What Next? The United Nations
Let us give you a couple of definitions before you embark on this article about how CJP is influencing the United Nations (UN). If you sit in almost any justice and peacebuilding class at EMU, you will soon hear the terms “track 1” and “track 2.”The UN, the Vatican, the U. S. government and the Communist Party of China all have this in common: They are track 1. They are governmental bodies with bureaucracies, policies and procedures. They tend to run things from the top down.
Track 2 consists of civil society groups, such as the loose network of groups dealing with homelessness in many cities; Doctors Without Borders on the international level; the Red Cross; your neighborhood block association.
Until recently, the faculty, staff and students at EMU have
tended to work at the track 2 level or at the grassroots level.
But CJP’s students – most of whom arrive with extensive track
2 experience – have urged CJP faculty members to pay more
attention to track 1. The students agree that track 1 needs the
support of civil society for peace to succeed. But they argue that
the reverse is also true: civil society cannot achieve lasting peace
without track 1 support. Which brings us to what’s happening at the UN these days... CJP professors Barry Hart and Lisa Schirch, along with 15 students, attended the first “people building peace” conference July 19-21, 2005, at the UN headquarters in New York City. The conference attracted almost 1,000 delegates from 119 countries, all seeking more collaboration between track 1 and track 2.
Hart and Schirch were amazed at how many of the delegates they personally knew. Schirch wrote a few days later: Barry and I sat together, goose bumps running up our arms as we gazed around the magnificent General Assembly meeting room and saw many of CJP’s graduates, partners and colleagues from around the world. It was breathtaking!
Many of the 13 working groups at the conference contained CJPers advocating the importance of key concepts taught at EMU, such as:
■ the need for individual and collective trauma healing to stop cycles of violence
■ the role of restorative, transitional and distributive justice
■ the importance of widespread education in the theory and skills of conflict transformation and peacebuilding
■ the importance of transforming oneself – that is, the role of religion and spirituality – as part of the peace process Hart, who continues to meet with UN officials and advisors and to present briefs to them (as recently as Sept. 5, 2006), has summed up his views in a “Peacebuilding Wheel” diagram.
It shows that peacebuilding can be viewed as a tire-wheel “in- flated” by the vital values shown on the diagram. “Cultural and context - social, political, economic and environmental - always inform this model,” notes Hart.