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The book by Johan Galtung and Carl Gustav Jacobsen, with contributions by Finn Tschudi and Kai Frithjof Brandt-Jacobsen, SEARCHING FOR PEACE: THE ROAD TO TRANSCEND (the most complete account so far of TRANSCEND theory and practice) has now been published by PLUTO, London. Drawing on the TRANSCEND approach to peace-making, Searching for Peace provides a comprehensive guide to conflict resolution. The TRANSCEND method, now used by the UN as a guide to future conflict resolution approaches, applies to all conflict constellations. It has been applied to more than 40 recent and current violent conflict arenas, charting found and yet-to-be-found paths to conflict resolution and transcendence. Searching for Peace provides a wide-ranging survey of past and present approaches to violent conflict prevention. The book’s extensive analysis of the emergent conflict dynamics which, if not resolved, threaten an even more violent twenty-first century, is as important as its comprehensive look at past...

LONDON – Memories are short, too conveniently so. The life and death drama now being played out in Zimbabwe in southern Africa is a tragic illustration of this human weakness that knows no colour line. Thirty five years ago the then named Rhodesia, a British colony, ruled by a white minority, made its unilateral declaration of independence. The break with the mother country had come after an acrimonious period of resisting pressure from London to modestly widen the franchise. For fourteen years Rhodesia was a pariah state, boycotted by order of the UN Security Council, yet finding ways to circumvent the embargo and prosper in a way that, if it had happened today, would make Saddam Hussein green with envy. Even the big British oil companies, Shell and BP, connived in the sanctions busting with, if not a nod, at least a wink from Britain’s Labour government. That was Britain’s mistake...

Photo © TFF The Leadership Academy, Pristina Universitywhere some of the training took place,13 C inside in February A huge task – on Women’s Day, in Mitrovica The day after a violent clash with several people wounded, from the UN as well as Albanians and Serbs I arrived in Mitrovica, described in Western media as “the most dangerous European city”. The first people I met were some happy youngsters jumping on the road waving hello. Then I was addressed by a Kosovar with a friendly “Congratulations”. When I looked confused another man explained, “Don’t you know, today is March 8th, the International Women’s Day.” I was in Mitrovica invited as a TFF associate by IOM, the International Organization for Migration, to give lectures as a part of a training program for members of KPC, the Kosovo Protection Corps, most of whom are former KLA soldiers, now transformed to a civil...

April 2000 – A year ago, on March 23, 1999, NATO commenced a massive bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Supporters of the attack described it as “humanitarian intervention,” and defended bypassing the UN as justifiable so as to coerce Belgrade to end its severe abuse of the Albanian majority population in Kosovo. Although it remains too soon to draw definitive lessons, it begins to be possible to suggest some of the major effects of this military undertaking, which is doing more to define the post-1989 world order than has any other event, including the Gulf War. Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait was a stark instance of international aggression, yet it was anomalous. In contrast, the ethnic conflict raging in Kosovo has emerged as the prototypic form of political violence of the current era. Chechnya, East Timor, Kashmir, Sierra Leone are examples of ongoing intrastate conflict that illustrate the...

LONDON- Nuclear proliferation could be a lot worse than it is. That is part of the pitch the American delegation will make at the forthcoming review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), opening on April 24th. No doubt somebody will quote John Kennedy who foresaw 20-30 nuclear powers by the end of the last century, and make the point that in fact the number is a mere 8. Countries which were about to enter this exclusive deadly club- South Africa, Brazil and Argentina stepped back at the last moment. AND, as President Bill Clinton boasted recently to the Indian parliament, the U.S. and Russia have cut their nuclear arsenals by 13,000 bombs. Nevertheless, as almost every expert will admit, Western, and in particular American, non-proliferation policy is in disarray. This conference is meant to mark 30 years of what the U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright recently called “the landmark”...

LONDON- How straightforward it used to be. For twenty two years the U.S. did not recognize communist China. Taiwan occupied the Chinese seat at the United Nations and that was that. Then from the right, quite unexpectedly, came Richard Nixon and turned everything on its head. China was not only recognized and Taiwan ejected from its seat, the American business and journalistic communities were encouraged to fall in love with all things Chinese. As the Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner bitingly wrote at the time, “The Americans found that the Chinese were courteous, industrious, family-orientated, modest to the point of being shy. They had the most wonderful and ancient cultural tradition; they were wizards at ping pong; they loved giant pandas. In less than a year public opinion completely turned around. Everyone loved the so-recently hated and feared China.” Thus it continued, more or less, until Tiananmen Square when America’s great strategic...

Report of an IOM/TFF Mission to Kosovo, March 7 to 10, 2000  More pictures from Pristina Kerstin Schultz’ report Purpose I was invited with Kerstin Schultz to contribute to training in conflict management skills of middle level leaders of the Kosovo Protection Corps, KPC. This followed the earlier involvement of Jan Oberg of TFF with a similar training exercise with the top leadership of the KPC. The three of us are members of TFF’s Balkans mitigation team based in Lund, Sweden, which has made many missions since 1991 to Kosovo and other regions of the Balkans. Background IOM are responsible for a comprehensive training programme for the KPC leadership that includes briefings for example from KFOR, the ICRC, UNMIK, and NGO’s working in the region concerned with rehabilitation and safety. TFF was invited to contribute some training seminars on conflict management skills. Kerstin Schultz and I were invited to give...

LONDON- She came to the world’s attention three years ago with her prize-wining novel, “The God of Small Things”. Now the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy dares to lecture the government of her country on nuclear weapons, a rather lonely voice in a sub-continent consumed with an almost fatal overdose of self-destroying hatred. “It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreck more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep into the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.” We have already seen her forebodings come true. In Pakistan, the...

A demilitarized zone, DMZ, usually a buffer zone between two entities that have been at war, is an important conventional measure to protect a ceasefire by keeping the belligerents apart, at least geographically. As such it is a symbol of war rather than of peace, or at best of a cold peace, a peace in the narrow sense of abstaining from violence; negative peace in other words. The two borders of this presumable no man’s land would be heavily guarded, ideally by some third party, a condition not really satisfied in the Korean DMZ case. A zone of peace, ZoP, is something quite different since it is supposed to be an enactment of positive peace. The idea is not to keep parties apart and have them abstain from something, but to bring them together and have them cooperate on something. The smallest ZoP is a person who has come to...

A report of a 10 day visit in early March 2000 by Roswitha Jarman working on behalf of the Agency of Rehabilitation and Development, ARD, an NGO and charity of Dutch Interchurch Aid, DIA, that started to work in Chechnya in 1996. ARD has now a staff of over 30 local people, most of whom are now in Ingushetia but some still in Chechnya. The general situation in Ingushetia I travelled to Ingushetia without problems. I was on my own this time but I did not feel in any danger. On arrival in Ingushetia and before even leaving the secure part of the airport a security officer came up to me and asked me to accompany him to his office. He asked for my details and asked for what reason I had come to Ingushetia. He was very friendly and offered me a security guard for my time in Ingushetia,...

LONDON – Three months after the failure of the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle the dust is finally settling. The press behaved as if it hadn’t had a good demo to report since the Vietnam war and the diplomats and politicians became uncharacteristically skittish after a march or two and the unerring capacity of the American police to over do it. Look no further than the statements produced by the UN Trade and Development (Unctad) meeting in Bangkok two weeks ago. This body which now exists as a sort of Third World counterweight to the mighty World Trade Organisation (WTO) enables developing countries both to chew the cud and gain a modicum of diplomatic and media attention for their own concerns without being drowned out by the agenda of the industrialised countries. Nevertheless, they used their only-once-in-four years opportunity not to denounce the WTO and all its works but to...

LONDON- The only question to be resolved, following the startling result of the Iranian parliamentary election, is how quickly the U.S. will now move to bury the hatchet. Its Cold War with Iran has gone on for over 20 years. This is unnecessarily prolonged, a prisoner of now distant memories of hostages taken in the U.S. embassy by hot-headed street fighters of the then recently successful revolution that had toppled the Shah and installed in his place the rigid, autocratic, Islamist regime of Ayotallah Khomeini. No observer brought up outside a theoistic regime can summon up much sympathy for the excesses of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath. Like the French Revolution, on which, in some part, it was modeled, once in power it immediately discarded any liberal tenets it held and became so rigid and uncompromising that normal idiosyncracies were regarded as a profound threat to the regime and were...