Culture of Peace Cities

Following the analysis that I made in my book World Peace through the Town Hall, I tried for years to encourage the development of peace commissions in cities around the world: Brazil, Canada, Spain, France, Netherlands, as described earlier. In some cases it worked for a while, for example the Brazilian commissions started by Lia Diskin or the Hamilton, Ontario, Commission. But they did not develop as I hoped, and so I decided that I had to do it myself as a model. A new city peace commission was developed by Helena Lourenco in Santos, Brazil, and she invited me for a wonderful visit in 2017 with very large audiences.

Finally in 2013, I joined the New Haven Peace Commission which I had helped to form during the 1980's before going to UNESCO as described here. My initial responsibility, which I had begun the year before, was the production of an annual report on the "state of the culture of peace" in New Haven. To make the report, I took advantage of my long history in New Haven, so I knew and could interview people who were intimately involved with the pulse of the city. And to make the report educational, I organized it according to the principles of the culture of peace as we had identified them in the UN Declaration and Program of Action in 1999.

At first my participation was difficult because the Commission was dominated by a 90 year old communist who considered the commission as his personal club to further his ambitions of playing with peace on a global scale. He used city funds to go to meetings of the International Association of Peace Messenger cities which he had helped to organize at the time of the first International Year of Peace in 1986. But over time, I made friends with other commission members and eventually the 90 year old withdrew as chairman although he continued to try to dominate the meetings.

Although I couldn't get much publicity for the report, it reoriented our priorities as a commission to local rather than international issues. In 2015, having identified in the report a new initiative for restorative justice in the schools as the most promising development for culture of peace, we decided to support the initiative to ensure it would received adequate long-term support.

I took on the responsibility to produce a brochure for the Commission.

Here are the annual reports through 2016: 2012 , 2013 , 2014, 2015, and 2016.

As of 2017 I was invited to join the Board of Directors of a new peace commission in Ashland, Oregon, and I attended their monthly meetings by Skype.

I dropped these engagements after moving to France in 2019, but retain email contact with David Wick of the Ashland Commisson, and facebook contact with Erica Holahan, Joelle Fishman and Aaron Goode of the New Haven Commission.