The information listed in this list is in no particular order of preference. These are all resources that might help you prepare for the discussions we are going to have during our conference from September 27 to October 2, 2023.
Keynote speakers Paul Rogers, Kai Brand-Jorgensen, & Irvin Waller
To change the world, we must endeavor to change the way the world thinks. With this in mind, we use the unmatched power of storytelling to promote peace, impact hearts and minds, and raise the collective vibration of humankind. This way peace emerges naturally because of what we have become. As one example of peace entertainment, the award-winning short film for peace “Admissions,” stars Academy Award® nominee James Cromwell and was created to promote the establishment of Infrastructures for Peace in governments worldwide. The “Admissions Room” depicted in the film operates symbolically like a Ministry of Peace. James Cromwell’s character “the clerk” acts as a Minister of Peace whose sole purpose is to resolve conflict and help people, cultures, and countries find common ground on which to reconcile their differences and begin to thrive together as one. The film’s concise, 20-minute length makes it perfect for classroom study and viral transmission in the world at large, especially because the film is offered as a complimentary “Gift of Peace.” For this reason, the audience for “Admissions” grows year after year. It has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Italian, German, and Spanish, and broadcast to 80 million homes in the Middle East. Additionally, It is also used as part of the world-renowned forgiveness curriculum at The Stanford University Forgiveness Project.
To watch“Admissions in English, please click on this link: https://www.peacenow.com/admissions/
To watch “Admissions” in Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, or Farsi: https://tinyurl.com/soaft57
From the Alliance for Peacebuilding website and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@AllianceforpeacebuildingOrg
“The peacebuilding field has grown significantly in the last two decades, seeing substantial wins, including the adoption of the Global Fragility Act (GFA), the United Nations (UN) Sustaining Peace Agenda, and the World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence. Yet many challenges remain.
PeaceCon 2023 convened at a time of extraordinary global turbulence. The number of compounding crises facing the field is unprecedented.
- Even before Russia launched its unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, the world was already experiencing a 30-year high in violent conflict.
- Recent reports have found a disconcerting increase in the total number of fragile contexts worldwide, with 1.9 billion people—24% of the world’s population and 73% of the world’s extremely poor—living in environments rife with chronic instability, conflict or violence.
- The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was not just a health crisis but also fueled global insecurity that has impacted the prevention and containment of COVID-19 with long-term social, political, and economic consequences.
- Globally, climate change, food and energy insecurity, and rising dis/misinformation are all compounding and compounded by violent conflict while our greatest tool of resiliency—democracy—is backsliding as strategic competition among the world’s most powerful nations accelerates.
To move forward in the face of such complexity and uncertainty, the peacebuilding field and its partners must ensure that recent wins are robustly resourced and implemented and provide a firm foundation on which to build more effective, sustainable solutions to increasing fragility and conflict. But will this be enough? Unprecedented times often call for unprecedented measures. How the field evolves to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow will determine future success.
PeaceCon 2023 brought together senior officials, thought leaders, policymakers, and practitioners to explore how the field must evolve, with strategic foresight and innovation, to strengthen existing instruments of peacebuilding and create new strategic approaches and peacebuilding architectures to manage conflict and prevent violence during these times of tectonic geopolitical shifts.
Throughout the conference, we collectively explored what is working, how to build on these successes, and how we can develop and demand practical and interconnected new peacebuilding strategies and tools for the future to shape a more effective and inclusive peacebuilding sector.”
Global Fragility Act (2019) https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2116
World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict and Violence 2020-2025 https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/fragilityconflictviolence/publication/world-bank-group-strategy-for-fragility-conflict-and-violence-2020-2025
Canada – Chile Solidarity 1973-1990: Testimonies of Civil Society Action
edited by Liisa L. North published September 2023 by Novalis
The stories and documents presented in this book relate key facets of the history of Canadian civil society solidarity with Chile after the September 1973 military coup d’état. It is a history that speaks to the importance of well-organized and coordinated civic action in the formulation of public policy, especially with regard to refugees and dealing with dictatorships; it also speaks to the significance of refugee and exile community contributions to Canadian society. In addition to retrospective interpretations by activists, through the documents that are reproduced here, we hear the voices of the churches, unions, and civic organizations as they worked to ensure justice and debated with government officials and corporate leaders about the directions that Canadian policy toward Chile and Latin America should take.
Liisa L. North is Emeritus Professor of Politics at York University in Toronto. She has made many important contributions as a teacher, a researcher of rural conflicts and social movements in Latin America, an analyst of Canadian foreign policy toward the region, and a social activist.
Bibliographic Information
ISBN: 9782898301469 Format: Paperback Pages: (approximately) 336 Price: (approximately) $27.95
Selling Points
- Marks the 50th anniversary of the September 1973 coup, when the first democratically elected revolutionary socialist government in the world was overthrown by the military
- No book has examined the breadth of the Canadian solidarity movement and the leading role of the churches within it
- Records the testimonies of the individuals and organizations that led solidarity, including the voices of the Chilean refugees who settled in Canada
- Brings attention to the document collections of the Latin American Working Group (LAWG), an independent research and solidarity organization founded in 1966 by activists with links to the churches