Ever since 7th grade when I first learned of Ghandhi’s nonviolent protests, I’ve often pondered the elusiveness of peace. Someone once said to me, “Humans just aren’t wired to be peaceful,” and I disagreed. Yet, I acknowledge that it’s challenging to believe in humanity’s altruism when frequent, often horrific, violence erupts.
This is why we need Dr. Benjamin A. Peters, a political scientist from the University of Michigan who also lived and taught in Japan (full bio at the end). He, and other professionals like him, study peace, the human right to peace, and peaceful societies. I met Dr. Peters earlier this year through a friend, and I’ve been fascinated by his work. Read on if you are interested in the right to peace, a way to think about our current crisis beyond just a clash between left and right, and for tips to learn strategies for personal peacemaking.
AM: The idea that humans have a right to peace seems obvious. Yet, we don’t often hear specifically about this. Can you define this concept and address why you think it’s not something we regularly hear about.
BP: Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said, “The right to peace is the mother of all human rights.” By this, he meant it is nearly impossible to enjoy our other human rights when we’re faced with conditions that destroy and impede human flourishing, whether that’s due to direct violence like war or structural violence like prejudice or poverty.
You might be surprised to know that the UN has been voting to recognize the human right to peace for more than forty years. In a 1984 vote at the UN General Assembly, 92 countries voted to recognize such a right. While many other countries voted “abstain” or “absent”, none voted against it. Most recently, the UN General Assembly voted on a Declaration on the Right to Peace in 2016. In that vote, 131 countries, most of the Majority World countries (what used to be called the Third World or Global South), voted in favor, and 34 countries voted against, including the U.S. and the majority of the Global North.
It’s disappointing that the U.S. government has at times tacitly and at other times directly opposed recognizing our human right to peace. This certainly has to do with US domestic and foreign policy, including our long history of interventionism. It’s difficult to find a position paper by the government outlining its opposition to the right to peace. Yet, the Canadian parliamentarian and peace activist, Douglas Roche, recounted in his book The Human Right to Peace (Novalis, 2003) that in a UN General Assembly debate in 1999, a US delegate said, ““Peace should not be elevated to the category of a human right, otherwise it will be very difficult to start a war.”
Well, yes – that is the point!
The right to peace, as advanced in the UN, contains many specific components. These include the right to resist oppression, limits on outsourcing security to private militaries and security companies, human security that address structural violence, the right to peace and human rights education, the right to demonstrate for peace, the right to conscientious objection to war, and the obligation to oppose the threat and use of force among others. The 2016 Declaration also called on States to “respect, implement and promote equality and non-discrimination, justice and the rule of law, and guarantee freedom from fear and want as means to build peace within and between societies.” While we face especially strong threats to constitutional and broader human rights at present, it’s important to remember that the US has abstained or voted against the right to peace at the UN under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
We don’t hear about the human right to peace because so much of US domestic and foreign policy goes against it. There’s also a general dearth of information in the US about global civil society movements pursuing peace, liberation, and human rights. There have been fifteen world conferences to advance the right to peace held in every continent except North America, but there has been no coverage of this in mainstream US media.
We can’t assume that “the world’s just not ready for peace” when most of the countries of the world have been sustaining the movement for an actionable right to peace for decades.
AM: Can you give us some concrete examples from your research about how the right to peace is being put into practice? For example in Japan and Costa Rica, and do you see any connections to what we are trying to do here in the U.S. in terms of the political situation?
BP: The right to peace is mentioned in the preamble of the Constitution of Japan (1947), and Japanese citizens have tried to use this right to constrain military policy. For example, in 1968, citizens in Naganuma, Hokkaido sued the government when it tried to reclassify land to install an anti-missile base in their village. The Sapporo District Court ruled in their favor, recognizing that the reclassification of land violated their right to peace. However, the Sapporo High Court and the Supreme Court both ruled against them. There are other instances of lower courts ruling in favor of Japanese citizens’ right to peace, but so far, they haven’t been sustained in high courts.
Costa Rica, however, is really the exemplar in the movement to secure the right to peace. You might know that Costa Rica hasn’t had an army since 1949, and it made a Declaration of Perpetual Unarmed Neutrality in 1983. It also has a law requiring peace education in the schools, has made changes to its legal system to utilize mediation and peaceful conflict resolution, and established a Ministry of Justice and Peace. Furthermore, Costa Rica demonstrates the role citizens can play in securing the right to peace.
When the Costa Rican government added its name to the Bush administration’s “Coalition of the Willing” invasion force against Iraq in 2003, a law student, Roberto Zamora, sued the government. He claimed that even that was a violation of the constitution and the declaration of neutrality. In a unanimous decision, the Constitutional Court ruled in his favor and noted that the policy was a violation of the constitution, the UN Charter, and of “a fundamental principle of ‘the Costa Rican identity’, which is peace as a fundamental value”. As a result, the government contacted the Bush administration and told it to remove Costa Rica’s name from the Coalition.
In a second example, the President of Costa Rica issued an executive order in 2006 allowing the importation and manufacture of weapons, the extraction of uranium and thorium, nuclear fuel development, and manufacturing nuclear reactors. Again, Zamora sued, and in a unanimous ruling, the Constitutional Court found that the order violated the constitution along with the right of Costa Ricans to a healthy environment, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and “the value of peace and the UN Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace”. As a result, the executive order was invalidated, and the government gave up on its policy. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening in the US. Yet, we must remember not just that an actionable right to peace is possible, but that it exists!
As for lessons for us here in the US, the example, especially of Costa Rica, demonstrates how important both political institutions and political culture are, including making peace part of the national identity and fostering the willingness to take action to uphold it.
The struggle here in the US is also about organizing to protect institutional frameworks that empower and protect citizens, basic constitutional rights, and the rule of law. The electoral component is supporting candidates who adhere to and are willing to strengthen those rights-based traditions. And then, when it comes to political culture, it’s the ever-continuing struggle to foster the values of democracy rather than authoritarianism and moral decency rather than dehumanization.
3) You and I have talked a bit about the work of Rian Eisler. Her theory of cultural transformation, that we are in a time where it’s crucial we shift from a domination model of society into partnership modality. You and I have both read Eisler’s book, Nurturing Our Humanity. Can you talk a bit about her theory and the group you are part of advancing the interdisciplinary science of peace?
BP: Riane Eisler’s book Nurturing Our Humanity, co-authored with peace anthropologist Douglas Fry, lays out a framework for analyzing social groups and cultures along a spectrum ranging from “partnership systems” to “domination systems”. This is meant to replace other categories like left and right or religious and secular. Partnerships systems align with and foster our species-typical dispositions toward peaceful and cooperative behavior, whereas domination systems create and perpetuate species-atypical social arrangements based on hierarchy and coercion. Eisler and Fry highlight empirical research on the comparative effects of these two systems on physical and mental health, social relations, and general human flourishing. I found their emphasis on adult-child relations and gender relations along the spectrum from partnership to domination especially insightful and an important reminder of how our earliest and most intimate relationships either reproduce or disrupt these systems.
Eisler & Fry’s work is part of a burgeoning interdisciplinary science of peace. I’m part of this network as a political scientist, and I collaborated with Dr. Peter Verbeek, a psychobiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to co-edit a book, Peace Ethology: Behavioral Processes and Systems of Peace, that brought together scholars from around the world and from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, criminology, philosophy, and primatology to examine our species’ capacity for peaceful behavior. We do this through the lens of ethology, or the study of behavior, and divide the book into four parts: the proximate causes of peaceful behavior, how peaceful behavior develops over the lifespan of individuals, the function of peaceful behaviors, and the evolutionary development of peaceful behaviors across species, including homo sapiens. While the approach might sound abstract, the chapters offer concrete examples, for example: peacekeeping behaviors among chimpanzees after conflict, the reintegration of former child soldiers in post-conflict societies, reforms to policing in immigrant communities in the Netherlands, experiential peacebuilding through environmental education in Iraq, the US, and the Balkans, the peaceful aspects of Small‐Band Hunter‐Gatherer cultures, an introduction to peace constitutions and how they work in Costa Rica and Japan, and many others.
AM: Please give us some concrete examples of everyday peacemaking that we can implement in our own lives. And also, how do we share these concepts and promote them so we can expand peace in our society?
BP: I appreciate this question. When we see peacemaking as multidimensional, we can more easily find the ways to work toward peace that match our skills, experiences, and moral commitments.
One necessary condition for peace is the absence of direct violence. Think of anti-war movements. Obviously, people are not at peace if they are suffering from war or other direct violence, so stopping war and working against militarism help advance this dimension of peace. Other examples of direct violence are police brutality and domestic violence. Those who focus on reducing and eliminating problems like these are certainly peacemakers.
Of course, even in the absence of direct violence, there is indirect violence and social injustice that causes harm, for example through bigotry, exploitation, and poverty. So, another necessary condition for peace is reinforcing and building institutions and norms that both eliminate these harms and create the conditions for human flourishing. We can advance this dimension of peace by working toward improvements in the areas of education, health care, expanded access to essential resources, and social services. Those engaged in this kind of work are peacebuilders.
The final dimension of peace that I would highlight here is what is called “sociative peace”. This is also necessary, and it refers to the attitudes and behaviors we cultivate and practice in our interpersonal relationships, whether those are in the home, the workplace, or other day-to-day relationships.
As one concrete example of how we can practice and share the skills of sociative peace, I have been studying and leading workshops on Nonviolent Communication as developed by Marshal Rosenberg. This is a practice of communicating with compassion and an openness about our shared human needs. I have used it in my family relationships, at work, and in conversations with strangers. I have taught it to the students in the program I direct at the University of Michigan, and I have used it and seen students use it in active conflict resolution with much success. This is just one example, and there are many other skill-based practices you can learn and use to become an active peacebuilder. Many peace-focused nonprofits also offer free training and educational resources specifically aimed at developing our capacities as peacemakers, peacebuilders, and peacekeepers. Some of these are the Institute for Economics & Peace, the Greater Good Science Center, Search for Common Ground, and the FrameWorks Institute as just a few examples.
Benjamin A. Peters, PhD, has been the Director of the Global Scholars Program and a faculty member at the University of Michigan since 2017. He also worked in Japan for fourteen years, where he was a Professor of Political Science, Dean of the School of International Liberal Arts, and Vice President of Miyazaki International University. His teaching and research are in the areas of the human right to peace and cultures of peace, Japanese and Costa Rican politics, and constitutional antimilitarism.
With Peter Verbeek, he is co-editor of Peace Ethology: Behavioral Processes and Systems of Peace (Wiley, 2018), and he is a member of the Political Science Research Committee of the Center for Global Nonkilling (member-group of the World Health Organization Violence Prevention Alliance) and has served as a reviewer for the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and for The Economics of Peace and Security Journal. He is also on the Board of Directors of ALPHA Education, a Canadian nonprofit that runs the Asia Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto.
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