We live in times whose signature is violence – from the killing of 134 innocent children in Peshawar to the massacres of 2000 by Boko Haram in Nigeria and the 17 in Paris just in the last month.

We must condemn this violence. But we must do more and understand its roots. Violence erupting in unpredictable places against innocents is growing and when any process grows in society, humanity needs to reflect on what is feeding it, from where does its nourishment come, and what can we do to stop the future explosion of violence overtaking the serenity and stability of everyday life, everywhere in the world.

Most analysis essentializes violence and makes it intrinsic to particular cultures. The dominant analysis based on fragmentation and reductionism, separates actions from their consequences. It allows no responsibility for the structural violence done to societies through wars and a globalized economy that has all the features of a war.

But violence is not essential to human beings or a particular culture. Just like peace, it is cultivated – its seeds are sown. We as humans across our cultural diversity and across our histories have potential to be both violent and peaceful.

The nourishment to the epidemic of violence in our times comes from structural violence of war, dispossession, uprooting and exclusion. It comes from robbing people of meaning, dignity, self-respect, security. This robbing of meaning, rights and dignity rooted in the diversity of cultures humanity has shaped, creates an inner vacuum which is filled with manufactured identities of a fundamentalist kind. Instead of identities growing positively and holistically from a sense of place and culture, identities get engineered into negative identities, defined only as the negation of the other.

The spread of wars and ecologically and socially disruptive globalization is uprooting people everywhere. The ultimate unfolding of this logic based on negative identities is extermination of the other. Powerful actors who have unleashed wars in Afghanistan and Syria do not take responsibility for the uprooting and brutalization of communities. In just one year, from mid 2013 to mid 2014, 3 million refugees have been forced out of Syria, 2.6 million from Afghanistan, 1 million from Somalia, and .5 million from Sudan. And even those who could not leave their homes as refugees have been made cultural and economic refugees by robbing them of their security and stability. Brutalized human beings spread brutalization.

Samuel Huntington, famous for his ‘Clash of Civilizations’, got it wrong when he said ‘we can only know who we are, when we know who we hate’. In India, the exercise of breathing with consciousness, ‘pranayam’, invokes ‘so hum’ – ‘you are, therefore I am’. We sow the seeds of peace every time we remember and celebrate our dependence of the ‘other’. Being open to the ‘otherness’ of the other creates conditions of compassion, peace, and wellbeing of all.

This article first appeared in the Huffington Post Italy on 19 January 2015.
Source [Italian]: http://www.huffingtonpost.it/vandana-shiva/semi-di-pace_b_6487600.html

The post 2010 Laureate Vandana Shiva on Sowing Seeds of Peace in the Face of Violence appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

Declining levels of peace

The historical measures of GPI have shown that 111 countries have declined in their level of peace, and only 52 have improved since 2008.

Seven of the top 10 most peaceful countries are in Europe, and Iceland remains most peaceful. Syria has replaced Afghanistan as the world’s least peaceful country.

“Our research shows that peace is unlikely to flourish without deep foundations,” says Steve Killelea, Founder of IEP and Vision of Humanity, “This is a wakeup call to governments, development agencies, investors and the wider international community that building peace is the prerequisite for economic and social development.”

Economic impact of violence:

While violence obviously has a serious impact on people’s lives, we don’t always think about the economic costs. IEP found that the global impact of violence is 11.3% of global GDP or $US 9.8 trillion.

The world would not only be a better place without violence, it would also be wealthier and more sustainable for all its inhabitants. Imagine if this money was invested into sustainable energies, education and training in entrepreneurship—for people in all countries! What a different world we could create.

Learn more:

Global Peace Index interactive map: http://bit.ly/GPI2014
Global Peace Index report: http://bit.ly/GPIreport
Global Peace Index Video: http://bit.ly/GPIvideo

Based on what?

The GPI is based on the measurement of 22 indicators:

1. Level of perceived criminality in society
2. Number of internal security officers and police per 100,000 people
3. Number of homicides per 100,000 people
4. Number of jailed population per 100,000 people
5. Ease of access to small arms and light weapons
6. Level of organised conflict (internal)
7. Likelihood of violent demonstrations
8. Level of violent crime
9. Political instability
10. Political Terror Scale
11. Volume of transfers of major conventional weapons, as recipient (imports) per 100,000 people
12. Terrorist activity
13. Number of deaths from organised conflict (internal)
14. Military expenditure as a percentage of GDP
15. Number of armed services personnel per 100,000 people
16. Financial contribution to UN peacekeeping missions
17. Nuclear and heavy weapons capability
18. Volume of transfers of major conventional weapons as supplier (exports) per 100,000 people
19. Number of displaced people as a percentage of the population
20. Relations with neighbouring countries
21. Number of external and internal conflicts fought
22. Estimated number of deaths from organised conflict (external)

Stay in touch with the Global Peace Index:

Twitter: @GlobPeaceIndex #PeaceIndex
Facebook: Global Peace Index

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“ANTI-SEMITE!” “Racist!” “Despicable values!” “Should be sacked!”

I received these comments and accusations following an article by Christian Kerr in The Australian on May 14. He correctly quoted me saying Liberal MP Christopher Pyne’s support for the London Declaration against anti-Semitism was “populist”.

Kerr may not have expected the subsequent vendetta against me, let alone the demands last Friday by former Speaker of the federal parliament Peter Slipper that, as an anti-Semite on a public payroll, I should be sacked.

My point was that the London Declaration against anti-Semitism is a consensus document. Politicians are applauded and often applaud themselves for signing it and take no risk in doing so. Pyne’s press release was a “pat myself on the back eulogy” and a gratuitous attack on the Palestinian-initiated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions supporters whose campaign is seldom explained in mainstream media and easily depicted as controversial.

You can support both the London Declaration and the BDS campaign. However, that distinction is easily lost when individuals are demonised and Israel’s constant flouting of international law is deliberately diverted by discussion of other countries’ human rights abuses.

If attitudes to Israel and the BDS campaign are distorted, it can have serious repercussions. For that reason I’ll detail the events that prompted Kerr’s article, the accompanying editorial in The Australian and the subsequent abusive emails.

First, a woman I’d never heard of asked me to comment on Pyne’s support for the London Declaration and his manifestly nonsensical claim that university activists who support BDS undermine the right of Jewish people to live in their Jewish homeland. I naively assumed that a quick response was the end of the matter. It wasn’t. She wrote back saying the Prime Minister had also signed the declaration and asked if I had the same sentiments about her as about Pyne.

Somewhat impulsively I replied “of course”, meaning that signing the London Declaration as a sign of moral virtue was an easy decision. By contrast, Stephen Hawking’s support for the BDS campaign is a much more politically and intellectually demanding decision.

My exchange with this lady finished up on Kerr’s desk and led to a heading next day saying I had lashed out at the Prime Minister. Really?

Kerr’s article was accompanied by an editorial headed “Strange way to promote peace” with the subheading, “Critics of Israel should turn their attention to Iran”. This implied that by criticising Israeli policies I was siding with Iran’s supreme leader, who was quoted as saying “any deal that accepted the Jewish state’s existence would leave a `cancerous tumour forever”‘.

This technique of deflecting attention from the cruel and illegal policies of Israel depends on misinformation. It is implied that if you support BDS you must be anti-Semitic and are therefore no different from Israel’s religious fanatic opponents. Guilty by association. Positions polarised.

Projects run by the Sydney Peace Foundation and the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies include support for the struggle of indigenous West Papuans, advocacy for the vulnerable Tamils in Sri Lanka and criticism of capital punishment in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The centre also provides English classes for refugees on temporary protection visas.

It is false to suggest, as in The Australian’s editorial subheading, that we pay attention only to Israel. I have just returned from Paris, where the Sydney Peace Foundation honoured the widow of the late Stephane Hessel, a Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust, an architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, author of the bestseller Time for Outrage, a hero of the French Republic and an enthusiastic supporter of the BDS campaign.

Hessel wrote: “When governments cannot be relied upon to defend humanity it is the role of us, the people, to lead the struggle for justice.”

The BDS campaign is grounded in international law and has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or delegitimising Israel. Israeli professor Ilan Pappe contends that it is a sacred duty to end Israel’s oppressive occupation as soon as we can and that the best means for this is a sustained BDS campaign.

There are other reasons for turning to BDS. Negotiation and diplomacy have produced nothing but the enlargement of settlements, the continued siege of Gaza and the absurd claim that a two-state solution is possible when the two sides are so imbalanced, economically, militarily and politically.

The peace process is a sham. Politicians play a cruel game if they do not recognise this but it requires vision and courage to say so.

As for Slipper’s demand that it was outrageous that I was paid public money to explain and support BDS and that I should therefore be sacked, for the past 13 years I have been a volunteer at the centre and foundation.

I have not been paid any salary, nor claimed any expenses. I have worked in diverse campaigns, often in dangerous places, and have been committed to raising funds for students from the poorest countries.

Such activities are fuelled by the values that The Australian said, albeit delicately, were strangely skewed but that Slipper described as despicable.

This article was first published in The Australian, on 21 May 2013. 

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