The Art Of Peace [EXCLUSIVE]
The Art of Peace Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded on the Dalai Lama's belief of "Universal Responsibility." Regardless of nation, culture or religion, our compassionate and benevolent treatment of one another is an essential path for discovering our deepest peace and happiness. By understanding our common humanity our actions will transform the world in beneficial ways.
The Art of Peace
Grounded in the Dalai Lama's vision of nonviolence, we engage the world in a proactive way. Where there is violence, our voices must be heard. Most people embrace peace and compassion as guiding principles of life. It is only when we speak through a unified voice that the strength of compassion and nonviolence can be fully harnessed. We want to lend our voices to these efforts.
"I fear we [peacebuilders] see ourselves to be - and have therefore become - more technicians than artists. By virtue of this shift of perception our approaches have become too cookie-cutter-like, too reliant on what proper technique suggests as a frame of reference, and as a result, our processes are too rigid and fragile."
International interventions aimed at building peace in conflict and post-conflict societies have a mixed track-record at best in achieving their objectives. One of the main explanations for this is the apparent inability of international actors to reach out and connect with local communities and leaders who are key in transforming societies and enabling a lasting peace.
In recent years, arts-based approaches to peacebuilding have gained traction as an emerging area of research and practice. Despite these advances, as an area of study and practice, they remain under-researched. In particular, there is a deficit in understanding the impact community devised and led arts projects can have on peace formation at various stages of conflict amongst diverse actors.
Thus, this project investigates the potential of grassroots-led arts projects in undertaking a key role in how peace emerges within a country and stresses the agency of local people to change their society. It focuses on four very different case studies: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Lebanon.
The project aims to determine how arts can positively contribute to peace. It builds a community of practice between academics, artists, practitioners and policy-actors to explore the transformative power of the creative arts in the context of conflict and peace. Creating an evidence-base around the impact of arts can shape new policies and NGO programming to improve the life of people in conflict-affected societies.
Irenees.net is a documentary website whose purpose is to promote an exchange of knowledge and know-how at the service of the construction of an Art of peace.This website is coordinated byModus Operandi
I have learned two lessons from those experiences. The first is that it is not enough to end a war in order to come to peace. The second is that the virtues that are necessary to win war are virtues that are opposed to those necessary to win peace. The malediction tied to victory is simply to maintain in power those who have won. Those who have won the war are generally not able to win peace, both because of their culture and because of the institutions they have implemented.
In our particular period in the history of humankind, we are facing the urgent need to reflect on the conditions needed for a society to invent its systems of management, of preservation and of survival. With years, it has appeared more and more clearly that governance has for a particularity that its aims are constant, transcend cultural and civilisational barriers, come down through the ages. Among those aims, there is the maintenance of the inner peace and the maintenance of the balance with the outside, of security and balance with the environment.
What are the components of an art? Firstly, it is that there are things that have to be known, that it is complicated and that it is not realistic to get involved for peace simply out of good will. too often the fact that peace requires simple means is mixed up with the idea that peace is simple and that it is enough too have a desire for peace to make it happen.
This reality clearly appears when we see the attitudes within most Non Governmental Organisations. Voluntaries and employees who are ready to risk their lives for peace building, are doing it in a naïve state and with a view on the world where there are the good ones and the evil ones. This view is linked to a logic and a culture of war.
I have said earlier that peace is one of the most constant aims of the governance, of the art of societies to run themselves autonomously. Today, if people are more precisely interested in peace building, we see that the art of peace is part of one of the varieties of governance. This variety is the art of transition management.
The art of peace is part of the art of governance. I deduce here that the art of peace can take profit from all the reflections on governance. The art of peace has nothing to gain by trying to think itself as an isolated thing, reducible to nothing else. On the contrary, it has to be part of a larger corpus of reflections. This leads me to maintain that the art of peace can nourish and nourish itself with the general principles, which have come out for governance. At the end of forty years of reflection, I have come up with five key principles of governance. I share them with you as one possible key to read peace between others.
The third principle of governance is the principle of competence and pertinence of the institutions. Do the conception of the institutions and the culture of those who are the actors of those institutions go into the same direction aiming at the same objective? The transition from war to peace implies a transition of the institutions. The conversion of an economy of war into an economy of peace is an investment, as Richard Pétris has often highlighted it. In the beginning of the 90, after the fall of the Berlin wall there was some talk about dividends of peace. The conversion of an economy of war into peace is a major institutional conversion. The political institutions implemented after wars are always systems of compartmentalisation of information. During wartime, what is dangerous is the circulation of information. Therefore, the conversion of the war institutions into peace institutions is a major question. The art of peace should be included into the institutional engineering- the art of conceiving the institutions, as part of it.
We live in a world where peace exists only by reason of a balance of terror. I have often thought that if great numbers of the women of all nations were to unite and lift their voices in the cause of peace, there would develop a worldwide will for peace which could save our civilization and avoid untold suffering, misery, plague, starvation, and the death of millions.
Thayne: In 1983, David Freed, the retired first cellist of the Utah Symphony and a peace activist, called to invite me to write poems about peace among nations. We were to be sponsored by the Utah Arts Council to perform around the state a peace message. This was my first experience with any kind of making peace. He was going to play Bach, and I was to read a poem about peace between the movements. Can you imagine what a challenge this was for me?
I still find occasion to use these poems in the cause of peace. More than twenty years after the test ban treaty conference, I was invited to read from the book together with the saxophone of Clifton Sanders at Utah Valley University for a peace-among-nations celebration. What a glorious serendipity to have the keynote speaker be Jonathan Schell. I told him how much his book The Fate of the Earth had meant to me, how it changed everything; it changed my point of view on the atomic bomb.
If that experience sounds mystical, well, I am a mystic. As I assimilated my accident, I learned this: I went away and returned with a promise to keep. Keeping that promise of offering peace would take the rest of my life. Love would be the directing force, love that is infinite. This is what I have to teach: The more we love, the more we are privileged to love. My mentor, Lowell Bennion, taught me that what matters most is relationships, vertically to the divine and horizontally to the human. Always.
Meyer: I urge those who want to know more to read your books Hope and Recovery, As for Me and My House, and The Place of Knowing, because love, received and given, has been your guide in your peaceable walk. How does one cultivate the arts of love and peace?
The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all that you encounter Two
The Art of Peace does not rely on weapons or brute force to succeed; instead we put ourselves in tune with the universe, maintain peace in our own realms, nurture life, and prevent death and destruction. The true meaning of the term samurai is one who serves and adheres to the power of love. Thirty Four
Thich Nhat Hanh: Distinguished guests, noble sangha, good afternoon. We can very well describe the practice of Buddhism as the practice of a kind of art. The art of being peace. The art of promoting peace in society, and the world.
And that is, the art of making peace with ourselves. Taking care of our body. And taking care of our feelings and emotions. And then the Buddha proceed to help us to recognize our mental formations. And among them, our thinking. We know that we still have a lot of wrong thinking in us. And the wrong thinking will bring about wrong speech and wrong actions that will cause war within us and the other person, between our group and the other group. Between our nation and the other nation. 041b061a72