Opinion
Assessing the Culture of Peace
By Joseph de Rivera
General Assembly resolution A/52/13, adopted by the United Nations in 1997, refers to a culture of peace as consisting of values, attitudes and behaviours that reject violence and endeavours to prevent conflicts by addressing their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation. And Assembly resolution 53/243 develops for the world’s children the basis for such a culture of peace by establishing the “International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World”.
We are now in the middle of the Decade, and two mid-term reports will assess the progress and obstacles experienced by the United Nations, its Member States and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in their efforts to promote the various aspects of a culture of peace. In addition, it is useful to have an overall assessment of the degree to which different nations and communities have actually achieved such a culture that enables us to set goals and measure progress towards creating peaceful societies. It establishes areas of strength and weakness so that both Governments and NGOs can develop policies that will encourage a culture of peace. Such assessment provides objective standards that will allow nations to compete for peace rather than power, and gives suggestions on the best way to design curriculums for peace education.
To assess the factors affecting the development of a culture of peace, an overall framework is needed that will allow us to relate the particular circumstances of each individual nation and its unique culture to the United Nations culture of peace. After a brief introduction to such a situation facing a society, a template based on the UN resolution and relevant findings from social science can be used as a guide to consider the aspects most relevant to a culture of peace. This can be used to discuss the extent to which each nation has the components of a culture of peace and how they are dynamically related in that particular society. Although such discussion involves judgements, the subjectivity of these judgements can be controlled by referencing the objective indicators and the results of questionnaires that measure attitudes, norms and a nation’s emotional climate. A concluding section can suggest what must be done to achieve a more peaceful culture and may reference actions that are reported to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s website for a culture of peace (www.unesco.org/cp) or in news networks (cpnn-usa.org). The template has so far been used to describe the culture of peace in Brazil, Spain and the United States.1 Some preliminary findings from the use of its objective indicators are also presented, as well as their implications for designing curriculums for peace education.
Do the objective indicators correlate with each other so that they may be summed up to show the extent to which a culture of peace exists in any given society? Data are available from over seventy nations. When we correlate the indicators and search for underlying factors, we find that we need four factors to account for the inter-relations among all indicators. We may say that there are four dimensions to a culture of peace and objectively describe the extent to which any given nation has such a culture by giving its scores on the following factors:2
Democratic development (measured by indicators for press freedom, gross domestic product (GDP), life expectancy, literacy, democracy, human rights and the percentage of women in the legislature);
Equality (measured by the Gini index on income inequality, low homicide rate and to some extent human rights);
Non-violent means (the inverse of military expenditures and military threats, which are correlated with the percentage of the population who are imprisoned); and
Nurturance (measured by education expenditure, tolerance for refugees, and to some extent the percentage of women in the legislature).
Note that the nurturance factor appears to be reflected in the first three aspects of a culture of peace, democratic development in the next three, and non-violent means in the seventh. Equality is related to the eighth aspect of sustainable development, which however needs to be divided into three components, since economic development is clearly an aspect of liberal development, and sustainability may prove to be related to nurturance.
This set of objective indicators may be used to measure the degree to which nations possess a culture of peace. Such measures may serve as benchmarks, so that we can establish areas of strength and weakness, and ascertain progress towards the goal of a society in which there is a complete culture of peace. Further, they provide an objective standard that may stimulate healthy competition among nations. For example, the United States may be justly proud of the extent of its democratic development and somewhat pleased with its degree of nurturance; however, it is only about average on nurturance, slightly below average on equality, and well below average on the use of non-violent means. Although our findings are preliminary, they have implications for how we may best design curricula for peace education.
Many programmes of peace education focus on cooperation and negotiation, and it seems clear that they should address their development and stress all four dimensions of a culture of peace and relate them to the different aspects of peace education. This is essential for democratic development and is crucial in all aspects of peacebuilding. However, our results suggest that democratic development has little to do with the attainment of equality. Progress towards equality only seems to occur when powerful stakeholders are confronted. If such confrontation is to avoid violence, curricula must include a course on the principles of and, whenever possible, offer training in non-violent actions.
In addition, a curriculum should address the structural factors necessary in the use of State non-violence, referring to both political factors, such as an adequate division of power within a Government and the separation of the military from politics and industry, and factors crucial in the building of civil society, such as the presence of civic groups that include different ethnicities and religions. Students from developed countries tend to be relatively unaware of power politics and to take civil society for granted. Yet, the lack of correlation between liberal democracy, equality and the extent to which nations use military threats and imprison their own citizens suggests that students must learn how to address these structural factors.
Finally, in addition to teaching about negotiation, non-violent action and socio-political structures, our assessment of cultures of peace suggests the importance of facilitating nurturance. In caring for others and the environment, nurturance is involved in all aspects of peacemaking. Peace education programmes may be able to foster this caring and help develop compassion and forgiveness. Furthermore, peaceful cultures appear to place a particular value on children, and perhaps curricula in peace education could address ways to help all societies nurture their children.
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| 1. | Assessing cultures of peace (2004). Special Issue of Peace and Conflict, vol. 10 (2). |
| 2. | de Rivera, Joseph (2004). Assessing the basis of peace in contemporary societies. Journal of Peace Research. 41 (5). |
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Joseph de Rivera is professor at the Hiatt School of Psychology at Clark University (United States) and Director of the University’s Peace Studies Program. The author and editor of numerous works on emotions and peace, he is currently serving as a visiting professor at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. |
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