A plan to stick the dogs of war back in their cages…
The Work of World Beyond War
World Beyond War is helping build a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. We believe the time is right for a large-scale cooperation among existing peace and anti-war organizations and organizations seeking justice, human rights, sustainability and other benefits to humanity. We believe that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people are sick of war and ready to back a global movement to replace it with a system of conflict management that does not kill masses of people, exhaust resources, and degrade the planet.
Executive Summary
Resting on a convincing body of evidence that violence is not a necessary component of conflict among states and between states and non-state actors, World Beyond War asserts that war itself can be ended. We humans have lived without war for most of our existence and most people live without war most of the time. Warfare arose about 6,000 years ago (less than .5% of our existence as Homo sapiens) and spawned a vicious cycle of warfare as peoples, fearing attack by militarized states found it necessary to imitate them and so began the cycle of violence that has culminated in the last 100 years in a condition of permawar. War now threatens to destroy civilization as weapons have become ever more destructive. However, in the last 150 years, revolutionary new knowledge and methods of nonviolent conflict management have been developing that lead us to assert that it is time to end warfare and that we can do so by mobilizing millions around a global effort.
Here you will find the pillars of war which must be taken down so that the whole edifice of the War System can collapse, and here are the foundations of peace, already being laid, on which we will build a world where everyone will be safe. This report presents a comprehensive blueprint for peace as the basis of an action plan to finally end war.
It begins with a provocative “Vision of Peace” which may seem to some to be utopian until one reads the rest of the report which comprises the means for achieving it. The first two parts of the report present an analysis of how the current war system works, the desirability and necessity of replacing it, and an analysis of why doing this is possible. The next part outlines the Alternative Global Security System, rejecting the failed system of national security and replacing it with the concept of common security (no one is safe until all are safe). This relies on three broad strategies for humanity to end war, including thirteen strategies for 1) demilitarizing security and twenty-one strategies for 2)managing conflicts without violence and 3) creating a culture of peace. The first two are the steps to dismantling the war machine and replacing it with a peace system that will provide a more assured common security. These two comprise the “hardware” of creating a peace system. The next section, eleven strategies for accelerating the already developing Culture of Peace, provides the “software,” that is, the values and concepts necessary to operate a peace system and the means to spread these globally. The remainder of the report addressesreasons for optimism and what the individual can do, and ends with a resource guide for further study.
While this report is based on the work of many experts in international relations and peace studies and on the experience of many activists, it is intended to be an evolving plan as we gain more and more experience. The historic end of war is now possible if we muster the will to act and so save ourselves and the planet from ever greater catastrophe. World Beyond War firmly believes that we can do this.
See full table of contents for A Global Security System: An Alternative to War
Like this:
Like Loading...
Political Film Blog 