Stories
Midterm Report on Culture of Peace - 2005
Youth Report on Culture of Peace - 2006
A trilogy of books for a new strategy
Final Report on Culture of Peace - 2010
Struggling with the United Nations
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The Culture of Peace News Network continued
Missions for the Culture of Peace
Vacations with Lindsay in the Caribbean
As I describe at the end of the story of the 1999 UN Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace, it included the call for "a global movement for a culture of peace" including the civil society and it emphasized the " sharing of information among actors" of the movement. This was important because we knew from the opposition to the resolution by the powerful Member States that we would have to rely upon the civil society to advance the culture of peace.
Anwaral Chowdhury, the UN Ambassador from Bangladesh who had been responsible for passage of the resolution by the General Assembly, was also responsible for the initial resolutions of the Culture of Peace Decade that followed, and so he wrote into resolution A/55/47 at the beginning of the Decade the following important passages which were cited by the resolutions in the following years:
The General Assembly:
12. Invites civil society, including non-governmental organizations, to provide information to the Secretary-General on the observance of the Decade and the activities undertaken to promote a culture of peace and non-violence;
13. Decides to devote one day of plenary meetings at its sixtieth session to consideration of the item, including a review of the progress made in the implementation of the Declaration and Programme of Action, as well as the observance of the Decade at its mid-point, with the participation of all relevant actors, as appropriate;
Federico Mayor agreed to provide me with some funds to coordinate the report which I undertook in the fall of 2004 with a goal of submitting it to the Secretary-General as called for in the above resolution in time for it to be submitted to the General Assembly, i.e. in June 2005. I developed a questionnaire and sent it out to all of the international organizations that had taken part in the year 2000 mobilization, and I set up a stand and gave out flyers, with the assistance of Kiki and a young man named Gert Danielson, at the World Social Forum in Brazil in January 2005.
Giving an interview for a radio program at our stand at
the World Social Forum of 2005
Most of the funds from Mayor were used for sub-contracts for the mobilization of responses to questionnaires from the various regions:
Latin America, Educating Cities (Alicia Cabezudo) $1,200
Brazil and World Social Forum, Gert Danielsen $300
Caribbean, Proyecto Caribeno de Justicia $2 000
Africa, United Network of Young Peacebuilders $1,000
South Asia, Center of Intl Research
on Human Unity (Gabriel de Gaudenzi) $2,500
Arab States (Bibliotheca Alexandrina) $ 3,300, including for translations
The greatest amount of work, however, was done by myself, especially with regard to international organizations, many of whom had to be requested by telephone and email up to 10 times before we got their information.
People tended to wait until the last possible moment to respond. I had set a May 1 deadline and as of April 1 there were only a few more than 100 responses. Most of the 700 responses came in the last few weeks.
We had expected that the UN Secretary-General would follow the instructions of the resolution quoted above and would forward the report to the General Assembly and have it published in the six UN languages. But as I describe in some detail elsewhere, this did not happen and we had to take other measures to disseminate the report, including the Youth Advocacy Team that made appointments with ambassadors and gave it to them personally.
Youth Advocacy Team of 2005
Using funds from Barcelona, the Barcelona region and Catalunyan governments, Mayor's Fundación printed up books with the final report and related documents which I mailed to all of the 700 participating organizations, and which we have been distributing since then. These books are available on the Internet by way of links on the Decade website.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme