Welcome to PeaceBuilding.com

So many aspects of our local and global societies are troubled, and are challenging our sense of security, fairness, values, safety, financial well-being and hope for the future. The purpose of this web site is to connect people and organizations who are willing to step forward, co-create solutions and take action in creating Cultures of Peace and greater well-being. This will be accomplished by integrating personal, professional and global initiatives and by recognizing shared principles and proven daily practices.

We live in extraordinary times with extraordinary challenges and questions. Together we must co-create the extraordinary answers. One of them is PeaceBuilding; within ourselves and within and through our organizations and our local, national and global communities. PeaceBuilding.com is a global electronic community where we can meet, co-create profound answers and share the inspired guidance that is now required of us. It is a center where we can discover PeaceBuilding as a compass. This is a powerful and dynamic peace that is as engaging as anything we have ever done. We are laying the foundation for the 21st Century, we are leaving our legacy!

Defining the emerging field of PeaceBuilding for the 21st Century:

"Peace" is both an innate state of Mind/Being, and a dynamic evolutionary process.

"PeaceBuilding is the construction of new environments and new cultures which transform deficient structures and capabilities and which unite the strengths of emerging innovations in all pathways of our local-global planetary life. PeaceBuilding creates and maintains beneficial conditions for sustainable (life-enhancing) social, economic, political and spiritual development of all peoples."

Adapted from speech given at the U.N. by Pathways To Peace and "An Agenda for Peace", a U.N. report of the Secretary General, 1992 (see definitions )

PeaceBuilding.com is also where the many pathways of human endeavor such as business, education, environment come together to better understand each other and share activities in a way that enables deeper connections and wider systemic awareness. This convergence among the pathways is represented symbolically in the PeaceBuilding Wheel. Due to the critical role of business and its profound interconnection and effect on the other sectors, PeaceBuilding.com is focusing on PeaceBuilding Through Business at this time.

We invite organizations and individuals to forge entirely new ground in cooperative association. Guided by vision and acting in concert with one another, each organization and individual contributes unique expertise and thereby augments power and purpose to transcend what any one organization or individual could have achieved alone.

By engaging in the common tasks and commitments of reinstating a sense of the sacred, re-establishing genuine community, fostering environmental sustainability and ensuring respect of diversity to create and disseminate tools which can guide actions toward global PeaceBuilding and toward the creation of a just, humane, and sustainable society. In this spirit, we are cooperatively stewarding the coordination of the administration of our collective work. In this spirit, we welcome your participation and look forward to the deepening of our partnership.

"Individuals and Nations, acting in concert, DO make a difference in the quality of our lives, our institutions, our environment and our planetary future. Through co-operation, we manifest the essential Spirit that unites us amid our diverse ways."
The Principle-in-Action of Pathways To Peace

Major concerns and opportunities that are before us*

PeaceBuilding Through Business:

The network of large corporations and financial institutions that comprise the global economy has tremendous power over individuals, communities, nations, and our common future. Yet, these institutions are not accountable for the power they wield to the people of the world. We might expect increasing challenges to the legitimacy of such power without accountability, as concern for the state of the world becomes more widespread. Institutions are ordinarily perceived as legitimate on the basis of (a) being duly constituted, (b) operating according to generally approved values or ethical standards, and (c) producing results that are in the public good. Some modern transnational corporations tend to fail on all three criteria. We need to explore the constructive role of business, large and small, in building a peaceful world. This is the primary focus of PeaceBuilding.com at this time.

PeaceBuilding Through Development:

The seeds of worldwide conflict lie in the enormous and growing disparity between the world's rich and poor peoples. On no grounds are the industrial paradigm and late 20th century capitalism more bitterly challenged. The development dilemma is really a cluster of issues (all of them systemic in nature and not susceptible to local amelioration) encompassing questions not only of equity and justice but also of hunger and poverty, population, debt, the oppression of women, security issues and more. If we take them all together, it does not appear that the current system in anything like its present form is compatible with ecologically sustainable global societies, or a satisfactory resolution of the plight of the poorest countries.

The paths of global development that seem to be economically and politically feasible do not look to be ecologically or socially plausible. Meanwhile, those that appear ecologically feasible and humanistically desirable do not seem economically or politically plausible. More fundamental liberation may now be necessary to bring about a more just world. The growing demand for a "fairness revolution" amounts to much more than an adjustment of existing economic institutions to ensure more equitable distribution. It implies a profound restructuring of international society. Changes in values, policies, and programs of development in the poorer countries, and a certain moral courage will be required to resolve questions of inequity and institutionalized oppression fairly.

PeaceBuilding Through Security:

National and global security is no longer possible. The increasing sophistication of modern weapons and their increasing availability to terrorist of special interest groups, only allows for national or global security to be achieved through military strength. Yet the world lacks even a modest commitment to seeking an alternative security policy and enormous sums of money continue to be spent in the name of "national security." At the same time, an uncontrolled global arms trade thrives outside the control of any government. Therefore the arms trade was not responsible for the citizenry in the way that legitimate democratic governments are. The arms trade contributes significantly to the destabilization of national, regional, and international peace. The "paradox of proliferation" is that the global spread of technical knowledge and industrial capability embodies both the promise of development and the threat of annihilation. But the peril presented by an increasingly militarized world is essentially the consequence of the military-industrial-financial complex following the logic inherent in late 20th century world capitalism, absent any guiding values other than economic gain.

PeaceBuilding Through Sustainability:

Our collective response must go beyond the development of international agreements, innovative programs, or technologies for environmental restoration (as important as all these will be) to encompass a new vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. Nothing short of the fundamental transformation of all our institutions and, underlying that, of modern thought and prejudice will ensure the long-term viability of human societies by building peace through environmental sustainability.

PeaceBuilding Through You

We must recognize that "social peace is as important as strategic or political peace" and commit ourselves to promoting the capacity for peace-building at all levels of the global system.

The reality is, PeaceBuilding in all its many forms will only be realized as each one of us steps forward and creates our part of "new environments and new cultures" in our daily lives, in our work and personal relationships, and what ever endeavors we are involved with. As it is stated, "We are the people we have been waiting for".

*Excerpts from a paper "Peace-Building for the 21st Century", Avon Mattison, Willis Harman, Tom Hurley, Meir Carasso and Duane Elgin, February 12, 1996.