Stories
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Struggling with the United Nations
The Culture of Peace News Network continued
I continued to work on CPNN as my highest priority, but it continued to frustrate me. During these years I had to add to my usual email closing: "Peace through struggle, and patience."
I continued to think of myself as a prophet, prophesizing the collapse of the American empire and a window of opportunity for the culture of peace, and I continued to use CPNN as a harbinger and as a system of information exchange for establishment of a culture of peace, but I failed to see much progress, either with CPNN or with the global movement it serves.
As for the global movement, I wrote a new book, Embrace the Fire: Plant the seeds for a Culture of Peace based on the articles published in CPNN. I published it at Createspace and put it on line, but got no sales and no feedback.
In 2012 I started publishing a monthly blog on the internet, Transition to a Culture of Peace; World history as it is happening, but again with little feedback.
As for CPNN, as I mentioned in an earlier page The Culture of Peace News Network continued, I undertook new formats to make it more attractive, but without much success. Here is a time frame for the various revisions and innovations since the beginning in 1998:
1997 - Initiation of Info-net at UNESCO with contracts for all UNESCO languages (See early history)
1998-2000 - Development of CPNN at UNESCO with Zeynep Varoglu, Di Bretherton and Takehiko Ito
2001 - Left UNESCO, taking CPNN-New England with me as UNESCO did not want to continue it
2002 - Training reporters at Wesleyan course on culture of peace, including Joe Yannielli
2005 - Started sending bulletin as part of UN International Decade for Culture of Peace - from beginning it was in English, French and Spanish (see initial list of bulletins.
2007 - Upgraded from CPNN-USA to CPNN-World.
2010 - Founded Culture of Peace Corporation with youth directors to assure future of CPNN
2011 - Following the UNESCO Human Rights Conference in Italy, I established a reporters list and started sending them emails a few times each year
2011 - Wrote an article about CPNN for the Journal of Peace Education, concluding that its future depends upon the development of a global movement for a culture of peace. The article was published two years later.
2012 - Undertook revision of CPNN with Meg and Lillian from the Corporation
2012 - Started the monthly bulletin to provide a summary of the news to our mailing list and the monthly blog in order to provide a personal analysis of the CPNN news.
2015 - On the urging of Joe Yannielli of the Corporation, I transferred CPNN to a Wordpress program base.
2018 - CPNN mentioned in Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
2020-2021. Experimented with an added service listing virtual events for the culture of peace prior to their occurrence so that readers could join in. This proved to be very time-consuming but with little evidence of use by our readers so it was not continued.
Here is a view of the homepage of the new Wordpress version in 2015 (Click on image to enlarge)
Over the years, I made one revision after another, hoping to increase effectiveness, but most of them failed to work as I hoped. First of all, I thought that there should be many sites in different languages from different parts of the world. The Japan site worked for a few years, but all others failed. Second, I thought that CPNN should have many volunteer moderators and reporters. With Zeynep and Di we spent several years training moderators, but nothing came of this. Over the years I hoped that most CPNN articles would be written by reporters. For a while by 2013 this seemed to start working but it could not be maintained. While half of the articles were being written by reporters at that time, by 2015 the level had fallen below 10%. Experiments with Facebook and twitter did not help, and one after another the directors who promised to help with this fell back. I tried to get the Corporation directors to help me expand the mailing list, but one of them complained that this was unethical, and the others were scared off. At first I tried a calendar of events, but that was a total failure. Later I added videos for a few years, but it seemed to make no difference so I abandoned them. I asked for help to use wikipedia and got no response, and failed to follow up myself.
Over the years the CPNN readership has gradually increased from 36,000/year in 2005 to 100,000 in 2008 to 360,000 in 2017. I suppose the readership is helped by the monthly bulletin, although both the level of readership and the mailing list are not expanding any more now in 2018.
Over time the number of articles have increased from less than 50/year from 2003 through 2010 and then increased to 205 in 2011, 463 in 2012 and 471 in 2013. Since then it has held steady, about one per day on the average. This is simply due to my own labor.
As I said in the Journal of Peace Education article, "To be effective, like a fish needs water, CPNN requires an extensive and effective social movement for the culture of peace, in other words a movement that has been internalized in daily life to the point that it is a benchmark of a great majority of societies. And we have not yet reached that point." A hint of this occurred in 2003 with the huge movement against the launching of the war in Iraq, when there was a temporary spike in CPNN readership.
I am motivated to continue by the image of the history of human rights recognition as it remained relatively unknown for forty years until the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty gave it wings. It's been only 16 years since the Culture of Peace Declaration was adopted, far from the 40 for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I keep hoping that Federico Mayor will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on culture of peace and we can repeat the scenario. And so I continue to plug along, putting articles on CPNN with very little feedback and a stagnant readership. Kiki accompanies me, but apart from her I plug along ...
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme