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A Culture of Peace Network for Non-Governmental Organizations The more we worked, the more we discovered that our initiatives within the UN system were matched by similar thinking and initiatives by local and international non-governmental organizations. Some of these have been mentioned above: the initiatives of the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Centro de Estudios Internacionales in Nicaragua. A prominent place was given at the end of the monograph to these and other initiatives for a culture of peace by non-governmental organizations. Some of the others included the World Movement of Scouts, the World Council of Churches, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the International Union of Psychological Sciences, the International Peace Research Association, and International Alert. We were in a good position at UNESCO to serve as a central clearing house for culture of peace initiatives, and so one of the first actions of our new unit in 1994 was to set up a computerized system to file and cross-index the information that we were beginning to accumulate from many sources. This material was then to be used as the basis for a newsletter and an Internet information system. Three years later, we still had not established the network. The computer program which was set up by UNESCO's personnel in 1994 was not properly done despite many hours of discussion and tinkering with the program. After a year of frustration, in 1995 we hired two staff to develop the network and an outside consultant to develop a proper program. By the end of 1996, the appropriate computer program was designed but was still not fully operational. A newsletter was put together and an Internet site was designed, but instead of featuring the work of non-governmental organizations, the first issues simply served as advertisements for the UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme. Sometimes I wonder in retrospect if it would not have been more effective to have devoted full time to the networking project instead of trying to establish national culture of peace programmes and other projects such as that of schools. Here at least was a project that might have been realized with minimal resources. Of course, the experience with the monograph indicates that even the simplest things can be destroyed if one encounters sufficient jealousy in the bureaucracy. [Note added in 1999: All is not lost! A networking system similar to that originally planned for 1994 is now being established for the International Year for the Culture of Peace and information is available on Internet at http://www.unesco.org/iycp.] |