Early History of the Culture of Peace

To be specific, the proposal cited a January 1992 mission of UNESCO to El Salvador, "The mission proposed formal and informal education for peace, development of tolerance, co-operation, and participation at all levels, management of democratic practice and social policies at local levels, alternatives of communication, and programmes of culture with an emphasis on youth."

The proposal that I gave Mr Mayor was formalized as document 140 EX/28 and submitted to the UNESCO Executive Board by the Chairman of its Programme Committee, Ambassador Ahmed Sayyad of Yemen. It was presented as a part of UNESCO's contribution to United Nations peace-building, a task that had been given priority following the publication of An Agenda for Peace by Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali in June 1992. The final version of Document 140EX/28 (see Annex II) included not only the original proposal, but also a dialogue based on my answers to questions posed by the Mayor's skeptical Director of Cabinet, Mr Daniel Janicot.

The Board was enthusiastic in their discussion of 140 EX/28 and the culture of peace (see Annex IIa). In fact, at the conclusion, they stood and applauded. Over the next few years, many Board members would be closely involved with its development, including Anaisabel Prera-Flores (Guatemala), Carlos Tunnerman (Nicaragua), Attiya Inayatullah (Pakistan), Torben Krogh (Denmark), Lourdes Quisumbing (Philippines), Balla Keita (Cote d'Ivoire), Dan Haulica (Roumania), Ingrid Eide (Norway) and Ahmed Sayyad (Yemen). Noticeably absent from the debate were Germany and France, and the Japanese speaker was the only one who expressed serious reservations.

When it came time to draft a decision, the Board did not accept the proposal that it should be administered by a new United Nations institution. Instead, they adopted a decision treating it as an exclusively UNESCO project. Knowing the weaknesses of UNESCO (low budget, few qualified specialists in conflict resolution, bureaucratic heaviness, and high vulnerability to political pressures), Mr Kutukdjian and I had tried to avoid this by proposing in 140 EX/28 that the culture of peace be administered by a new UN institution with a guaranteed budget as a percentage of peacekeeping operations. Director-General Mayor appears not to have pushed for this option, but to have acquiesced in the decision to treat it as just another UNESCO project. It would be almost a decade later that the culture of peace transcended UNESCO to become the United Nations International Year for the Culture of Peace (2000), the International Decade (2001-2010) and the programme of action for the entire UN system.

In its resolution, the 140th Executive Board decided to "establish an action programme aimed at promoting a culture of peace. The Board further requested that leading experts be consulted, as well as the UN and specialized agencies, and that a programme setting out practical activities to be undertaken should be submitted to its next session in May 1993. The Director-General engaged me as a consultant to carry this out, providing some extra-budgetary funds with the help of the foundation for the Houghouet-Boigny Peace Prize, presided over by Alioune Traore. I was placed under the authority of the Social Science Sector. Unaware of UNESCO procedures, I did not realize that the due date for the new programme proposal would be 26 February 1993, less than four months after the Executive Board decision and less than two months after my consultantship would begin, since, for the first two months, I would still be lecturing at my university!