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Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen

Promoting Peace by Peaceful Means

The Transcend Network

Globalizing Peace
Transcend:
A Peace and Development Network
OP 1 - CP 331
Cluj-Napoca 134919
Romania
external linkWebsite


Director:
Johan Galtung
emailEmail

Co-Director and Executive Secretary:
Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen
emailEmail
Transcend
Transcend Peace University
The World's First Online Peace University
external linkWebsite 		1 To work for peace is to work against violence; by analyzing its forms and causes, predicting in order to prevent, and then act preventively and curatively since peace relates to violence like health relates to illness. Whether as direct violence or as the indirect slow, grinding violence of social structures that do not deliver sufficient nutrition and health at the bottom of world society, enormous suffering, dukkha, is the effect.
2 To work for peace is to build sukha, liberation, well-ness in a world with peace with nature, between genders, generations and races, where the excluded are included but not by force, and where classes, nations and states serve neither direct nor structural violence. In such a world they would all pull together for better livelihood for all. That would be true globalization, unlike the present reduction of that term to represent only state and corporate elites in a handful of countries.

A Model for a Peaceful World
3 Committed to the promotion of peace by peaceful means, the Transcend network aims to combine 14 approaches into a model of a peaceful world:
4
  1. Peace Movement: extend this concept to include commitment to peace by all states and corporations, accountable to peace programs.
  2. War Abolition: treating offensive arms like hard drugs, outlawing research, development, production, distribution, possession, use.
  3. Global Governance: democratizing the United Nations through direct elections to a People's Assembly and abolition of the veto power.
  4. Peace Education: to be introduced at all school levels all over like civics, hygiene, sex education, knowledge of own culture.
  5. Peace Journalism: that all decent media also focus on ways out of conflicts, building a solution culture, not a violence culture.
  6. Nonviolence: that nonviolent ways of fighting for a cause and to defend own integrity = basic needs become part of common skills.
  7. Peacemaking/conflict transformation: conflict handling knowledge and skills as part of training citizens anywhere, like hygiene.
  8. Peace Culture: that people start discussing their own culture, what can be done to make it more peace-productive, and then do it.
  9. Basic Needs: that respect for the basic needs of everybody, and indeed the most needy, becomes a basic guideline for politics.
  10. Peace Structure: from exploitative and repressive structures with nature, genders, races, classes, nations, states to equity, parity.
  11. Peacebuilding: cultivate good and bad rather than good or bad images of the world's actors, and positive ties in all directions.
  12. Peacekeeping: with minimum violence become a protection for the defenceless and a protective in-between for the violent.
  13. Peace Zones: starting with yourself as a peace zone of one person based on the principles above, construct archipelagos of peace.
  14. Reconciliation: learn to apologize and accept apologies, how to ask for forgiveness and forgive, how to heal and close conflicts.
5 More can be added and some will be when we turn to one effort to enact some of this. Does the model stand any chance or is it merely a fata morgana, some image over a desert overheated by the excessive violence, not to mention the threats, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? It can be argued that humanity has been through much worse. And that increasingly military and civilians, politicians and people will do all of this together, given more knowledge, skill and will.

Peacebuilding in Practice
»The word ›peace‹ is used both by the naive who confuse absence of direct violence with peace and do not understand that the work to make and build peace is now just about to start, and by the less naive who know this and do not want that work to get started. Thus the word ›peace‹ becomes a very effective peace-blocker.«

Johan Galtung
In this issue:
internal linkArticle 		6 Transcend counts more than 300 practitioners and scholars in peacebuilding and development from over 60 countries around the world. Actively engaged in conflict transformation world-wide at the invitation of local parties, Transcend has 23 active programmes, conducting its work through action, education/training, dissemination and research. With centres in Barcelona (Spain), Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Geneva (Switzerland), Hagen (Germany), Honolulu (USA), Kyoto (Japan), Moscow (Russia), Sandnes (Norway), Taplow Court (Great Britain), Torino (Italy), Vienna (Austria), and Washington, DC (USA) – with several others now being formed in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia – Transcend has provided more than 1000 training programmes for over 10000 participants in 46 countries around the world.
7 Participants in Transcend training programmes have included politicians, diplomats, aid and development workers, teachers, psychologists, social workers, journalists, civil service employees, UN staff, professors, students, and others. In 2000, Transcend developed the United Nations' first ever manual on Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means: The Transcend Approach. In February 2003, Transcend launched the global Transcend Peace University online.
8 Transcend is involved in peacebuilding, conflict transformation, and post-war reconciliation and healing in several conflict areas world-wide, at the invitation of local groups, organisations, universities, governments, and parties to the conflict. Transcend only works in conflict/war affected areas when it has been invited. Currently, Transcend is doing research on: Peacebuilding and Empowerment; Non-Territorial Federalism and Functional Independence; Self-Determination and the Nation/State Dialectic; Peacebuilding and Globalisation; Conflict Transformation and Psychological Assumptions; Comparing Methods of Conflict Transformation from Micro, Meso and Macro-Levels; the Dialogue Process; Local and Subsistence Economics; Models for Global Economic Crises; Understanding Genocide.
9 Transcend has recently launched the new Transcend Media Service, and is in the process of developing the Conflict Transformation Index (CTI) and Transcend Early Warning Index (EWI). Transcend perspectives are freely available on the Internet, and a monthly Bulletin is being prepared for distribution in 12 languages.
polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 5 (2004).
Online: http://agd.polylog.org/5/pbk-en.htm
ISSN 1616-2943
Author: Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen, Cluj-Napoca (Romania)
© 2004 Author & polylog e.V.
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