Building Sustainable Peace

Some Peacebuilding Principles & Practices

Peacebuilding requires a different way of thinking, sensing, knowing, and relating to oneself, to others, and to the complex self-organizing systems that are embodied as our cities, counties and states.  What follows are some principles for enabling that change.

 

Peacebuilding Begins With Personal Transformation

Those of us who would seek to build sustainable peace must be willing to engage in the hardest work of all, that of our own transformation. Why? The only person in the world that you have the power to change is yourself.  Yet experience also teaches us that personal transformation can become contagious.  Gandhi expressed this principle this way: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body.  If we could changes ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.  As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.” (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XII, April 1913 to December 1914, p. 158)

 

Connectivity

All of reality is interconnected and interdependent. As the physicist David Bohm observed, we would be well served to see all of existence as an undivided whole. Bohm proposed that “the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and ‘broken up’ into yet smaller constituent parts.” (David Bohm, Wholeness and The Implicate Order). A necessary corollary is that developing our understanding of systems thinking should be given a high priority.

 

We ALL participate in creating the systems we inhabit

The communities in which we live, and the societies of which they are constituent parts, are living self-organizing systems of systems.  They include systems in which we educate our children, enforce our laws, transport our families, create goods and services, and seek and provide medical care. If we are fortunate enough to live in a working democracy, we participate in a political system in which we govern ourselves through representatives we elect when we bother to vote. Each day each of us participates in creating, maintaining, or even shifting these systems through countless decisions about how we relate to each other and choose to follow or disregard the rule of law.  In short, we are part of creating, through action or inaction, the systems we often criticize and demand that someone do something about.  But, not everyone in our societies has an equal opportunity to influence or create the systems in which they live and work each day.

 

Non-violent Resistance

Where there is systemic oppression and discrimination that cannot be overcome through normal political channels, non-violent resistance is vital.   As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “The method of nonviolent resistance is effective in that it has a way of disarming opponents.  It exposes their moral defenses, weakens their morale and at the same time works on their conscience.  It makes it possible for the individual to struggle for moral ends with moral means.”  “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide.  The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”  “A Testament of Hope – The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.” pp. 25& 109) 

 

Sustainable Peace Requires Systemic Justice

              Destructive cycles of violent conflict almost always originate in essential needs of some major constituency or identity group not being met. (See “Building Peace –Sustainable Reconciliation In Divided Societies” by John Paul Lederach, p. 8) In many cases of intractable conflict, the genesis is a poverty trap created by systemic deficits: absent infrastructure (roads, sewage treatment, potable water, energy grid), poor education, inadequate health care system, lack of security for a llpersons, and corrupt governance, all exacerbated by insufficient financial capital. Many of the violent conflicts in the world are rooted in systemic racism and systematic oppression of the weak, exploitation and/or abandonment of the poor, and absence or perversion of the rule of law.  Peacebuilding requires more than good mediation and conflict resolution skills. The underlying systemic causes of destructive conflict must be addressed and remedied with…