The Culture of Peace News Network

Responding to the importance of consciousness about a culture of peace and the failure of the commercial mass media to contribute positively, the Culture of Peace News Network (CPNN) has been developed with the goal of providing an alternative source of news. The criterion for a contribution to CPNN is that it should promote at least one of the basic principles of a culture of peace and should not contradict any of them. invited to contribute.

When I launched CPNN as a UNESCO project in 1998, the intention was to establish an international network of CPNN websites that would exchange their stories and hence achieve a world news service for the culture of peace. One member of my staff worked full time for two years on this project and she and other team members undertook missions to establish CPNN sites in China, Jordan, Brazil, El Salvador, Australia, the United States and Russia. Additional contracts were made with organizations in Greece, Macedonia and France.

The CPNN sites in a number of countries were not maintained, and only two lasted for more than a year, CPNN-USA and CPNN-Japan. By 2010, CPNN-Japan had folded.

Once I retired from UNESCO in 2001, I put my energies into developing CPNN-USA as a technical model which could be adapted for use in other countries.

Through the use of the PERL programming language, I was able to provide a discussion section on one side of the web page opposite the story itself, and to allow readers to contribute directly on-line to the discussion, with their contribution appearing immediately on the web page. This provided a kind of check on the truth of the story, since readers were able to write in immediately and question or confirm its contents.

At first, the stories came from readers rather than from the organizers of the website or a staff or reporters.

As of 2005, there were 262 stories on line at CPNN-USA, as well as 201 discussion topics and 359 discussion replies on the CPNN discussionboard.

By 2007, admitting that my dream of many CPNN sites in many continents and languages was not going to be realized, I changed the name of the website from CPNN-USA to CPNN-World and started publishing regularly in English, French and Spanish, including not only original stories, but also stories reprinted from other media sources where reprinting was not expressly forbidden.

Then in 2015, aided by the young people in the Culture of Peace Corporation, I revised CPNN-World into a Wordpress format which could be managed (in theory, at least) by others as well as myself. By this time, there was less and less discussion by readers, so I dropped the previous discussion format and relegated it to separate discussion pages.

As I write this in 2017, we are averaging about one article a day in English, and fewer in Spanish and French. The bulletin is sent out monthly to a mailing list of over 4,000 readers, and the total readership is now more than 100,000 a year.

A summary of my strategy with CPNN was published a few years ago in the Journal of Peace Education.

Issues

Index

News about Culture of Peace

Historical Perspective

Seville Statement on Violence

National Programmes for a Culture of Peace

Definition of Culture of Peace

UN Declaration and Programme of Action

International Year and Manifesto 2000

Decade and Midterm Report

Main Actors for a Culture of Peace