First Annual Peace Education Conference, McMaster
University, Hamilton, November 9-11
Peace Through Justice: Executive Summary
As we begin the new millennium the concept of a world without war remains as elusive as ever. In addition to traditional warfare, the recent movement towards "humanitarian intervention" has kept the United States, Canada and other nations busy in conflicts from Kosovo to Afghanistan. The problem that this project wishes to address is how to equip young people with the tools they require to critically assess such conflicts and more soundly exercise their democratic rights. The Project’s goal is to create Learning Tools (including modules, workbooks, texts and Web site) to develop these critical skills. These Learning Tools will introduce American and Canadian high school seniors and college freshman to interdisciplinary curricula involving the horrors of war, ongoing attempts to legally regulate and curb such horrors (such as the newly formed International Criminal Court), and to encourage critical reflection on the possibility of peaceful solutions to global disputes. These Learning Tools will be designed to educate young people on the role which law, particularly international law, can have in advancing the cause of world peace. The Project will draw upon the expertise of a distinguished Advisory Board composed of leading lawyers, judges, academics and activists.
Conference Talk:
Tamir Bar-On Representing Peace Through Justice – Tamir Bar-On and Howard
Goldstein
The subject of this
town hall meeting is “Why the need for Peace Education (and the Conference):
What is the Problem (s)? What are the Opportunities?”
As a representative of the Project Peace Through Justice, along with my
colleague Howard Goldstein, I will answer this question by telling the story of
how we came to engage in our Project. Initially,
both Howard and I were troubled by the coming into existence of the new
permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on July 1, 2002.
While we thought that it was a positive human rights development to end
impunity for war criminals, we were concerned about the politicization of the
new court, whether there could be teeth in the new court in terms of mechanisms
of enforceability (especially that large powers like the United States and China
have not ratified the Rome Treaty signaling their full acceptance of the ICC)
and the inherent tensions between the search for justice and the world of realpolitik
in which national interest and the maintenance of power are the rules.
As we sent out our
project to find an institutional home to universities and think tanks, Peace
Through Justice’s goal was to create an academic text on the history of war,
attempts to legislate against the horrors of war, and the new ICC. Our initial
project title was called “Killing By the Rules,” a sort of indictment of the
ICC and legal regulations of war as temporary measures that fail to highlight
the fact that war itself is the war crime. Yet,
the Project changed its orientation after a meeting with M. Cherif Bassiouni,
the head of DePaul University’s International Human Rights Law Institute and
the head of the Drafting Committee that created the ICC and Professor Dinah
Shelton of Notre Dame’s Law School. Professors
Bassiouni and Shelton, both veterans of the human rights movement, warned us of
the danger of dismissing incremental human rights change.
After some reflection, we realized the wisdom of these insights.
As a result, the Project now seeks to present the ICC as a positive
development in the evolution of human rights and the consciousness of peace.
The focus of the Project now is to develop educational Learning Tools
(texts, modules, teacher’s guides, Web site, etc.) to demonstrate the positive
role which international law can have in advancing the cause of peace.
The goal of the
Learning Tools is to counter our own public school experiences in which we were
uncritically taught history as a series of wars with little normative insight.
Our consultations with educators have revealed that there is need for
pedagogically sound Learning Tools to provide young people a view of history
from a peace perspective. In short,
the aim of our Project will be to teach young people the roots causes of
violence and war both at home and abroad, as well as reveal what peace scholar
Elise Boulding calls “the hidden side of history”- the history of peace
movements.
Our angle on peace
is one that has moved from an ideological purity that knocked the ICC to a
pragmatic peace perspective. While
we still have problems with the ICC, but we now believe that the ICC can be a
springboard for greater human rights consciousness (like the arrest of Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet).
Let me briefly end
by explaining our pragmatic peace perspective. The Peace Through Justice Project
has assembled an Advisory Board that includes peace activists such as Michael
Nagler, Quakers, human rights lawyers and professors, and military historians.
We would argue that peace cannot be preached to the converted; it is a
complicated matter that does not have simple solutions that demonize one side or
the other, and that one should not dismiss one’s peace partners due to
ideological purity. Two short
stories will suffice to illustrate Peace Through Justice’s pragmatic peace
approach. The first comes from my colleague Howard, who had serious difficulties
in convincing a distinguished professor of military history of the merits of our
Peace Project, as well as joining our Advisory Board.
This professor did not want to be affiliated with a Project that did not
see the historical realities of war, despite the fact that he himself wanted to
regulate war’s excesses. He did not want to be associated with a Peace Project
that dumped on the military. He
viewed the military as a necessity against aggression.
However, in the end, this professor joined our Advisory Board because we
respected the integrity of his viewpoint, and a common ground was found which
linked all our interests.
My second story is
related to pacifism and the Quakers. In
a meeting with the Quakers in Toronto, I was told of the debates within the
Quaker community (a historically pacifist Church) in Britain during the bombing
of London. A number of Quakers broke
with the Church’s pacifist stance in the face of Hitler’s absolute,
militaristic evil by taking up arms. The two stories illustrate that peace is
complicated by messy real life political and military situations, and that we
should not dismiss peace partners due to a lack of ideological congruence.
To reiterate, the
Peace Through Justice Project sees the need for Peace Education texts and
modules in North American high schools and universities. Secondly, the Peace
Through Justice Project would argue that there are different pathways to peace,
including pragmatic, institutional approaches to peace.
We should not push aside potential peace partners due to reasons of
ideological purity. In a world in
which war has become increasingly common (e.g., the war on terrorism,
humanitarian military interventions, and traditional wars), it is imperative to
equip young people with the necessary critical skills to challenge this culture
of war and find concrete, peaceful alternatives to violence and war.
Peace Through
Justice: Project Directors' Biographies
Tamir Bar-On, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (Political Science, McGill), teaches political science at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and has previously lectured at Glendon College (York University). Mr. Bar-On has published academic articles on political theory, comparative politics and neo-fascism, in leading journals such as The European Legacy, Sociological Research Online and McGill Journal of Political Studies. Mr. Bar-On is currently developing a course on the history of terrorism from the Assassins to al-Qaeda.
Howard Goldstein, B.A., M.E.S., LL.B, LL.M. (Osgoode), has been a practicing lawyer for over ten years. A former Law Clerk to the Chief Justice of Ontario, Mr. Goldstein’s areas of practice include criminal and international commercial law. While practicing international law, Mr. Goldstein has lived in London, Budapest and Bucharest, and he maintains a strong interest in the developing democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Most recently, Mr. Goldstein has been associated with the London international law firm Norton Rose. In addition to being a practicing lawyer, Mr. Goldstein has also written scholarly articles on the law in the McGill Law Journal, as well as being the author of the Ontario Law Reform Commission’s report on juries. Mr. Goldstein has taught courses on Law and Society and Practical Reasoning for Founder’s College at York University.