“Peace activists tend to be sensitive to interacting with the military and police,” said 91����Ƶ professor , as she introduced the speakers. “We often define security in a different way, focused on ‘human security.’” But she believes the two sides can – and must − work together even in countries where the security forces are part of a repressive government.

“We’ve come a long way in civil society to move from protesting security policies to making policy proposals for how to better pursue human security,” said Schirch, who has been invited to speak at the Pentagon, the Army War College and West Point Military Academy. She noted that several Harrisonburg Police Department officers were guests at the luncheon.

A research professor at 91����Ƶ’s (CJP), Schirch is also director of human security at the , an international network of peacebuilding practitioners and scholars that promotes “sustainable peace and security.”

Schirch and many of the luncheon attendees are currently involved in the final phase of a three-year project: the creation of a master curriculum, including a handbook and training modules, to help security forces and civil society groups learn how to collaborate on human security, community engagement and security sector development. The project, supported by the , partners the Alliance for Peacebuilding with the and the at the University of Notre Dame.

Approximately 30 contributors travelled from 26 countries for the one-week “training of trainers” on the 91����Ƶ campus. The luncheon speakers, who were part of the training session, spoke about their experiences engaging with military and police.

Reforming police practices

Kamal Uddin Tipu started his career as a police officer in Pakistan, eventually rising to deputy inspector general in the city of Islamabad. He came to CJP as a Fulbright scholar in 2004 to earn a master’s degree.

At 91����Ƶ, Tipu focused on restorative justice as a better way to deal with crime, law-breakers and victims. He spoke fondly of his time on campus, his family’s experiences while living in Harrisonburg, and his internship with the police department in Rochester, New York. He returned to Pakistan to implement what he had learned, introducing reforms in local police practices.

In recent years, Tipu went to Africa as a police adviser to the African Union and United Nations. “I saw how we need to focus more on the root causes of conflict,” he said. “I also saw the enormous amounts of money that countries spend on the military.”

A ‘peace general’

Deng Giguiento, a longtime peacebuilding trainer and practitioner, counts two generals as her friends on the Philippine island of Mindanao. As training coordinator for the Peace and Reconciliation Program of , she often interacted with security officials on local situations of conflict.

When a German couple was abducted by anti-government insurgents, for example, she helped negotiate their release alongside an army general. The general had rejected military action, despite opposition from his officers. Afterwards, the general started a class for his officers. His textbook was “The Little Book of Conflict Transformation,” written by��John Paul Lederach, founding director of CJP.

“When the general got stuck, he would call me and put me on speakerphone,” said Giguiento, who helped to establish the after attending SPI in 1997.

Moving from protest to proposals

Bernardo Arevalo de Leon, a former Guatemalan diplomat, talked about how his country is still trying to recover from a 33-year civil war between armed rebels and a repressive right-wing government. After 10 years of peace talks, the two sides signed a peace accord in 1996, but the country is struggling to implement reforms that were promised.

“The big task is to transform the way the government uses its security forces,” said de Leon, who was involved in the peace process. “We needed to think differently about the role of the police and the army.”

He also pointed out that civil society needed to move from protest to proposal to engage in the reform of the security sector.

De Leon is now based in Guatemala, where he is director of the Regional Office for Latin America for , a global peacebuilding nongovernmental organization based in Geneva.

Wrong.

In fact, the United States military combats terrorism and climate change. Both are huge threats to national security.

In this week’s Suter Science Seminar on the 91����Ƶ campus, professor connected two related issues that are central to the university’s educational mission and values: peacebuilding and sustainability. A research professor at 91����Ƶ’s , Schirch also serves as director of human security at the Washington, DC-based , which works to advance sustainable peace around the world.

Schirch’s perspective on climate change and global stability is bolstered by her wide travels; she has conducted conflict assessments and participated in peacebuilding planning alongside local colleagues in over 20 countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Kenya, Ghana, and Fiji. She earned a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University and is the author of a number of books and other publications.

After briefly explaining the science of global warming, Schirch focused on its political and social effects, rather than arguing for its existence. While much of the American public has varying responses and opinions to the concept of climate change, the view that global climate change is happening is uncontested in the Pentagon, as well as among the majority of the scientific community, she said.

The human response to climate change can be dramatic, Schirch said. When drought caused by global warming mixes with corrupt governments and religious extremism, terrorism can result.

In fact, retired naval commander Admiral T. Joseph Lopez, has argued that the conditions caused by global climate change will “extend the war on terror.” Lopez was among 11 retired military leaders contributing to a 2007 report, “.” Their findings and recommendations to the Department of Defense acknowledge the serious implications of political and social instability caused by the effects of climate change, Schirch said. (Schirch also referenced a 2014 report, “,” in which an expanded advisory board of 16 military leaders echoed the earlier findings.)

North Americans may be less aware of the implications of climate change, Schirch said, because “we actually are living in one of the most climate stable regions of the world.” Nations in the northern part of the globe are less affected by climate change. Ironically, these are the nations that tend to be the worst polluters of the atmosphere.

“As the sea levels rise in the decades and centuries ahead, there will be inundation of coastal areas with loss of settled areas and agriculture land, threats to water, and spread of infectious disease will stress the region,” Schirch said. The result will be forced migrations out of the most affected regions as land becomes unlivable.

Some activists claim that “climate migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these bad greenhouse gasses are coming from,” she added.

Though climate change poses serious threats, Schirch concluded with some hopeful ideas. “Climate change is a source of conflict, but it also has potential to be a motivator for collaboration and peacebuilding,” she said. Climate change has potential to bring humanity together with one common goal. She added that the Mennonite tradition has always supported the goals of peace and creation care, even before climate change was a problem.

In a formal response after the seminar, biology professor Jim Yoder described global climate change as a “wicked” problem, a thorny and complex issue that cannot easily be pinned down or solved. Ray Gingerich, emeritus professor of theology and ethics, reminded the audience that both a top-down and bottom-up response are required.

Schirch’s lecture was part of 91����Ƶ’s annual , made possible by the Daniel B. Suter Endowment in Biology. Six seminars by experts in their field will take place this semester. Lectures are free and open to the public.

These are the messages being spread by alumni of the of 91����Ƶ who are working in West African countries affected by Ebola.

“Local communities should not be seen simply as the source of problems or as victims,” writes Libby Hoffman in an published this month (January 2015). “Ebola is not just a medical problem – it is a community problem, and this dimension is being largely ignored within the current international response.”

Liberian peacebuilding alums Nathaniel Walker ( ’10) and Gwendolyn Myers ( ’14) offered similar sentiments in commentaries published in The Guardian and the Liberian Daily Observer, respectively.

“Communities that have taken Ebola prevention and control matters into their hands have recorded [a] significantly low number of cases,” wrote Myers in a . “Whereas, in communities that are yet to fully embrace the outbreak and to take action to avoid infection, we have seen an increase in transmission.”

Local efforts include developing the Pen-Pen Peace Network, an initiative of motorcycle taxi drivers. The Network has communicated about Ebola prevention through text messages, billboards, social media and loud speakers, distributed 3,000 fact sheets through communities, and built handwashing sanitation stations for citizens, wrote Walker and co-author Kai Kuang in an .

Women are playing important roles

In another grassroots initiative, Vaiba Flomo (CJP Grad. Cert. ’13) has rallied her close-knit Rock Hill community in Monrovia – where many of the 25,000 adults and children survive by hand-crushing rocks to sell for construction projects – to do health education. With her women’s team (called GSA Rock Hill Community Women), Flomo has distributed buckets, chlorine, and soap to various groups and centers where youths and adults typically gather, including clothing shops, prayer bands, video clubs, and drug stores. In an impoverished community largely ignored by governmental agencies, Flomo and her team have received .

Liberia is still recovering from a brutal civil war (as is Sierra Leone, one of the other West African countries hit hard by Ebola). For Walker and Myers, community-driven efforts toward Ebola prevention are vital not only to eradicate the disease, but to preserve the fragile peacebuilding steps that have been taken in recent years to heal these communities. (Guinea, the third West African country widely affected by Ebola, has suffered from political violence, but not outright civil war.)

In both Liberia and Sierra Leone, peace remains tenuous and distrust runs high (in many of these communities victims and perpetrators are living side-by-side), so fighting Ebola is intimately tied with communities’ ability to transcend past transgressions and develop open and honest communication.

“Lack of trust within communities is the unseen but powerful inhibiter of Ebola prevention and treatment initiatives,” writes Hoffman, whose charitable foundation, , is the main U.S. backer of , a Sierra Leonean peacebuilding initiative.

“Conversely, empowered and trusted local voices and leadership magnify the success of prevention efforts, and they do so while strengthening community capacity for post-Ebola recovery.”

Gaining strength to handle any crisis

Hoffman writes that building trust in communities actually provides a “social immunity” that goes beyond the disease at hand, and into the underlying fabric of society, leaving communities “stronger to face the next crisis, whatever it may be.”

Fambul Tok community members in Sierra Leone have been using their hard-earned trust to distribute soap to their communities, teach about prevention techniques, and develop the Bridging Communities Network, which functions much like the Pen-Pen Network in Liberia. [Hoffman attended 91����Ƶ’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) in 1996 and 2000; she has employed CJP graduates to work with Fambul Tok and sent Fambul Tok staffers to SPI sessions.]

As an example , who attended SPI ’14, heads a group called Peace Mothers under Fambul Tok. These mothers have been distributing soap and promoting handwashing in six mainly rural districts of Sierra Leone, seeking to reach about 250,000 households per district, often by going door to door.

“We believe that the outbreak will end when actors at all levels – the national and district governments, community-based organizations and the health sector – work cooperatively to engage local communities,” said a “project report” released Sept. 2, 2014, by the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founded by Nobel Peace Laureate (MA ’07 in ).

The tide may be turning

This seems to be happening at last. The tide seems to be turning from Ebola in West Africa. On that weekly UN figures show a decline in new Ebola cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Even though the “death toll from the world’s worst Ebola outbreak has reached 8,429 with 21,296 cases so far,” schools in Guinea opened Jan. 19 after a five-month closure and the national daily infection rate in Sierra Leone is two-thirds lower now than it was in November. Liberia had its lowest weekly total since June and all three countries “have sufficient capacity to bury all the people known to have died from Ebola,” said the BBC.

In Sierra Leone, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman has found that the locals are proving amazingly resilient.

“Vigor seems to be part of Sierra Leone’s national ethos,” he wrote in a on Sierra Leone’s passionate surfers, “especially now, when so many people are fixated on staying healthy. Freetown’s streets thicken at dawn with men and women decked out in the latest and brightest spandex — jogging, stretching, jumping rope, or doing situps and push-ups in the grass.”

If one visits , you’ll see that interspersed with updates on trainings in handwashing to stop the spread of Ebola, are fun photos of Myers in colorful clothing and high heels, sometimes with color-coordinated decorations around her neck and in her hair. It’s as if she’s saying, “We are not all gloom and doom here! We’re resilient Liberians and proud of it!”

at a to. The money raised will be distributed��by the to two Liberian service organizations founded by alumnae of : GSA Rock Hill Community Women in Monrovia, founded by Vaiba Flomo, and Messengers of Peace, a youth outreach group founded by Gwendolyn Myers. To or for more information, click .

Almost 20 million people died between 1914 and 1918 in the worst war the world had ever known. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and others reacted to the carnage by embracing the idea of a “league of nations” which would settle conflicts before they escalated into wars. Wilson told a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1919 that such a league would be a “guaranty against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin.” This league would not merely “secure the peace of the world,” it would be “used for cooperation in any international matter,” said Wilson.

Narrow, national politics intervened – as they would henceforth – and the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Versailles peace treaty that founded the League of Nations.

In the absence of U.S. cooperation and that of other key players in the following years, the League’s impact was limited. It nevertheless took some actions from its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, that showed the possibilities for its post WWII successor, the United Nations. It settled territorial disputes between Finland and Sweden, Germany and Poland, and Iraq and Turkey. It dealt with a refugee crisis in Russia. It gave rise to the Permanent Court of International Justice.

But the League had an imbalanced structure that continues to plague today’s UN – decision-making was dominated by certain nations, namely the victors from WWI (with the exception of the United States). And the League had no power of its own to stop aggressor-nations, whether by agreed-upon economic sanctions or by military means. The outbreak of World War II marked the utter failure of the League.

In the aftermath of the Second World War

If WWI was terrible, WWII was horrifically worse, claiming the lives of more than three times the number of military and civilian people as WWI.

Again, it was a U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pushed for the creation of an international organization to be, in fact and not just in words, a guarantor of peace.

[A]s earlier, the basic dilemmas and conundrums had not changed: How to balance national sovereignty and international idealism? How to reconcile the imbalances between countries over power and influence, over resources and commitments? How, in other words, could one draft a charter that would recognize and effectively deal with the sheer fact that some countries were, in effect more equal than others?��(Hanhimäki, 15)*

The answer was to entice the then-most-powerful nations into being players in the proposed organization – and into staying in the game –��by giving them permanent seats at the top of the organization, with each having veto power over decisions.

To this day, 68 years since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the five victorious powers from WWII – China, France, Great Britain, the United States and Russia – occupy permanent seats on the UN’s��, with each being able to block a decision by exercising a veto that cannot be overridden. For example, the inability of key players on the Security Council to agree on ways to support peace in Syria has blocked any effective UN role in Syria, except for chemical weapons dismantling. Similarly the UN was helpless when the United States ignored France’s, Russia’s and China’s dismay and unilaterally led an invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Security Council is now enlarged by 10 members, elected by the general UN membership to two-year terms, but these 10 do not have the veto power or staying power of the “Permanent Five,” dubbed the P-5.

Which part does what in the UN system?

There’s no simple way of explaining the complexity of the United Nations and its “system” or “family of organizations,” but in the next couple of dozen paragraphs we’ll make a try. The UN began in 1945 with these six components (all beginning with “The”):

1.��, consisting of representatives from the UN’s member nations who deliberate policies, then make recommendations and decisions. Basically, it’s the UN version of the U.S. Congress or British-style parliaments, but with less legislative impact since the UN is a voluntary association.

2.��, as described above.

3.����(or��), responsible today for some 70 percent of the human and financial resources of the UN system, including 14 specialized agencies, nine “functional” commissions, and five regional commissions.

4.��, today made up of 43,000 civil servants who staff duty stations around the world and perform the day-to-day work of the United Nations, including administering peacekeeping operations, surveying economic and social trends, and preparing studies on human rights. Basically, the Secretariat services the four other organs on this list (not counting the Trusteeship Council) and administers the programs and policies invoked by them.

5.��.

6.��Trusteeship Council, whose historical reason for existence has disappeared, leaving it without a purpose.

The UN system has grown exponentially beyond the 1940s-era United Nations to encompass more than 50 affiliated organizations – known as programs, funds, and specialized agencies – with their own memberships, leaderships, and budget processes. For example, the����– almost always simply called UNESCO – is a legally independent organization that is affiliated with the United Nations through a negotiated agreement. Its chief executive meets twice a year with the executives of 28 other UN-affiliated organizations, including the��,����and��. This group is called the Chief Executives Board for Coordination and is chaired by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

In contrast to the “specialized agencies” like UNESCO with its structural independence, the “funds,” “programs,” “departments,” and “commissions” (among other descriptors) of the United Nations are usually an integral part of the mother organization headquartered in New York City. They carry out the policies established by the General Assembly and Security Council.

For a visual overview, locate the eight-color, 14-box chart titled “. Another handy resource is��. It outlines the better-known components of the UN system. A word to those who might wish to work within this system: there isn’t a centralized application process; you’ll need to search for each unit’s specific hiring requirements and procedures and be prepared to compete against many – perhaps hundreds – who are multilingual with graduate degrees.

The UN system performs work that almost everyone would agree is laudable – from supporting basic research aimed at improving food production to raising literacy levels around the world – but the United Nations’ foundational purpose of maintaining international peace resides largely with the Security Council. No use of international sanctions, no peacekeeping operation, no��significant��steps for peaceful resolution of a��major��conflict, can be undertaken without Security Council approval.

Stemming the flood of suffering��and dying people

When massive loss of life looms, whether from natural disasters or war, the UN system is positioned to intervene, if welcomed (or at least permitted) by the host state. For natural disasters, the aid typically comes quickly. For massive deaths due to human conflict, United Nations intervention gets stymied by political considerations, resulting in ineffectiveness and delay, as occurred in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

��typically get funded by developed nations, using personnel drawn from less-developed nations. This is why the UN’s “blue helmets” or “blue berets” are disproportionately from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Jordan and countries making up the African Union.

The Security Council also largely shapes the work of the General Assembly, which is supposed to be where democracy comes to the fore on the international level. Yes, all 193 members of the UN have one vote in the General Assembly. But, no, they can’t override any Security Council decisions. Only the Security Council can pass binding resolutions, though the General Assembly can, and does regularly, pass non-binding resolutions that at least have a moral impact.

The entire UN system is coordinated by its��, currently Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea, who gets into that position only if recommended by the Security Council.

Money flows into the UN system in two ways, via: (1) an assessment, like a tax, based on a country’s gross national income relative to other countries and (2) voluntary contributions. The UN’s peacekeeping operations are funded through the assessment, with a surcharge paid by members of the P-5 group.

Voluntary contributions from nations and other sources (e.g., the European Union and development banks) make up at least part of the budgets of many important organs, such as the��,��,����and��, as well as��,��, and��.

Nine countries account for roughly three-quarters of the operating budget of the United Nations: the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Spain and China. The United States is the single largest contributor at 22 percent, but collectively, the European Union countries contribute the lion’s share of the UN’s budget, roughly 35 percent.

In 2011, the����(UNHCR) said it needed $3.5 billion – its largest request ever – to meet the needs of the world’s growing numbers of refugees and displaced persons. It received $2.18 billion.

The biggest forced movements of humans today are in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan (and South Sudan), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Colombia, and Mali. The world has 15.4 million recognized refugees – equivalent to everyone living in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco becoming refugees simultaneously – plus twice that many displaced within their own countries.

“These truly are alarming numbers,” said UNHCR head António Guterres, upon releasing a report in June 2013. “They reflect individual suffering on a huge scale and they reflect��the difficulties of the international community in preventing conflicts��[author’s emphasis] and promoting timely solutions for them.”

In mid-2013, nearly 97,000 uniformed UN personnel were conducting peacekeeping, truce supervision, or stabilization work in 16 areas, including Afghanistan, Mali, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Sudan, Liberia, Haiti, Lebanon, and the border of India and Pakistan, Their budget was $7.57 billion, the largest single outflow of UN dollars for anything. (Yet this is miniscule, relative to the military budgets of developed nations like France and the United States.)

Dramatic jump in peacekeeping

A��dramatic increase in UN peacekeeping operations followed a 1992 “,” nurtured by then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The policy document was endorsed at a meeting of heads of state convened by the Security Council. It defined four consecutive stages to prevent or control conflicts: preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding (i.e., identifying and supporting ways to help strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid future conflict).

For the first time ever, the Agenda for Peace implied that the UN did not necessarily require the consent of all parties in the conflict to intervene.

One of the early success cases of the Agenda for Peace was in Mozambique, where between 1992 and 1994, about 6,000 UN peacekeepers helped oversee its transition from a state of civil war to democratic elections.

The balance sheet for UN peacekeeping in the 1990s, however, was mostly negative, with its disastrous failure to stabilize Somalia – festering to this day – and to prevent ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.

Obviously, the foundational reason for the United Nations – being a guarantor of peace – is far from being achieved.

“The basic problems for the UN as the overseer of international security was and remains simple: how to deal with conflicts – be they between or within states –��without offending the national sovereignty of its member states[editor’s emphasis],” writes Jussi M. Hanhimäki, a native of Finland who is professor of international history and politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

From the beginning the UN recognized the economic roots of much violent conflict, putting these words in its charter: “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”

This statement reflected awareness that the global Great Depression after WWI, coupled with the punitive reparations imposed on WWI’s losers, incubated the aggressive ultra-nationalism that resulted in the next world war.

Efforts to alleviate poverty around the world, however, have been confounded (in part) by different nations’ political and economic ideologies. The United States, for instance, has always promoted global capitalism as the best way for all countries in the world to develop. But is it? If other modes of development were better in certain situations, would the UN system have room to explore them under its current funding and leadership system?

Doug Hostetter, a 1966 graduate of 91����Ƶ who directs��, has observed over the last five years growing involvement by global corporations in UN discussions.

Viewed in the most positive light, this corporate involvement – often in the form of underwriting the costs of conferences and participating in them – shows private-public cooperation to address some of the world’s most intractable problems. Viewed in terms of vested interests, however (as Hostetter says he views matters), the corporations are mainly interested in maximizing their profits, regardless of the impact on the most vulnerable in the world.

Impact of unwieldy structure on functioning

As mentioned earlier, the UN system consists of more than 50 organizations and entities, labeled by dozens of acronyms, with the majority beginning with “UN” or “W” for “World,” plus ones like ECOSOC, FAO, GATT, IAEA, ICJ, ILO, IMF, ITU, MSC, OHCHR and ONUC.

Excluding the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the UN system has about 83,000 on its payroll, most of them working out of offices or “duty stations” around the globe. The single largest chunk of employees is within the��, headquartered in New York City. Secretariat employees also work from office centers in Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Beirut, Geneva, Nairobi, Santiago and Vienna.

Annual expenditures in the entire UN system, excluding the banking entities, topped $41.5 billion in 2011, according to the UN Chief Executives Board for Coordination.

Compensation varies within the system, but at the United Nations itself, salary scales (found at the����) for two sample locations in the fall of 2013 – New York City and Addis Abba, Ethiopia – ranged from a minimum of $77,338 for entry-level professionals to a maximum of $203,620 for senior-level professionals, including cost of living adjustments for these locations. Rent subsidies, allowances for dependents, grants for children’s schooling, extra pay for hardship and hazardous work are routinely granted in addition to salaries.

In 2005, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan sought to strengthen the Secretariat’s office of internal oversight in order “to review all mandates older than five years to see whether the activities concerned are still genuinely needed or whether the resources assigned to them can be reallocated in response to new and emerging challenges.” This is just one example of many initiatives in recent decades aimed at streamlining the United Nations, some of them successful.

“There is no point in mincing words,” writes Jussi M. Hanhimäki. “The UN is a structural monstrosity, a conglomeration of organizations, divisions, bodies and secretariats, all with their distinctive acronyms that few can ever imagine being able to master.” He notes that “the UN has a tendency not to reform but to build new structures on top of already existing ones,” causing limited resources to be “squandered due to lack of operational coherence.”

Development aid in particular is subject to “duplication and overlap [that] have reduced efficiency and increased administrative costs within the UN and its sister organizations,” such as the World Bank, says Hanhimäki.

Everett Ressler, a 1970 graduate of 91����Ƶ, draws a different conclusion from his 40 years in international development and humanitarian work. “The UN functions as a crucible in which people from all countries strive to work together for the common good, including the resolution of differences,” he says. “What has surprised me is not that there are challenges and disappointments but that so much continues to be achieved despite them. The limited but unique role of the UN is often wrongly portrayed, and its contributions are undervalued.” (Ressler retired from UNICEF in 2008 after 14 years of what he describes as “ building capacities to prepare and respond more effectively in crisis situations.”)

Peace is central, ongoing focus

Turning to the peace field: building a peaceful world has been at the UN’s heart since it was founded, garnering its agencies or people Nobel Peace Prizes in 1945, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1969, 1981, 1988, 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2013. The 1992 Agenda for Peace was endorsed at the Security Council level.

In the summer of 2005, the first “people building peace” conference was held at the UN headquarters in New York City. This conference attracted about 1,000 delegates from 119 countries, including 15 CJP students and several who are currently CJP professors, Catherine Barnes, Barry Hart, and Lisa Schirch. Sitting together in the majestic Grand Assembly room, Hart and Schirch reported being thrilled to see many CJP graduates, partners and colleagues from around the world.

In 2006 the UN formed a��, charged with coordinating the efforts of multiple actors, including UN agencies and international donors, in stabilizing post-conflict countries. Currently on the stabilization list are Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and the Central African Republic. The Commission has a budget titled the����from which it disperses about $100 million annually for activities and projects aimed at preventing these countries from relapsing into conflict.

Burundi, for example, was one of the first countries receiving support from the Peacebuilding Fund, with an initial allocation of $35 million in 2007 aimed at “making the hard-won peace in Burundi irreversible,” said Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, referring to the end of a decade of civil war in the mid-2000s. The UN has remained in Burundi ever since, supporting security sector and justice system reforms, radical improvement in governance and human rights, and improved living conditions.

Yet the path to peace remains perilous in Burundi, as��Peacebuilder��magazine recently learned from Jean-Claude Nkundwa, a CJP graduate student who did research in his home country in the summer of 2013. As a teenager in Burundi in the early 1990s, Nkundwa witnessed genocidal killings and lost family members to ethnic cleansing.

In an article posted atdescribed what he saw during his recent visit: muzzled dissent, the fostering of militant youth groups by the ruling regime, and discrimination against out-of-power ethnic and regional groups. He said President Nkurunziza, serving a second five-year term after being elected in 2005 and re-elected in 2010, has disregarded human rights and rule of law (including, it appears, the law barring him from running for election again).

But the last thing Nkundwa wants is for the UN to give up, as if Burundi were hopeless. On the contrary, he says:

The international community needs to play a more proactive role right now. It must assert itself and pressure the Burundian government to create political space to allow the opposition to operate without intimidation and harassment. The international indifference to the war in Rwanda in 1994 led to the genocide of one million people. Surely, there are some lessons learned, and the international community should not repeat the same mistakes in Burundi.

Realize, though, that the UN is operating in Burundi with the permission of its ruling regime. This long-standing dilemma of the UN’s – i.e., that it is supposed to be a servant of its member-nations, almost regardless of what the leadership of a particular nation is doing – began to be addressed in the early 2000s with a series of formal discussions on whether each state has a “responsibility to protect” its people.

In 2005, the UN members agreed that each of them has a����their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. (It’s dubbed the “” principle.) And, when states fail to do this, the international community has the right and responsibility to act in a “timely and decisive manner” – through the UN Security Council and in accordance with the����– to protect the people facing these crimes.

This principle has since been invoked in the cases of Libya (controversially), Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan, and Yemen.

The goals are worthy,��but how to implement them?

Activities that the UN system undertakes without fail, year in and year out, are convene conferences, issue reports, and make heartfelt declarations on what the world needs to do to move closer to most people’s desire for justice, peace, and prosperity (or at least a chance at decent survival) for all.

Terminology has changed over the years at the United Nations. “Human security” is the latest term referring to the right of people to live in safety and dignity and earn their livelihood – which, of course, is what long-standing UN units concerned with poverty reduction, education, health, agriculture, peace, and so forth have been trying to do for decades.

The��, declared under former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000 to guide the UN through 2015, called for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality, better health, environmental sustainability, and “a global partnership for development.”

“We have to connect the dots [between] climate change, [the] food crisis, water scarcity, energy shortages and women’s empowerment as well as global health issues,” says Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-Moon. “These are all interconnected issues.”

Except for the emphasis on environmental sustainability, Annan’s and Ban’s stated aspirations for a better world can be found in the 1945��, its 1948��, and its supplemental 1966��.

It’s the implementation of these grand goals that continues to bedevil the UN system.

Look at the work of the Office of the��, for example. In a given week, it may hold meetings on: who is using torture for what purposes; the rights of indigenous people in the face of gold prospecting, lumbering, ranching, and drilling for oil; abuses endured by women in the Middle East and Africa; and legal protections that developed countries should extend to their migrant workers. Yet, to the dismay of its staff no doubt, the human rights commission is basically toothless. It can make recommendations; it can try to shame entities into making changes. But it lacks implementation tools.

As for peace work, when is the Security Council going to respond to early signs of an impending conflict and authorize preventive measures before it’s a full-fledged crisis, with tens- or hundreds-of-thousands or millions dead?

Why we need the UN system

Despite the weaknesses of the UN system, it is the place in which the world places its hopes when the going gets really tough. Every day the UN system directly helps millions of people, at the comparatively modest cost of about $6 annually for each of the world’s inhabitants.

A����found that a strong majority of Americans support the UN system and its efforts to end global poverty, provide humanitarian relief after disasters, and lay the groundwork for peace around the world. Specifically, the UN system:

1.��Articulates important objectives for the world. It thus raises consciousness everywhere on issues like the abuse of girls and women and the rights of indigenous peoples.

2.��Feeds the hungry and houses the homeless when they are recognized as groups of displaced people or refugees from conflict, abuse, or natural disaster. Tries to get them back to their homeplaces whenever it can.

3.��Dispatches well-qualified advisors – in almost any humanitarian, educational, cultural, security, governance, or developmental field you can name –��in response to invitations by governments. Designates UNESCO World Heritage sites.

4.��Issues educational materials and underwrites trainings that are especially valued by governments that have few resources.

5.��Acts as a moral counterweight to reprehensible acts around the world, calling individuals and governments to be accountable.

6.��Sponsors cross-national biomedical, environmental, and scientific initiatives aimed at reducing preventable diseases and improving living standards.

7.��Remains the only globally recognized organization that aspires to recognize and uphold the rights and needs of one and all, mediating between those who come into conflict. As such, it is an essential instrument for global peace.

In a June 2013 interview, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said:**

My answer to those who criticize the UN is that the UN is as strong as the member states want it to be. The UN is a reflection of the world as it is, whether you like it or not. Democracy is not everywhere, human rights violations take place, wars and huge inequalities exist. But if we forget the UN Charter, if we forget the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if we forget what our work and the world should be, then we have failed. My job as well as yours at the Alliance for Peacebuilding is to reduce the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. It is relevant for the UN and for the Alliance for Peacebuilding. This is what we are fighting for, every day.

# # # #

You’ll also see a picture, right at the top, of American and British soldiers teaching their Sierra Leonean counterparts how to use a mortar. It’s a worth-a-thousand-words example of what’s wrong with the predominant approach to security reform around the world, according , research professor at the of 91����Ƶ.

“Often, military personnel are taught how to use weapons and how to target ‘enemies’ but they are not taught about civil society, how to protect civilians or basic social skills for interacting with people,” she said. “More and more experts are realizing that more training is needed to help security forces understand how they should be relating to civilians.”

Schirch argues that the institutions of civil society – religious groups, universities, media, community organizations, etc. – are the foundation of stable, peaceful communities. True security sector reform, then, should assist security forces to protect and empower civil society as it builds and sustains peace. The train-and-equip model that prevails now, however, often results in civilians “perceiving the military or police as predators, not as protectors,” she said.

Re-orienting soldiers, police officers, to civil society

Addressing that problem lies at the heart of Schirch’s latest undertaking – a three-year process to develop a curriculum for teaching soldiers and police officers the “soft” skills of relating to civil society. The project, called “,” is a partnership between (where Schirch also serves as director of human security), the at the University of Notre Dame, and .

As part of the ongoing curriculum development, Schirch and her colleagues are meeting with civil society groups and security forces around the world to gather input, collect case studies, and develop teaching strategies and materials. By 2015, the work will result in the publication of a training handbook and a series of online courses designed to improve the ways that security forces and civil society groups communicate and interact.

Schirch describes the effort as a culmination of the work she’s done over the past decade to help American foreign policy support – rather than counteract– peace, security and democracy in other countries. Among her inspirations for this was a 2005 visit to Iraq to lead a peacebuilding training, during which Iraqis asked her what she was doing to teach her own government and military how to build peace.

Keynote speaker at Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship

During her keynote address at the hosted at 91����Ƶ Jan. 31 through Feb. 2, 2014, Schirch described how she subsequently began “knocking on doors” in Washington D.C. and at the Pentagon, with no clear idea of what she wanted to do other than to begin talking with military leaders about . (To beat swords into plowshares, she noted, you have to get in touch with the people holding the swords.) As a result, she now receives regular invitations from the military to appear on panels, teach courses, and speak at conferences about peacebuilding and security. This is a reflection, she said, of an enormous hunger in the military to learn more about these issues.

Also during her remarks at the recent conference, Schirch outlined a series of 50-year goals she has for the security curriculum project and ensuing work. Among these is her hope that the military will become an institution focused on peacekeeping, disaster response and protection of civilians, rather than destruction of enemies, and that all soldiers will be trained peacebuilders whose primary role is to protect civilians. She also hopes that nonlethal weapons will be used during violent crises to prevent further violence, and that perpetrators of that violence will be brought to justice before the International Criminal Court and other legal institutions.

Schirch points to a number of examples where better relationships between civil society groups and the military have already improved security and built peace around the world. In the Philippines, she said, classes at the – founded by graduates of – have taught conflict management and peacebuilding to soldiers. These soldiers’ new skills and relationships to civil society groups, as resulted from the classes, have allowed the military to “de-escalate very tense situations with armed groups,” Schirch said.

New book: Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning

Civil society leaders, with the support of security forces, have also stopped post-election violence in both Ghana and Kenya by acting on previously established plans for addressing conflict, she said.

This summer, Schirch will be teaching a course at SPI based on her latest book, . The book, listed atop the reading list for 2014, concludes that effective peacebuilding requires coordinated planning between the military, government and civil society groups. The curriculum project Schirch is now developing will include lessons on conflict assessment and methods described in the book.

“Instead of just demonizing the military, we need to engage them as human beings and provide training so they have tools other than guns to build peace,” Schirch said when speaking to the audience of young peacebuilders at the recent 91����Ƶ conference. “We have a lot of work to do, so it’s good that we have a lot of good people working on this.”

The theme of the conference is “Peace in practice: What does it look like when our theories become action?”

“Lisa’s example of��field work with local, international, and systems-based conflicts is inspirational for college students,” says Christine Baer, a conference co-organizer and a senior and major.

Schirch and other speakers will focus on building peace at all levels, from local to international, and integrating this work into art and other forms of community engagement.

91����Ƶ Lisa Schirch

In her role at the Alliance for Peacebuildling, Schirch connects policymakers with global civil society networks, facilitates civil-military dialogue, and provides a conflict prevention and peacebuilding lens on current policy issues.

Schirch is also a research professor at .

She has conducted conflict assessments and participated in peacebuilding planning alongside local colleagues in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Kenya, Ghana, and Fiji.

Schirch works primarily with small local NGOs and civil society organizations. Schirch also has worked as a consultant on conflict assessment and peacebuilding planning for large entities, such as the , the World Bank, several branches of the U.S. government, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, and many other international organizations.

She holds a BA in international relations from the University of Waterloo in Canada and an MS and a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University.

Drama that entertains and informs

“I’d Like to Buy an Enemy” will be performed by on Friday, Jan. 31, at 8 p.m., in the MainStage Theater in University Commons.

The play, starring Ted Swartz, MDiv ’92, and Tim Ruebke MA ’99 (), allows audiences to laugh at themselves while raising important questions about the place of the United States in the world, confronting the fear that is such a large part of contemporary culture, and exploring ways to honestly work for peace and justice in this country.

Tickets are $8 for general audience and $5 for 91����Ƶ faculty and staff. 91����Ƶ students and conference attendees are free, if they show their identifications.

Ted and Company will also host university chapel on Friday at 10 a.m.

Organizers

The Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship Conference is sponsored and organized by , a student organization that organizes campus-wide activities, regular space to share meals and discussions, and special speakers to spark meaningful dialogue. For more information about the conference or Peace Fellowship, contact the applied social sciences department.

Conference details

The program will open on Friday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m., and end on Sunday, Feb. 2, at 1 p.m. Participating schools include Bluffton University in Ohio; Conrad Grebel College in Canada; Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania; Goshen College in Indiana; Hesston College in Kansas; and Messiah College in Pennsylvania.

Workshops will be offered on a wide range of topics, including “A Subversive Shalom: Enacting Radical Peace” with and ; “Home Front: the Untold History of Radical Veteran Peacemaking” with ; and “: Promoting Personal Growth and Community Well-Being” with Philip Fisher Rhodes and Ron Copeland.

Other topics to be covered range from “The Relationship Between Islam and Peace” and “Restorative Justice in Our Schools” to “Arts, Theater, and Peacebuilding.”

Most sessions will be held in of the seminary building and seminary classrooms.

Creating connections

“We expect this conference to be a time of sharing stories and experiences at all levels, with many practical applications of peacebuilding,” said Krista Nyce, an 91����Ƶ senior major and conference co-organizer. “We have heard a lot in the classroom about theories and have debated concepts; thus we hope this can be a time to build on those with realistic accounts of speakers’ varied involvements from local organizations to experiences of national organizing, from art to restorative justice to education.”

and a is available . is also available.

For more information on the conference visit or email: emupeacefellowship@gmail.com.

“Antoinette Tuff is a national hero,” wrote Schirch, who is affiliated with 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. “Her story must be shared, passed onto future generations.”

Titling her commentary Schirch pointed out that “learning to talk down a gunman is not some top-secret strategy. FBI agents learn how to talk down gunman. They use the same skills we teach in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Listen, ask questions, share stories, show compassion.”

Schirch is also the founding director of the human security program under the Alliance for Peacebuilding based in Washington D.C.

A columnist in the Washington Post, Petula Dvorak, drew from Antoinette Tuff’s sympathetic manner of speaking to the gunman, saying: “Are you listening to her, America? Her 911 call — listen to the whole thing; it’s riveting — is a portrait of poise, compassion and selflessness. She was exactly what America is forgetting to be.”

As the founder and director of , Schirch has worked for the past seven years to encourage U.S. government agencies to protect humanitarian space while embracing conflict prevention and peacebuilding principles. The project has progressed rapidly over the past year, as her strong relationships with military and civilian leaders have resulted in invitations to teach civil society peacebuilding concepts nearly weekly at the Pentagon, West Point, the U.S. Army War College and elsewhere.

“The quantity and quality of our relationships with the , , [the] and the grew exponentially during the last year,” Schirch wrote this spring in a report for the , a funder of 3P’s work.

Over the past year, Schirch also taught a course on Afghan civil society to nearly 1,000 foreign service officers, published several reports and book chapters for government audiences, and testified before Congress. Schirch noted that while she’s developed close relationships with American military and diplomatic leaders, she does not support many of the policies they now pursue.

“Building relationships is an essential part of peacebuilding,” she says. “The most important negotiations and diplomacy happen with people you disagree with.”

Schirch founded 3P (which stands for Partners for Peacebuilding Policy) Human Security during a sabbatical in 2005, after exploring ways that CJP could relate to policy-makers in Washington, D.C. She recognized opportunity to engage both the peace community, which often was simply opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without offering viable alternatives, as well as the military, which was flailing in its attempts at “state-building” in those countries.

In the years since, 3P has worked with other peace organizations to better define and understand “security” while working with the military to imagine alternatives to the way it has carried out its missions overseas. While her short-term goal with 3P is to persuade the military and state department to recognize, support and protect the ability of Afghans and Iraqis to rebuild their own countries, her long-term goals are grander in scope.

“We have to conceive of ‘security’ in a totally new way,” Schirch says. This involves exploring what the concept of “security” means to people, what conditions are necessary for them to experience it, and how – or if – the military has a role in creating or protecting those conditions. These exercises then lead to bigger questions about pacifism, and whether the use of force is an appropriate intervention during security crises, and what kind of force, exactly, would be appropriate. A related set of questions involves what sorts of changes to the country’s budgetary priorities and military-industrial complex would allow the military to embrace peacekeeping rather than aggression as its primary role – all work that has proven both exciting and exhausting for Schirch over the past seven years.

“Lisa helped shape the thinking of a lot of people who are in Afghanistan and Iraq on the role that indigenous civil society groups can play in facilitating conflict prevention or stabilization,” says , vice-president for operations and government services with , a national security consulting firm. “She is definitely one of the innovators [in that field].”

Agoglia is a retired U.S. Army colonel who directed the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute in Pennsylvania and the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan. He has worked with Schirch for years, both as an officer and a civilian.

After operating under the structure of CJP since 2005, 3P shifted its organizational affiliation as of July 1, 2012, to the , a coalition of practitioners based in Washington, D.C. While grant funding for 3P’s work will now flow through the Alliance for Peacebuilding rather than CJP, there will be no practical change to Schirch’s role and presence at 91����Ƶ, where she will remain based as a research professor. She will also continue to teach one class each year at its .

Through October 2012, Schirch is taking an unpaid sabbatical to focus on rest and renewal. She is pursuing her interest in the visual arts as the artist-in-residence at CJP. She hopes her example will help to “normalize” rest-taking and breaks in a field where people “all talk about self-care a lot, but don’t do a very good job of it.”

“When you work in war zones, you lose people who you work with,” she says. “Grief and trauma are a part of working to build peace in places where there is great tragedy.”

She also said the experience of developing strong working relationships with military leaders, with whom she still holds sharply divergent convictions about war, violence and justice, has become a mounting stress she hopes to alleviate during her sabbatical.

Schirch’s art itself will have a dual “3P” motif, both in its media –��painting, photography and pottery – and subject matter –��parenting, parks and poetry. Her sabbatical will culminate with an art show on campus that will open on Nov. 3.

“Beauty is the opposite of violence, and that’s the theme of my art show,” she says.