Cross-Conflict Participation

Ironically, the new psychology peace journal, which had published in its inaugural 1995 edition the article that I wrote for Federico Mayor, later that year refused to publish the description of cross-conflict participation that had been developed with the experts. It remains to this day in a drawer (and in these files), awaiting a new period of history when it can be supported and used for a true culture of peace. At first I was rather angry that the journal, of which I was on the Board, had refused to publish the paper, but years later, seeing that the papers that I DID publish then, such as the one on internal intervention, are not referenced anyway, I realize that it wouldn't have made much difference even if it had been published.

Let me explain the background.

The culture of peace proposal that I gave to Federico Mayor in May, which became UNESCO document 140/EX28 and which was adopted by the UNESCO Executive Board in the fall of 1992 did not include specific reference to cross-conflict participation. It did say that the objective of the culture of peace programme would be "to heal the social wounds of war with local activities of reconcilation and co-operation."

Once it was clear that I would be hired as a consultant to develop the programme, I needed to base it on a solid scientific footing, for which I turned to social psychology.

As described in the Mayor article, the most appropriate basis was the finding of the psychologist Muzafer Sherif that reconciliation can be achieved by having the two sides in conflict work together on a common task that they both felt needed to be achieved. I gave this the name "cross-conflict participation" and set about designing an approach that could be applied to the many conflicts being addressed by the United Nations and its peacekeeping operations.

When I arrived at UNESCO in January 1993 I was given only a few weeks to prepare documents for the UNESCO Executive Board, and I had little time to consult experts for the proposal. Each night I would spend at the fax machine in the office of the Social Science director, trying to reach experts from around the world to get their opinion. I did reach many of them and developed a document for the Board that quoted from them as much as possible.

As I describe in the Brief History of the Culture of Peace on line at culture-of-peace.info, the document was not well received by the Board. Board members looked for their favorite experts in the list and didn't find them. Besides, they said, it sounded too Anglo-Saxon for their Continental tastes (the US and UK were still boycotting UNESCO at that time).

Eventually, despite the initial rebuff at the Board in May 1993, the culture of peace programme was accepted in the fall of 1993 and we successfully tested cross-conflict participation in the El Salvador culture of peace programme as described in my article with Francisco Lacayo and Mirta Lourenco published a few years later and available on the Internet.

Years later, armed conflicts continue to cause enormous suffering throughout the world and the cross-conflict participation model remains buried in the archives. The world is not yet ready for it...