Early History of the Culture of Peace

As described here earlier the International Year for a Culture of Peace, the UN General Assembly in 1998 proclaimed the Decade 2001-2010 as the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the world, and in 2000 they put UNESCO in charge of the Decade.

However, by 2004 it had become evident that the new administration of UNESCO would do almost nothing to make the Decade a success.

Federico Mayor agreed to provide me with some funds from his Fundación Cultura de Paz to coordinate a report about civil society initiatives for the Decade to be submitted to the UN General Assembly at for the Decade midterm in 2005.

I developed a questionnaire and sent it out to all of the international organizations that had taken part in the year 2000 mobilization, and I set up a stand and gave out flyers, with the assistance of Kiki and a young man named Gert Danielson, at the World Social Forum in Brazil in January 2005.

Home page for the report on the decade
(click on image to go to the actual site)

Most of the funds from Mayor were used for sub-contracts for the mobilization of responses to questionnaires from the various regions:

Latin America, Educating Cities (Alicia Cabezudo) $1,200
Brazil and World Social Forum, Gert Danielsen $300
Caribbean, Proyecto Caribeno de Justicia $2 000
Africa, United Network of Young Peacebuilders $1,000
South Asia, Center of Intl Research on Human Unity (Gabriel de Gaudenzi) $2,500
Arab States (Bibliotheca Alexandrina) $ 3,300, including for translations

The greatest amount of work, however, was done by myself, especially with regard to international organizations, many of whom had to be requested by telephone and email up to 10 times before we got their information.

People tended to wait until the last possible moment to respond. I had set a May 1 deadline and as of April 1 there were only a few more than 100 responses. Most of the 700 responses came in the last few weeks.

As you can see here, the 700 midterm reports come from organizations everywhere in the world and involved thousands, perhaps millions, of people working for a culture of peace.

We had expected that the UN Secretary-General would follow the instructions of the resolution quoted above and would forward the report to the General Assembly and have it published in the six UN languages. But as I describe in some detail elsewhere, this did not happen and we had to take other measures to disseminate the report, including the Youth Advocacy Team that made appointments with ambassadors and gave it to them personally.

Youth Advocacy Team at UN headquarters in 2005
(click on image to go to their report)

Using funds from Barcelona, the Barcelona region and Catalunyan governments, Mayor's Fundación printed up books with the final report and related documents which I mailed to all of the 700 participating organizations, and which we have been distributing since then. These books are available on the Internet by way of links on the Decade website.

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