Sarah Holtz talks with Fred Arment, the Founding Director of International Cities of Peace

FA: There are many ways to peace. We define peace as safety, prosperity and quality of life for all in the community. We haven’t had any pushback on that definition of peace. There’s always [the question] what do you mean by peace? Well, we have a good definition. It means that everybody in the community is safe, they can feed their families and they have a quality of life and can achieve their purpose. What more?

SH: Interesting. I wonder if you could define for us what is a city of peace?

FA: Well, it’s a self-established city of peace. We don’t establish cities of peace around the world. We have 313 as of this week. People that are peacemakers in the community want to establish their community as valuing peace. There is a process. It can be done by a proclamation, a mayor signing a resolution, but mainly it’s community groups that are working for peace in their areas and they want to establish it in perpetuity as a city dedicated to a culture of peace. We highlight their work, and we also highlight the city itself because every city essentially has a peace legacy.

SH: Very cool. Something stuck out to me in your mission statement which is that you contend that peace is a right. I wonder if you can explain a little bit about what that means.

FA: Well, over the centuries and millennium, as we’ve evolved as a species, we have raised the bar in terms of what it means to be humane and have a sense of justice. The idea of a culture of peace, the idea of peace has been evolving along with us.
The right to peace is a philosophical term. The United Nations has elevated our ideas of what a right is. Now you have a right to have your culture. You have a right to be safe and prosperous no matter who you are.

Our idea of the right to peace is no longer a hope. We are establishing peace all over the world. People have a tendency to watch the news and think everything is going south, but I’ll tell you, we have seen a remarkable difference just over the last few years of people’s consciousness arriving at the conclusion that peace is what’s known as the zeitgeist of our time. It is what it’s about.

SH: I know that you do a lot of work with the United Nations. Can you describe what your role is as a consultant with the UN?

FA: The sustainable development goals, you’re familiar with 17 different goals like water, air, things like that and making people aware that there are these initiatives is one of the things that all of our cities of peace are doing.

In the Dayton area, we celebrate an International Day of Peace. There are celebrations all around the world. What we’ve done is identified 150 organizations that mount Peace Day events each year, 50 events. But the 50 events are totally different. They are specifically geared towards climate or specifically geared towards education, all of these different development goals. We identify the sustainable development goals for each of those celebrations of Peace Day making people aware that they are working in different areas.

There are so many different ways to work for peace. It’s not just something that happened in the ‘60s where people went out and changed the world in that. We’ve evolved as peace organizations to the point now where we’re in the community. We’re sustainable agriculture, all of these different things.

The sustainable development goals, we have three representatives at the United Nations. They go to the workshops and the General Assembly and participate in all the ideas, especially UNESCO and some of the other more human-focused ideas.

SH: I think that’s great. I have one last question for you which is how do we extrapolate these lessons from international cities of peace for people who are just dealing on an everyday basis with conflict resolution and peacemaking in their own communities?

FA: Well, I think that learning about what a culture of peace is [is important]. UNESCO has nine different tenants that create a culture of peace; free flow of information, education, human rights and things like that understanding that non-violence is a part of daily life.

But we shouldn’t stay in our bedrooms, and we shouldn’t stay on the internet. We need to really get out. We need to become active. We need to become involved. There are no bystanders in what we need to have done to prevent some of these existential threats that are coming toward us from being solved. Nobody on the sidelines.

Sarah Holtz talks with James Siguru Wahutu, a professor in NYU’s Peace and Conflict Studies program

JW: I do think that the designation of something as a genocide is an important designation because at the very least is says okay, we recognize that there are crimes here that are beyond repair, even within the confines of a conflict, they’re beyond repair. We recognize that and for that in and of itself it’s very important, however this is where the struggle for “me” exists.
There is a tendency within the continent whenever there is a conflict people ask, “Is it genocide or is it not?” “Is it as bad as you wonder or is it not?” We are almost in a race to the bottom as to what is the worst form of thing that could happen on a continent.

The danger of using “genocide” in the press is that it almost desensitized people. People say, “Okay, it’s genocide. Let’s move on. It’s not that bad.” But why must something be called a genocide for people to pay attention? Whether we call something a genocide or whether we call it a crime against humanity, no one cares.

People are dying, people are suffering, and the goal should be to ameliorate the human suffering not whether a conflict is a genocide or not.

That’s the tension a lot of journalists are having to grapple with that I’ve had to grapple with as well because what use is calling acts a genocide if we are not going to actively work towards stopping it? Yes, labeling something as a possibly genocide or labeling the intent as genocidal is important, but I think that has to be balanced with what is next.

SH: Right, and that’s definitely something that I want to talk to you about. Just to back up a bit, what are some of the main factors that led you to your research?

JW: Honestly, it was my senior year of undergrad in Western Minnesota. I was writing a senior paper on how conflicts, especially post-election battle conflicts were covered in the press.

I was largely interested in how African newspapers told this particular story to African audiences. How do we tell the story of post-election battles in our own country?

I was talking to my then mentor and he said something along the lines of “You can sit here and complain about it, or you could apply to graduate school and do something about it.” I ended up applying to graduate school and focused on African media and how they told the story Darfur in the shadow of [inaudible 02:58].

SH: I’m speaking to Professor James Siguru Wahutu. James, I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about the lessons you’ve learned from the African countries you’ve researched about how journalists deal with authoritarianism.

JW: Last year during the last Administration, one of the things I often told students is that American people don’t know how to deal with somebody who is an autocrat. They do not know how to deal with that. This is a time when they should be looking at Africa and saying, “What can we learn from the news organization in Mozambique and Angola where the leader is quite comfortable having a hostile relationship with the press?” The press still does its work every morning to hold the state to account.

I wrote a few pieces about it. I said, “Look, this is not new. Look at foreign correspondents in African countries. Ask them how they are dealing with hostile regimes.” It’s always been fascinating to me that everyone is quick to tell African news organizations, “You need to be more like the New York Times” but the New York Times doesn’t know how to deal with a hostile regime. Nobody says, “Maybe we need to figure out what the Africans are doing and how they have learned and what we can learn about what to expect.”

When journalists were being targeted last year in the streets of multiple states in the U.S., everybody kept saying, “These are rogue officers.” I’m like, “No, no, no, this is targeted. We know how this works out because we have seen it in African countries. They have learned. You need to pay attention to what is happening in the global South, but that is never the case.”

SH: I know you authored an article called Making African Suffering Legible. What does that mean to you and how do you make African suffering legible to readers in neighboring African countries who are witnessing these conflicts in real time?

JW: I think one of the most effective ways this was done was during the late ‘90s, early 2000s in the South Sudan conflict. When you read those stories there is this notarization of human suffering and what that meant and what it looked like. Also, there was this sense that whatever is happening in South Sudan is going to be affecting us very quickly and we need to figure out a way to ameliorate the situation.

In the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi’s what we saw in that coverage was this consistent narrative about those particular groups that were fighting in Rwanda and how those groups could be similar to groups living in Kenya and tying that experience to this shared experience of colonization, shared experience of the commodities markets just falling and how this affected countries that were heavily reliant on agriculture.

Those are the connections they were making. It was a story of pain. It was a story of families disintegrating. It was a story about neighbors killing each and the connection between what was happening there and what could have happened and what had sometimes been happening in the smaller scape in Kenya in the same way the Nigerians covered Rwanda.

It was conflict. It was Nigerians going through a civil, but something in Nigeria is different and we need to care about it because we could end up like them very quickly. There is a level of introspection but there is also a level of emotional labor being carried with that emotional labor being outsourced to sources and actually letting the Rwandans speak for themselves and quoting them directly and letting them tell their story. Letting the Darfuris tell their story. Letting the South Sudanese to tell their story.

This contestation as to what is happen in Darfur genocide or is it not often times doesn’t show up in a lot of African narrativization of these events. Humans are suffering and we need to care about them. All of these other institutions may be calling it a genocide or something else, but as far as we are concerned, people are suffering and that is the story we need to tell.

Sarah Holtz talks with Rivera Sun, author/activist, contributor to Nonviolence News

RS: Nonviolence is one of those big words that can encompass a lot of different practices, tools and types of actions, but if we start just with non-violent action, that’s a toolbox that includes things like protests, which many of us know, boycotts and strikes, occupations, blockades, shutdowns, walkouts, call in sicks, demonstrations rallies, marches, banners, posters, music, singing, the list goes on and on.

There are actually over 300 different methods of non-violent action and the hallmark of them is that they’re not causing harm to people and most of the time, not harm to property either. It’s a useful toolbox.

But actually, the word “nonviolence” goes on to describe practices and policies that are rooted in approaches that don’t cause harm to other people. One of the ways I like to explain this is by actually talking about violence.

Many of us know what physical violence is, how that feels, what that looks like, but more and more of us are trying to pick up on the fact that there are other kinds of violence. There is systemic or structural violence like the violence of slavery or the violence of discriminatory policies or the violence of the war machine for example.

If you have systemic or structural violence, it stands to reason that you could also have systemic or structural nonviolence. These are alternatives. Instead of having a punitive justice system where people get sent to prison for long prison sentences, we can have restorative justice.

This has been really helpful for intervening in things like the school to prison pipeline or disproportionate minority impacts in the justice system. We’re seeing many communities across the U.S. and beyond start to implement restorative justice practices, particularly in schools, but increasingly with juvenile justice programs and even with certain types of adult offenses.

That’s just one of the many examples of non-violent systems and structures that can be implemented that can replace those kinds of systemic and structural violence that have become all too familiar and all too norm in our society.

SH: Right and how did you start writing and thinking about nonviolence and social change in the first place?

RS: I grew up with a father who was an anti-Vietnam War activist, but I didn’t actually become an activist until I was much older in life when the Occupy Movement happened right across the street from where I lived. It was hard to ignore our local encampment in California where it was loud and very visible. I had to come out of my house and say, “What’s going on?” That got me started in activism.

Several years later, I was writing my novel The Dandelion Insurrection and I realized that I had gotten my characters in a mess that I didn’t know how to get them out of, so I actually googled “How to bring down dictators non-violently” and got four million hits back and started reading. I realized that there is an entire field, science, art, movement, everything you can think of around non-violent action. It’s the kind of tools that any of us can pick up, anywhere, anyone.

SH: We’re speaking with Rivera Sun who leads workshops on non-violent strategy. Rivera, I’m wondering if you could share some of the strategies that you teach in your workshops.

RS: I have done trainings across the country and internationally as well. What I specifically focus on a lot is strategy for non-violent movements. We look at some of the things that we’ve been talking about today, but also what are design elements for a successful campaign, learning from the past and apply to the present.

Who will be the participants in our movement? What types of action are they going to take? How long will our campaign last? What do we do when we need to shift tactics? How will communications be handled? What is our message, our demand, our slogan? How do we mitigate some of the risks that the movement might be facing? How do we build participation in the movement with groups of people who may be odd bed fellows that we might not be used to working with?

These are all aspects to being strategic about the work that we are doing. Successful movements throughout history have used these approaches. They’ve been skillful, they’ve been wise, they’ve been thoughtful about what they are doing. They have directly impacted the situation with direct action, with acts of non-cooperation and intervention.

One of my goals in these movements is to make sure that everyone in our populace has these tools. I am firm believer that strategy is wiser when we do it together. It should be the purview of just a handful of really smart people. When our whole movement knows how to plan, it starts to behave strategically.

This is a quote from one of the Otpor activists in Serbia who overthrew the dictator Miloševi? in 2000, “When everyone knows how to plan, you start to see strategic behavior.”

Personally, I would love to see that in a broad sector of the U.S. populace particularly with our social justice movements because I think we are up against so many challenges that we can’t rely on one or two movements to do all the strategizing for all that needs to be done.

We need people to know how to use these tools. They come from a very long lineage around the world. We sometimes get into a bad habit of thinking of nonviolence as something that only certain types of peace activists use, but actually, nonviolence is as old as the hills.

The first recorded strike happened in 1170 BC in Egypt when tomb workers who were building a tomb for the pharaoh went on strike because the pharaoh had not paid them.

We see that people in almost every country around the world of every race, ethnicity, nationality, every age, every gender, ever sexual orientation, every political persuasion for that matter, have picked up these tools and used them for their goals.
I really like to remind everyone that we borrow these tools from generations of humanity. We learn them from people who have resisted and struggled against the oppressions and injustices that they face. When we ignore them, it’s a shame. It’s a crying shame that we can’t see that thousands of years of history have delivered these tools to us at this moment of need that is very great in our society.

SH: Rivera, I first encountered your work in an article that you wrote about the Nonviolent Cities project. I wonder if you could share a little bit about that organization.

RS: Pace e Bene, which is a 30-year-old nonviolence organization, started a program called the Nonviolent Cities project. The bold idea for this was to look at around at our cities and our communities and towns and say, “What are these forms of structural and systemic violence? How does violence happen in our communities? How is one form of violence often responded to with another form of violence? What can we as citizens do to start to shift that equation and break that cycle?

The Nonviolent Cities project is being organized in over 50 cities across the U.S. It was launched in Carbondale Illinois, which was actually the model nonviolent city. We learned about the idea from them. They had their local library host a series of gatherings for different civic groups and individuals in which they put forward this vision that we could root our practices as a community in nonviolent alternatives.

Many of these groups are small groups of really amazing heartful individuals doing what they can where they can as they can, but they’re all carrying the broad vision of what this might look like. Honestly, they’re learned a lot from a lot of our social justice movements. We often don’t think of something like the call to defund police and fund street teams that are unarmed that still disrupt, interrupt and deescalate violence as a nonviolent call to action, but it is.

In the nonviolent cities, they are picking up on ideas such as that and helping to bring them to their city or to support the campaigns that are preexisting. They are looking at different forms of community safety rooted in nonviolence.

When there is a protest, can a peace team be there instead of the police as was just done in Minneapolis during a local street festival? Can we create an accompaniment service for vulnerable community members when they don’t feel safe riding the subway so that they could call someone and have someone ride along with them?

A nonviolent city would also teach nonviolence specifically, directly and overtly to its citizenry. That might look like the Nonviolent Schools project which was started in Rhode Island at a public elementary school teaching practices of nonviolence as a form of alternative conflict navigation.

This school actually frontloads a week of no nviolence training and conflict resolution with the entire school. When teachers are asked, “What about your standard curriculum? What if you lose time?” They say, “We make up that time later on because we don’t have to spend so much time on discipline in our classrooms.”

It is inspiring to see the stories framed in this way. We’re not just reading reports of how bad everything is getting, we’re also reading at the same time about the people who are doing something about it and the solutions that they are proposing. There is something very empowering about that, very grounding, very centering and there is a lot in there that we can learn from.

We’re still paying attention. We are not putting our heads in the sand. We’re paying attention to the news in such a way that we learn from and with our other fellow human beings who are standing up for profound change and proposing some of the best and brightest ideas on the planet.