How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT
This editorial revisits the phrase to promote a culture of peace and argues that the word peace admits too many interpretations to serve as a shared aim among people of different cultural backgrounds and life experiences. The author illustrates how two parties can sign the same declaration while meaning different things by it, notes that the research literature has responded by dividing the term further into positive and negative peace, and argues that a formulation nobody can question is also one nobody can examine. He proposes replacing it in our own thinking with a phrase that states what is actually meant: constructive dialogue within an area of mutual respect and non escalated armed conflict.
KEYWORDS
Peace, terminology, positive peace, negative peace, cultural diversity, shared understanding, constructive dialogue, mutual respect, accountability, mission statement, interpretation, awareness
INTRODUCTION
Due to the latest development of peace and conflict awareness and sensibility throughout the globe, our initial statement ‘to promote a culture of peace’ might be re-arranged or newly specified. The first WMO Conflict Insight Report and the corresponding discussion helped us to finalize this step. The core problem that was detected in this content is the term ‘peace’ itself which obviously grants too many options for interpretations and generally assumes that all of us believe in the same conception.
MAIN CORPUS
A more diverse readership than the word assumes
Nowadays, that we form a more global society than ever, we also might have in mind that all of us are individuals with different cultural backgrounds and life experiences who meet each other at a level of virtual interaction that was not common in the past. This level of interaction places its focus on the interest and exchange of private and professional experiences. The frequently used share button outlines that all of us have a story to tell, are truly unique and diverse. So, by using specific words in such a global society of internet users, we may want to give sufficient credit to and raise the level of our awareness towards our own diversity that further on has a direct influence on the interpretation, evaluation, and the way we initiate action.
Where the misunderstanding actually happens
Someone may now ask why a single word should deserve this level of attention, as long as everybody involved shows goodwill and a genuine interest in improving the circumstances. From what I understand and believe, this is exactly where the trouble starts, because goodwill and a common vocabulary are two very different things.
Let me offer a picture. Imagine two representatives sitting at one table, both of them longing for peace, and both of them absolutely sincere in their statement. For the first one, peace means that the shooting stops and that people can move through the streets again without fearing for their lives. For the second one, peace means that the causes which brought the weapons into the streets are finally addressed, namely the access to land, to water, and to public office. Both of them will sign the same declaration, both of them will leave the room satisfied, and both of them will accuse the other of betrayal within a few months. Nothing dishonest happened here. What happened is that one word carried two different agreements.
Accordingly, we may say that the word did not create a common ground but the illusion of one, and such an illusion is more dangerous than an open disagreement, simply because an open disagreement can be worked on.
What we owe to those who read us
There is a second consideration that I find at least equally important, and it concerns our responsibility as an organization that publishes and that teaches. When we place a term such as peace at the very centre of our mission statement, we implicitly ask our readers and our students to fill it with their own content, and afterwards we are surprised when their conclusions differ from ours.
In order to be honest, we should admit that a term of this kind offers a certain comfort. Nobody will ever object to it, no government will ever refuse to endorse it, and no colleague will ever ask us what precisely we intend to do. And this is my concern: a formulation that cannot be questioned also cannot be examined, and an organization that cannot be examined slowly loses the ability to examine itself.
Therefore, by choosing a longer and admittedly less elegant formulation, we accept that our work becomes assessable. We can be asked whether a dialogue actually took place, whether the parties were treated as equals within it, and whether the armed conflict escalated or not. These are uncomfortable questions, and I believe that we ought to invite them.
What the term has already become
Analyzing in a very superficial way what the term ‘peace’ may currently mean to the community of researchers and activists, we will easily find enhanced expressions like ‘positive peace’ and ‘negative peace’ that create an even more complex content. As a result of such disclosures, we are not only dealing with the individual’s proper point of view, personal experiences, and cultural settings, but also with the task of creating a mutual understanding of what we are all longing for: harmony, respect, structured dialog, and non-escalating armed conflict.
SUMMARY
The reflection makes a small change with a large consequence. A single word that every reader accepts and each understands differently permits an organisation to state an aim without ever establishing what its members are working towards, and the appearance of agreement is then mistaken for the thing itself. The example of the two representatives carries the argument, since neither of them acted in bad faith and both left the room with a different agreement in hand. The author’s second point is the more demanding one: a formulation that nobody can object to is also one that nobody can hold anyone to, and the comfort of such language is precisely what makes it unsuitable for an organisation that wishes to be assessed. The response is not to define the word more carefully but to set it aside and name the elements instead.
CONCLUSION
In order to offer more transparency, we might want to replace in our mindset the easily used term ‘peace’ with ‘constructive dialog within an area of mutual respect and non-escalated armed conflict’.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The proposal is more consequential than its brevity suggests, because the substitution changes what an organisation can be held to.
Peace is what negotiators call a valence term: everyone endorses it, no one is bound by it, and its acceptance across a room is evidence of nothing. The formulation offered here divides it into three elements that can each be observed. Whether dialogue is taking place is a matter of fact. Whether the conditions of that dialogue treat the parties with equal regard can be assessed by anyone present. Whether armed conflict has escalated is measurable. An organisation that adopts this language has given up the comfort of an aim nobody can dispute and acquired an aim against which its work can be judged, which is the whole of the gain.
The example of the two representatives deserves to be recognised as a description of a well documented pattern rather than as an illustration. Agreements that record a shared objective without specifying what it consists of collapse at the point of implementation, and each party then reads the collapse as the other’s breach rather than as a defect in the drafting. The practitioner’s remedy is the one the author is applying to his own organisation: where a term is accepted too readily, ask each party what they understand by it, and record what they say rather than the word they said it in.
Two observations on what the new phrase includes and what it does not. By naming the absence of escalation rather than the absence of conflict, the author preserves a position this journal has taken repeatedly, namely that conflict is a normal feature of shared life and that the objective concerns the way it is conducted rather than its disappearance. That is worth making explicit, because a good deal of what passes for peace work aims at the suppression of disagreement and achieves the appearance of calm at the cost of the grievance that will surface later. And by placing mutual respect as the condition of the dialogue rather than as its outcome, the formulation sets a threshold: a conversation in which one party is not regarded as an equal is not the thing being described, whatever it produces.
One element the phrase leaves out deserves mention, since the distinction the author cites turns on it. The literature’s second term was introduced precisely to name the harm that persists where no one is fighting, in the form of arrangements that leave people without what they need while nobody strikes a blow. A formulation built on dialogue and the absence of escalation describes the conditions under which such arrangements can be raised and addressed, and it does not by itself require that they be. Whether that is a gap or a proper limit depends on what an organisation of this kind takes its task to be, and it is a question worth the field’s attention rather than an objection to the proposal.
Finally, the author’s willingness to make his own work assessable is the part of this reflection least likely to be imitated and most worth imitating. Organisations in this field are unusually well supplied with language that cannot fail, and the decision to exchange it for language that can is a rare one. Having made it, the organisation has invited exactly the questions its readers should now ask.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
FURTHER READING
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 53/243 (1999), Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace.
Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1945, preamble.
Richmond, O. P. (2008). Peace in International Relations. Routledge, London.
Wallensteen, P. (2015). Understanding Conflict Resolution (4th edition). Sage, London.
Avruch, K. (1998). Culture and Conflict Resolution. United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington D.C.
Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (3rd edition). Penguin Books, New York.
Bell, C. (2008). On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Institute for Economics and Peace, Positive Peace Report, annual editions, Sydney.