The Nature of Peace and Peacebuilding in a Collectivist and Illiberal World
This article was originally published in Beyond Intractability
The only reasonable prediction we can make about the 21st century is that we don’t know what’s coming our way — except that it will be bad.
While triggered by the Israel/Palestine situation, this article is a critical reflection on the role of ‘peacebuilding’ (my umbrella term for all non-adversarial dispute resolution processes) in the 21st century.
To understand why the peacebuilding field has failed to live up to its lofty ambitions, we have to unpack the world we inhabit today. After the heady optimism at the end of the Cold War, the conflicts of the new century have forced Westerners to rethink their short-lived assumptions about abolishing war, making the world safe for democracy and capitalism, and world peace. Hence, I won’t give you a two-point off-ramp for Russia, a five-point plan for the Syrian embroglio, or a seven-point approach for the Israel-Palestine mess. Of course, we should try to make the world safer. However, our attempts should be rooted in hard-nosed realities, not skewered by wishful thinking.
Continue reading Peacebuilding: Growing Strawberries on Coconut Trees – by Ashok Panikkar
It was an honor to share my perspective as a Jew and diversity professional at Chattanooga’s MLK interfaith service commemorating The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That event was years ago but my passion for diversity is a lifelong legacy from my father, a US World War II military intelligence officer whose letters describing Naziism reside in Cincinnati’s American Jewish Archives. Having dedicated decades to tikkun olam, Hebrew for ‘repair of the world,’ I resonate to this day to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words, “Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”