Civil Paths to Peace

2009-02-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

With the end-of-year festivities and business travel, many people, me included, are now back and ploughing through their e-mails and Net browsing activities.

The postings in this message thread speak eloquently to the issues at hand. Faith sees cultural conditioning, selfishness, greed, power, apathy and resistance to change as non-enabling traits in efforts to engender respect and understanding.

Francis echoes some of the points raised by Faith and suggests that perhaps much is being done behind the scenes that we may not be aware of. The annual reports of bodies concerned with peace issues may provide a clue. We'd welcome any insights from people in the know.

Chris is uncomfortable with the term "tolerance" which he suspects is shrouded in the dynamics of power inequalities. He prefers "understanding" as it is an enabler that gets one to appreciate the other and accept change without fear. These are all excellent points in this discussion. Keep your views coming.

Oh, before I leave...there was talk in a recent issue of Canada's Maclean's Magazine about the Net generation and how their lives supposedly revolve around the proverbial Me, Myself and I. Headlined "Posts Tagged ‘Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Yo’ Is this the future? Don’t bet on it. Spoiled, shallow and selfish: say hi to the new kid at work" (http://blog.macleans.ca/tag/grown-up-digital-how-the-net-generation-is-changing-your-world/)many so-called “Net geners” did't take kindly to this characterization of who they are.

Somewhere along the line, the suggestion had been made that celebrating birthdays (and that comes with cakes) in the workplace would go a long way to keeping these net geners happy. One "kid" who thought this was ridiculous had an advice for employers: if you want the best from your net gener employees, it all boils down to one word, respect. Well said!

The assumptions we sometimes make blinds us to the realities around us. Let's hear from you soon.

Willie

2008-12-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

If you’re like me, until only recently, I hadn’t heard about Civil Paths to Peace. Let’s call it CP2P.

CP2P is a report of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding (R&U). It was released in 2007. In 2005, the issue of respect and understanding was a featured agenda discussion item at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malta. Subsequently, the Commonwealth Secretariat took up R&U as a major mandate and sought ways to promote mutual R&U among all faiths and communities in the Commonwealth. It set up the Commission to look into R&U, chaired by Amartya Sen.

Now, think about it: there are hundreds of peace institutes and conflict resolution centres in scores of countries across the world, not to mention the army of civil society groups working to promote peace. Yet we live in a world with extremes in thinking and ideologies, if you’d pardon this bit of drama, with all manner of conflicts at various levels. To what extent have all these bodies studying and promoting peace been successful? What kind of impact have they had? Why is the world so conflicted still? What really can we do about it? Would more of the same get us anywhere?

As I learned recently in a meeting in Jamaica, our problem is that we argue too much about principles. We dig in our heels. We can’t and mustn’t blink. Our values and principles must prevail. Have two opposing camps with that kind of attitude and you’ll have a fight, sometimes a pretty bloody one. Rather than argue about principles, it was suggested, why not focus on finding strategies to overcome the problem? Is it that simple? How do we make R&U work at all levels of human interaction? Business as usual is unlikely to get us anywhere. We need bold and imaginative alternatives to realize R&U.

What do you think? Any ideas?

Willie Clarke-Okah

Commonwealth of Learning - Civil Paths to Peace

Civil Paths to Peace