The "festive season" leaves its imprints, among them unfulfilled wishes, gifts desired but not received, parcels fallen off Santa's sleigh.
Wasn't there a PEACE-GPS on our list? Were we not hoping for an intellectual and spiritual equivalent of the well-advertised, and widely available, GPS for automobiles? Such a device, a Global Positioning System, when installed in a vehicle, can guide drivers from where they are to where they wish to go, taking available roads and traffic conditions into account. Trusting the ads, a reassuring voice will intone at the end of the journey: "You have reached your destination."
If the destination of humanity's collective journey is the ancient promise of "Peace on Earth," surely it should be possible to construct a PEACE-GPS that can guide such journeys in the here and now.
When one defines peace as the presence of justice and absence of fear -- not solely as the absence of war -- then three essential components of such a navigational system could be discerned.
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One is its horizontal domain: the voices of those most affected by the lack of peace and the absence of justice, articulated through the activities of broadly based peace movements. Next is its vertical component: actions of governments, impacts of law and international treaties. And then, there is its third dimension: relevant knowledge, available and compelling information on how to achieve and maintain justice and peace.
The women's peace movements that emerged in the 1960s were rooted in the understanding of the global consequences of nuclear war and the preparations for it. Yet, as Kay MacPherson, who has chronicled many facets of the Canadian and international women's peace movements, showed in When in Doubt, Do Both (University of Toronto Press, 1994), these were not "ban the bomb" attempts, but powerful "ban the insanity of force" interventions. The authority and authenticity of women's voices was evoked on behalf of the survival of all.
Today, it is well worth recalling the organization Voice of Women (now officially called the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace), with its astonishing breadth of issues, its understanding of the indivisibility of peace, its realization that peace for some cannot be achieved through perpetuating injustices toward others. The courage and the amazing resourcefulness of Canadian women, at a time well before the age of grants and official recognitions, has had a strong impact on public life, not least because actions were based on two assumptions: first, that peace and justice were important issues of Canadian public policy and, second, that considered interventions of citizens would be heard and heeded by the government of Canada.
While the faces of the women's peace movement have changed since MacPherson's time, its enduring substance has remained as part of our political landscape; it is well-anchored in those global social movements that understand the indivisibility of justice and peace.
Thus, the citizens' collective understanding of the nature of peace constitutes an essential parameter of any PEACE-GPS.
For the late George Ignatieff, respected Canadian public servant, peace and justice also constituted vital elements of Canadian public policy to be studied, debated and enacted broadly and openly. His memoir The Making of a Peacemonger (University of Toronto Press, 1985) recounts how the press had attached this label to him and how he became increasingly committed to it. Seeing the United Nations, in Louis St. Laurent's words, "frozen in futility," Ignatieff responded by advocating more diplomacy, more talk, more in-depth knowledge of all dimensions of peace, rather than the use or threat of force.
His was the struggle for workable national and international institutions to advance peace and justice. As Canadian diplomat, as academic and as president of Science for Peace, Ignatieff understood the crucial importance of credible institutions in all journeys toward peace and justice.
Searching for Peace, the Road to TRANSCEND, by Johan Galtung, Carl G. Jacobsen and Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen (Pluto Press, 2002), shows master cartography at work. The book is a major achievement in Galtung's long and distinguished career in peace research and conflict resolution. Here one finds an up-to-date and in-depth account of current global war and peace, as well as a record of active and potential conflicts, all together constituting the social equivalent of the GPS's digital maps -- potholes and all.
But there are also driving instructions. More than 45 years of peace and conflict studies have yielded a powerful general approach, evolved and utilized by TRANSCEND -- a peace and development network -- under the directorship of Galtung.
Their approaches are non-violent, yet realistic and detailed. In Galtung's context, "to work for peace is to work against violence, by analyzing its forms and causes, predicting in order to prevent, and then acting preventatively and curatively, since peace relates to violence much as health relates to illness."
Based in Austria, the organization's documentation, teaching and consulting work has gone well beyond the traditional European East-West concepts and reached deep into the new structures of the global South and East.
The knowledge dimension of the PEACE-GPS is thus in good hands.
On the eve of 2007, the roads to peace appear dark and full of craters, yet they are the only roads leading anywhere. Front-page hypnotism with apocalyptic heroism can no longer remain a substitute for the urgent application of all available PEACE-GPS arrangements.
Ursula M. Franklin is university professor emerita, University of Toronto, and a senior fellow of Massey College. She is the author of The Real World of Technology and The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map.
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