The 2001 Quaker Peace Roundtable:
Workshop #5: Mary Lord, FCNL, A New Campaign
for the Peaceful Prevention of Armed Conflicts and
Gross Violations of Human Rights
Notes by Roger Wolcott
Mary Lord began by commenting on Joe Volk’s remark that small things may be
important. In an area so huge as the one she is working in, it is helpful to have a
concrete
image to guide you. So she quotes Psalm 131:
My heart is not proud, 0 Lord,
my eyes are not haughty:
I do not concern myself with great mailers
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
0 Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and forevermore.
Great matters are too hard for us. It is not true that we can make peace for everyone -
but
we do what we can - and this may make a difference.
We are in the formative stage of a project, so the people in this workshop can be
guinea
pigs for trying out some of our ideas. The subject may be organized into four main points:
1. With the end of the cold war and
increasing globalization, the nature of conflict has
changed. Conflicts now occur within a nation. These may be ethnic conflicts, the result of
"failed states" and so forth. But the international community does not have ways
of
dealing with such conflicts.
2. In the years since the Bouldings began to
advocate peace research, a considerable body
of academic work has accumulated. This is conflict management research which examines
ways to limit deadly conflict and constitutes a valuable resource for peace work. The
result is a "tool box" of specific techniques such as mediation, arbitration and
"smart
sanctions" (that is, actions which penalize leaders but not ordinary citizens).
Although
such procedures have been studied and tested, so far the results have been confined to
informing academic specialists.
Another resource has come from a commission of the Carnegie Corporation, which has
published twenty books on peace topics. Some of this material contains especially useful
ideas. We learn, for example, that in preventing violence, early warning of potential
crises
is not a problem. Neither is not knowing what action to take. The problem is the absence
of political will. Intervening to head off trouble carries risks, and the reasoning is
that
perhaps if we do nothing the difficulty will go away. A handout from Lund’s book
Preventing Deadly Conflict illustrates in a tabular form some of the ways in
which