Developing a Perspective
The most important thing I learned about peace and/or peace history
Jane Addams defines Peace as “the unfolding of worldwide processes that make for the nurture of human life”. Having this beautiful definition has been surprisingly useful for me. It has created a window for me to peer through and observe the historical progress of the world as a whole toward peace, and how this process has accelerated over the past two centuries. Even the most hardened skeptic must recognize that the number of institutions around the world that are geared towards creating peace has increased substantially over the past century; places like hospitals, schools, museums, and libraries. In other words. These and similar institutions are tremendously influential on the individual, providing precisely the kind of nourishment of human life that Addams describes, and there are lots of them now.
For me, this definition of peace deconstructs the illusory peace vs war dichotomy that often roadblocks conversations. In other words, when the subject of peace gets brought to the table, I find that the conversation often quickly becomes about how peace is impossible because war is necessary or part of human nature. War is talked about as the opposite of peace; and surely during war, the kinds of things that nourish human life are frequently destroyed. But as Addams explains, peace is more than the absence of armed conflict, which would be ‘negative peace’. It’s, again, the unfolding of worldwide processes that make for the nurture of human life. War can and often does slow down the forward march of human progress by ravaging communities that were nurturing human life on this planet. The key phrase here is ‘slow down’, not prevent, cease or completely counteract. The presence and reality of war does not prohibit us from creating schools, hospitals, and building communities around the world that nourish human life.
Incidentally, wars have a unique way of motivating us to build and create even faster than before, precisely because it is so brutal, so wicked, and so atrocious that it shocks us into improving our societies and ourselves. For example, the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution came as a result of the Civil War, and likely would not have occurred without the war. Southern States were not present when these amendments passed through the legislature, and I wager they would not have voted for a constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery, nor establishing citizenship and legal protection for their “property”. The abolitionist movement had been protesting, writing letters, submitting proposals, signing petitions, and lobbying for decades prior to the conflict; but their efforts produced little progress before the Civil War erupted in comparison to the monumental moral leaps that occurred during and after. These abolitionists created many channels for the early peace movement and women’s suffrage movement to work through, which proved useful over the following century, but the big changes happened during the war. While I don’t believe that war is a necessary part of human life today or in the future, if/when it occurs, we have the choice to react and leverage the emotions that it generates to fuel reform and build a better world.
The most important thing I learned about International Justice
Part of the International Criminal Court is the Trust Fund for Victims, highlighting how part of eliminating injustice must include restoring the life and dignity of the victims, to the state they were in (as much as possible, anyway) before the crime occurred. Acknowledging the need to focus on victims of crimes, and taking measures to help them in some fashion, is one of the most incredible components of the ICC. This emphasis on victims during legal processes helped me recognize why justice does not always demand prosecution. In Eric Blumenson’s article, The Challenge of a Global Standard of Justice: Peace, Pluralism, and Punishment at the International Criminal Court, he explains,
“... Article 53 [of the Rome Statute] requires the prosecutor to investigate and prosecute a case unless certain conditions obtain. Because one justification for declining to pursue a case is that doing so would serve the interests of justice, the Rome Statute should not prevent the prosecutor from considering a broad range of conflicting considerations when their weight is very great.”
At the scale which the ICC and other international legal instruments operate on, holding perpetrators accountable through criminal prosecutions may hurt communities, and thus victims, more than alternative forms of accountability. There have been several successful examples in recent years of alternative forms of accountability stabilizing a region and reestablishing the rule of law. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in post-apartheid South Africa exchanged amnesty for confessions. This established an accurate historical record, helping to relieve the injustice housed within the victims, and acted as a channel for the perpetrators to come to terms with their crimes. Similarly, the Ugandan process of mato oput, stresses reconciliation and reintegration of perpetrators back into society. When a crime takes place, a sense of injustice emerges both within the victim(s) and the perpetrator(s). This seeming simple concept resonates with me because it highlights the need to account for both victims and perpetrators if we are to reestablish justice. I worry that confessing may not be enough to restore justice for neither the perpetrators nor the victims in cases of mass atrocities, but the situations in Uganda and South Africa lead me to believe it may be the best choice after a relatively high threshold of atrocity is breached.
The most important thing I learned about Human Rights
The work on human rights is the one point in the total activity of the United Nations where the ultimate ideological issues are sharpest. . . . Today men fight precisely because they disagree on their own interpretation of themselves. Man, you and I in person, our origin, our nature, our rights, our destiny: these are the great questions of the age. And these questions are nowhere more dramatically discussed than in the United Nations debate on human rights. For here responsible representatives of all the effective cultures of the world vigorously contend every comma and every shade of meaning. Nothing is more repaying to the thoughtful student of the present ideological situation than to read and ponder, in all their prolonged, dramatic richness, the records of our debates on this question. Here you have the exciting drama of man seeking to grasp himself
- Charles Malik, A Talk on Human Rights
Our conception of what humans deserve simply because they are human has changed drastically over time, especially over the past two centuries. But that does not mean that human rights are a fluid, flexible concept that changes over time. This trip has made me dogmatic about my belief in the existence of Natural Law, which functions as the fountain which human rights flow from. Somewhere within this fountain exists an absolute answer, a right answer, to the way that human beings deserve to be treated simply because they are human. We as a society have located this truth about the world, evidenced by the creation of documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we are still in the process of “sanding down and finishing” precisely what it means. As Malik explains, the beautiful part is that this transnational, transgenerational debate over human rights has been, and is currently being, recorded so that future generations will be able to look back and be reminded of humanity’s struggle to define itself.
Many of the rights that have been proclaimed as universal human rights involve things beyond the control of individuals. The right to an education (UDHR, Article 26), the right to an adequate standard of living (UDHR, Article 25), any many others imply that something specific needs to be provided to all peoples of the world. Now, for example. an education that promotes the free and full development of the human personality will not simply grow out of the dirt - many people need to work together to create it. So the question becomes, who is obligated to be doing this work? Answer: everybody. Part of being human includes having these duties to give back to the community (see UDHR, Article 29). If you grew up in a society that provided you with the tools to create, build and improve the world, then you have a duty to do so. If your community did not provide you with these tools, then you have a duty to yourself to either work toward improving your community so that it can begin to provide these things for people (including yourself), or find a new community that properly fosters your growth. Now, as communities grow large enough, it becomes prudent for states to begin to provide many of the things that human beings deserve. The language in the UDHR does not explicitly say that a state has a duty to provide each citizen with anything, but that’s precisely what is implied. If the state does not hold up its end of the bargain, then citizens have a duty to do something about it, to change it so that the other members in the community may benefit, so their families, children, and themselves may reap the rewards of a society that properly nourishes the development of human life.
An interesting story/idea/concept learned in this class about which people should know
On June 25, our class was set to learn about South Korea, starting with their gift to the Peace Palace. Their choice was a statute of a Haechi (pictured above), the official symbol of Seoul representing justice and fairness. Most interesting, though, is that their gift was donated in 2014. The majority of gifts came as a result of the 1907 Hague Peace Conference, and made their way into the palace within the next few decades. The Peace Palace was built to be, and I argue is, the symbolic home of Peace, and contributing a gift to this building expresses the willingness of a country to support efforts toward Peace globally. South Korea has been in the vanguard of international peacebuilding for decades, and South Koreans have held various prominent positions in international diplomacy, like Secretary General of the UN and President of the International Criminal Court. In other words, South Korea is very involved on the international stage, and as a result they ought to be represented within the Peace Palace. So the rest of the day was spent investigating why it took so long for South Korea to be represented within the Peace Palace.
The destination was the Yi Jun Peace Museum, which began with an interesting coincidence. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invades South Korea, providing an official launch of the Korean War. 65 years later, our class walked into a museum dedicated to telling the story of Korean emissaries sent to The Hague to attend the 1907 Hague Peace conference, who also happened to arrive in the Hague on June 25, 1907 (see their itinerary pictured below). What we learned in this museum about East Asian history was shocking, and eventually did answer why the Haechi was donated so recently.
In brief: during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Japan asks the Korean government for permission to land their army in Korea as a foothold in order to wage war with the Russian Empire. Korea agrees, and the war ensues. Following Japan’s victory in 1905, the Japanese army moves into the Korean Imperial Palace and essentially forces them to sign away their legal and diplomatic rights in what is sometimes referred to as the “Ulsa Treaty”.
Fast forward to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference. Korea is originally invited to attend, but when Yi Jun and the other emissaries arrive at the door, Japan succeeds in barring their entry because of the Ulsa Treaty. Because of this treaty, if Korea wants to attend the conference, then they must do so as part of the Japanese delegation. Since the Japanese delegation was full, Yi Jun and the entire Korean delegation is left standing outside the door.
There was something else happening in The Hague during 1907. The money to construct the Peace Palace was donated by Andrew Carnegie in 1907, and every delegate at the conference knew about it. The representative from France, Baron D’Estournelles, proposed that every represented nation should contribute to the creation of the Peace Palace. Since the Korean delegation was not allowed into the conference, they did not get to donate a gift to the Peace Palace back in 1907. It took over a century for someone to notice.
The lesson from my time in The Hague that most resonates with me now, in the Fall of 2015 is
My biggest lesson was about the relationship between objects, attention and memory. Despite the fact that humans have this unique capacity to understand and manipulate abstract ideas, it’s becoming clear to me that we are hard-wired to notice, hold our attention on, and ultimately remember material objects more easily. Having something tangible as part of presenting new information to people is profoundly important; this is not news, people have recognized this and used visual aids and props for a while. But what I realize now is that the reason why visual aids and props are so important has to deal with attention. The mental ‘cost’ of paying attention to something is significantly reduced when an object is present that the senses can interact with directly. As simple as it sounds, having tangible objects present allows the mind to utilize another entire pool of mental resources, those dedicated to sensory information about ‘touch’, for processing and understanding new information. So including tangible objects with a presentation, conversation, or even when studying alone, helps new ideas form around an item that our mind has an easier time dealing with. The pins shown below are the physical, tangible and deeply symbolic token that our class used to teach the story of positive history.
As humans, we all have a finite amount of mental resources available to us at any given moment; these amorphous resources allow us to remember, think of things to say, make sense of new ideas, among many other things. So if learning efficiently is the primary objective, which it is supposed to be as a student and arguably for everyone, then this insight about objects, memory and attention opens up additional doors for increasing educational productivity. Either we can increase our capacity by engaging in activities that increase our storage of mental resources, or we can find ways to spend the mental resources we have more effectively. Any strategy that either reduces the ‘cost’ or increases the ‘return’ is going to be worth looking into, and likely worth utilizing. Incorporating physical items into the mix when learning about abstract concepts makes them easier to understand, easier to remember, and effectively cost less of our attention to comprehend.