history of world peace.
Conclusion
The Pyramid of Peace: Past, Present and Future
Among the purposes of this book has been to challenge the notions that peace is solely the absence of war and that writing history is an exclusive privilege of the mightiest militarily. Without the victories of peacemakers and the resourcefulness of the peaceful, I have tried to show, not only would there be no history to write, but there might not even be a world in which to write it. Learning from them, as the most successful have from those before, is perhaps the safest way to ensure that the only constraints to peace and peacemaking are those beyond our control. As mentioned in the introduction, the analytical narratives presented in the preceding chapters are meant less as guidelines than as signposts; the opposite applies to this conclusion. Its purpose is in no way to draw the world history of peace recounted and still unfolding through us to a close, but to reopen certain of its lessons in redoubled directly applicable ways.
To recap and attempt to make a small contribution to pasts, presents and futures of peace, I present this Pyramid adapted from Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs and motives, summarizing and pragmatizing some salient peace principles and practices already covered in more depth.1 Defining the Pyramid’s terms theoretically and by way of key historical examples will, I hope, not limit but rather inform the meanings and applications they may take on in different contexts. The structure, in which the levels below are supportive prerequisites for those above, is likewise not intended to limit their scopes or functions but to expose relationships and interdependencies that may be difficult to see outside of it. That the Pyramid is based on peace strategies with track records is indicative only insofar as they can transcend their original circumstances through constant re-qualifications within cultural contingencies and diversities as evolving conditions and participants require. The point is less to offer a definitive plan for world peace, of which there is no shortage, than to propose for ongoing debate and action an alternative framework in which it becomes additionally actualizable and sustainable.2
Pyramid of Peace Principles
Items linked to each level, like the levels themselves, are applicable in individual, social and collective ways demonstrated by the selected examples given. They are purposefully limited in number because a less suggestive, fuller exposition would require a separate book, which new generations could rewrite with levels, items and examples relevant to their times. Cumulatively, differences and similarities in version chains would thus provide prosperity with more and more complete historical guides to world peace, analyzable and implementable as experimental scientific models. World peace requirements discovered in or expressed through the Pyramid are intended to be pertinently holistic for humanity for now not forever, that is only as suitable to unaccounted-for idiosyncrasies. If not, such requirements can be catered to fit the needs of situations at hand, in which case the Pyramid and the lessons of the world history of peace it represents would stand amended. Conversely, they can be wantonly rejected outright and the Pyramid falls if it is not restructured by item, by level or from the ground up as necessary.
Climbing the Pyramid, so to speak, means actualizing each item of each level from the bottom up on a continual, progressive basis. Reaching any level except the top at any one place and time does not necessarily depend on it being reached everywhere by everyone, but surely would not hurt. Likewise, reaching any level once does not mean it will always be held, as the Pyramid embodies a static dynamism by which its structure can stay intact even if its levels and items are periodically unactualized, though each must be actualized before or in tandem with the next. Extents to which items and levels are actualizable individually, socially and/or collectively depend in large part on the specificity of the meanings attributed to them, which must perforce be substantiatedly general for our purposes here. The set of imperatives previously discussed are part of the Pyramid as binds that tie together its items and levels. On these premises and those set out below, the Pyramid is both a description of world peace and a way to achieve it.
Corporeal Peace
The premise of corporeal peace is that without the wellbeing of our bodies and minds world peace is an irrelevancy. As obvious as this premise may be when pointed out, a prevalent pitfall of peacemakers historically and contemporarily has been failing to take it into account. If true, then nothing is more relevant to world peace than components of corporeal peace such as nutrition, shelter and sanitation, healthcare and education. Individual experiences concretize this level as the Pyramid’s base in ways history cannot, and make self-evident that corporeal peace is a precondition of world peace. Nevertheless, history does provide examples of how instinctual and bio-genetic imperatives were made into systematic measures consciously taken to secure or enhance corporeal peace as the basis of all other peaces.
Nutrition
Starvation precludes the peace of an individual just as, on wide enough scales, it does for society. In addition to the suffering empty stomachs cause to individuals and societies, they are like ticking time bombs inadvertently targeted at collective peace. Efforts to secure enough food have been starting points of peace since primordial times, when gathering and hunting were the norms. Advents of agriculture and hydraulic revolutions were expansions of this base, which the Ancient Chinese and Japanese rightly believed to be the source of any and all kinds of peace. Similarly in Ancient Greece, first-generation Horae who represented how peace was made and maintained were agricultural goddesses the worship of whom was intended to ensure plentiful harvests. Industrialism changed the way food is produced and distributed, but not its being the foundation of world peace. What individual nutrition needs are and how they are met depends on cultural traditions as much as economic systems, and world peace depends on nutrition needs being met in consideration of cultural traditions and ec
onomic systems.
Shelter and Sanitation
Shelter was as necessary for the corporeal peace of prehistoric nomads as it is for us now, though only with transitions to sedentary life in the home base structure of hunter-gatherers can the idea of home originate. The first meanings of Shalom for the Jewish tribes of the Torah related to protection from hostile natural elements, the basic sense in which shelter is taken here. Metaphorically, their perennial search for the Promised Land as a prerequisite of peace can be seen as an indication of the significances of such a permanent dwelling for aspiring or currently sedentary peoples. The violence used in stealing peoples’ homes as a way to the Promised Land may have been justified by Yahweh, but within our context serves only to show how for people so lacking, no place is more precious to peace than home. In Ancient India, pre-Vedic societies and, millennia later, Ashoka sought to secure sanitation for all as a step towards peace because diseases terminally infecting people otherwise at peace can thereby be curtailed. Reconstructions that have occurred after destructive wars attest to the importance of shelter and sanitation as a second step after nutrition in rebuilding peace; world peace cannot be actualized before everyone everywhere who so wants to has taken these two steps.
Healthcare
The Hippocratic Oath, a non-violent code by which doctors’ duties are combined with doing no harm and protecting their patients from injustice, and Henri Dunant’s efforts to assist the wounded in war regardless of the nationality, may be the only specifiable healthcare items in this book. But implications of the Oath and the Red Cross which Dunant founded, that healthcare is a birthright linked to justice and necessary to corporeal peace because of its upholding role, are logical extensions of nutrition, shelter and sanitation. Once available only to the high-born, the well-off and the poor as charity, universal healthcare was made actualizable with industrialism coupled with the social planning developed to stem civil strife along antithetical ideological lines during the Great Depression, a sign that universal healthcare can be part of any political position. Efforts towards universal healthcare are made more difficult by meanings it has in different parts of the world. While debates in some places are about providing health services more equally or cost-effectively, in others they are about how to provide it to begin with. Universal healthcare would not be necessary for world peace if everyone was always healthy; as this is an unfortunate improbability universal healthcare is required for world peace.
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