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5 webinars Wednesdays 7pm Feb 16 - March 16 2022

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5 webinars Wednesdays 7pm Feb 16 - March 16 2022

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Following on from last year's hugely successful In Conversation series, we are delighted to announce a second series running every Wednesday from 16th February to 16th March 7pm GMT. This year we have invited a number of noted international conversationalists - academics, activists, journalists and a Nobel peace laureate. We have also invited a number of prominent human rights and peace activists to listen in and respond to the conversation. Their contribution will be followed by contributions from the audience.

The conversationalists are as follows:
* Register here for Wednesday, February 16 at 7pm GMT: Nick Buxton + Niamh Ni Bhriain (Transnational Institute, Amsterdam) with Eamon Rafter (Irish Chapter WBW). Respondent: Yuri Sheliazhenko.
* Register here for Wednesday, February 23 at 7pm GMT: Lara Marlowe (Journalist, The Irish Times) with Brian Sheridan (Irish Chapter WBW). Respondent: Joe Murray (Afri).
* Register here for Wednesday, March 2 at 7pm GMT: Malalai Joya (Human Rights Activist, Afghanistan) with Peadar King (Irish Chapter WBW). Respondent: Mary McDermott, CEO Safe Ireland.
* Register here for Wednesday, March 9 at 7pm GMT: Máiread Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) with Barry Sweeney (Irish Chapter WBW). Respondent: Eilis Ward.
* Register here for Wednesday, March 16 at 7pm GMT: Caoimhe Butterly (Irish Human Rights Activist) with John Lannon (Shannonwatch). Respondent: Mark Garavan.

We look forward to you joining us!
Barry Sweeney
Chapter Coordinator
Irish Chapter World BEYOND War

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Wednesday Webinar Series: Bearing Witness to the Reality and Consequences of War - World Beyond War . . .

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Following on from last year's hugely successful In Conversation series, we are delighted to announce a second series running every Wednesday from 16th February to 16th March 7pm GMT. This year we have invited a number of noted international conversationalists - academics, activists, journalists and a Nobel peace laureate.

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Outline of an Alternative Global Security System - World Beyond War . . .

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No single strategy will end war. Strategies must be layered and woven together to be effective. In what follows, each element is stated as concisely as possible. Entire books have been written about each of them, a few of which […]

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Interesting reading regarding the carbon footprint from the military industrial complex

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Interesting reading regarding the carbon footprint from the military industrial complex

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There are a lot of superlatives that can be used to describe the U.S. military. It represents the biggest chunk of the federal budget. It's extremely good at killing people. And it's also a prolific carbon emitter and serial oil user.

A from Brown's Watson Institute examines the Pentagon's day-to-day carbon footprint, oil use, and how much carbon the unending War on Terror has emitted. It shows that while the military is progressive in terms of acknowledging the threat climate change poses to the world, it's also a huge part of the problem.And while this represents one of the most comprehensive analyses of how much carbon the military emits, it likely doesn't capture just how bad of a polluter the Pentagon is.

The military is notoriously cagey about its carbon footprint. The Kyoto Protocol-the 1997 precursor the Paris Agreement-required the world's developed countries to account for their emissions but left a notorious loophole to opt out for reporting or reducing military emissions. (The loophole was engineered by the U.S., which then, of course, didn't sign the treaty). The Paris Agreement closed that loophole, though it doesn't say anything about reducing countries' military carbon footprints. The Department of Defense has a huge vehicle fleet, manages roughly half a million installations, and has a well-known love of secrecy, which creates further roadblocks when it comes to estimating its environmental impact.

"The war machine is thirsty for oil."

The new report scours public records from the Department of Defense on its fuel use as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, which track all federal agencies' carbon emissions. The findings show that since 9/11, the military bought an average of 120 million barrels of fossil fuel annually. In 2017, it emitted 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. If it were a country, the military would basically be Portugal.

"The war machine is thirsty for oil," Neta Crawford, a political scientist at Boston University who wrote the report, told Earther. "That's a given because of their need for mobility and they operate in areas with extreme temperatures. They need a lot of energy. Well, 'need' should be in quotes."

On the carbon emissions front, the report estimates that the War on Terror campaign the U.S. military launched in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks is responsible for 35 percent of all its emissions in the 21st century. The report notes that U.S. Central Command, the command center responsible for military operations in the Middle East and thus waging a vast swath of the post-9/11 war, has been a huge source of those emissions.

But even the annual average emissions of 59 million metric tons Crawford estimated doesn't capture the whole picture of the military's vast carbon pollution problem. Crawford looked at what percentage of the U.S. industrial workforce is employed specifically in the military-industrial complex (it's about 15 percent) and performed a back of the envelop calculation for how much the military-industrial complex emitted by building all those bombs, predator drones, humvees, and other tools tools of war. The report shows that the military-industrial complex footprint averaged 153 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually. That puts it roughly on par with the Netherlands' emissions.

The report doesn't include emissions related to rebuilding after the horrors of war, burning oilfields in Iraq, or how much other countries involved in the international military campaign have emitted. But you get the idea: the War on Terror has not only been an unmitigated disaster for the millions of people killed and displaced, but also for the climate.

The military's huge appetite for fuel and profligate emissions come in part because of enormous inefficiencies inherent in the equipment it uses. A humvee, for example, gets less than 10 miles per gallon of diesel fuel while a stealth bomber gets less than a quarter of mile per gallon of jet fuel. With a range of 6,000 miles, each full flight emits 251 metric tons of carbon dioxide according to the report.

All this is happening even as the Pentagon prepares for rising seas that will swamp its bases and a hotter, more violent future.

"There's an irony and tension between being so concerned about the risks of climate change for operations and installations and conflicts yet being one of the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases." Crawford said. "It's as if two and two don't make four here. If one sees a problem in the future, one would try to prevent it. But instead of trying to prevent it, the U.S. acts as if climate change conflicts are inevitable. Nothing about the worst outcomes is inevitable, we can still prevent them."

To that end, Crawford's report shows a few avenues for reducing emissions in the military, like producing plans for each military installation to reduce its energy use. There also other ideas out there like Elizabeth Warren's recently released plan to decarbonize the military, including the supply chain that's an even more monstrous source of emissions. Or, the U.S. could shrink its military and maybe stop starting wars. But ultimately, something needs to happen because the way the military spews carbon now is in direct opposition to its mission.

"We have defense forces so they protect us," Crawford said. "If in the long run, these defense forces make us less secure then we need to rethink what we're doing."

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Groundbreaking Report Gives Us a Glimpse of the US Military's Gigantic Carbon Footprint

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There are a lot of superlatives that can be used to describe the U.S. military. It represents the biggest chunk of the federal budget. It's extremely good at killing people. And it's also a prolific carbon emitter and serial oil user.

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Article on military pollution being linked to deaths in the Philippines

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Article on military pollution being linked to deaths in the Philippines

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Watch video
CLARK AIR BASE, Philippines - The U. S. military is long gone from bases in the Philippines, but its legacy remains buried here.

Toxic waste was spilled on the ground, pumped into waterways and buried in landfills for decades at two sprawling Cold War-era bases.

Today, ice cream shops, Western-style horse ranches, hotels and public parks have sprung up on land once used by the Air Force and the Navy - a benign facade built on land the Philippine government said is still polluted with asbestos, heavy metals and fuel.

Records of about 500 families who sought refuge on the deserted bases after a 1991 volcanic eruption indicate 76 people died and 68 others were sickened by pollutants on the bases. A study in 2000 for the Philippine Senate also linked the toxins to "unusually high occurrence of skin disease, miscarriages, still births, birth defects, cancers, heart ailments and leukemia."

The 1991 base closing agreement gave the Philippines billions of dollars in military infrastructure and real estate at the bases and in return cleared the United States of any responsibility for the pollution. The Department of Defense told Stars and Stripes it has no authority to undertake or pay for environmental cleanup at the closed bases.

Philippine government efforts never gained traction. Philippine President Joseph Estrada formed a task force in 2000 to take on the issue, but it fell dormant and unfunded after he left office a year later. Efforts by private groups and environmentalists to force a cleanup have largely fizzled.

After two decades, the base closing agreement has run up a troubling environmental record. Filipinos claim exposure to U.S. pollutants has brought suffering and death.

As the U.S. military works to become greener in the 21st century, the Philippines stand as a dark reminder of how environmental responsibilities can go astray overseas.

Both the Air Force and the Navy polluted haphazardly in the Philippines.

The Navy pumped 3.75 million gallons of untreated sewage each day into local fishing and swimming waters at Subic Bay, according to a 1992 report by what was then known as the General Accounting Office.

The bases poured fuel and chemicals from firefighting exercises directly into the water table and used underground storage tanks without leak detection equipment, the agency found.

At least three sites at the Subic Bay Navy base - two landfills and an ordnance disposal area - are dangerously polluted with materials such as asbestos, metals and fuels, the Philippines government found after an environmental survey there.

Clark Air Base was a staging area during the Vietnam War. Its aviation and vehicle operations contaminated eight sites with oil, petroleum lubricants, pesticides, PCB and lead, according to a 1997 environmental survey by the Philippine government.

Before the U.S. closed the bases, it drew up a rough bill for cleaning the hazardous pollution.

Though they never tested the water or soil, the Air Force and the Navy estimated cleanup at each could cost up to $25 million - the average cost of handling the most polluted sites back in the United States, according to the GAO.

Rose Ann Calma is believed to be one of the warning signs of pollution at Clark Air Base.

Now 13 years old, she weighs just 32 pounds and must wear diapers. Cerebral palsy and severe mental retardation have stolen her ability to speak or walk.

Her mother and about 500 other families who were displaced by a volcanic eruption in 1991 moved onto the base and set up a tent village.

They drilled shallow wells on a former motor pool site and drank the untreated water - despite an oily sheen - until they were moved off the land in the late 1990s.

Records of the families, published by the Philippines Senate, said 144 people were sickened at the camp, 76 of whom died.

It said at least 19 children were born with disabilities, diseases and deformities between 1996 and 1999.

Tests in 1995 by the Philippine Department of Health confirmed wells on Clark were contaminated with oil and grease, a byproduct of decades of military use.

"If it is God's will, then I accept it," Rose Ann's mother, Susan Calma, said recently.

In a village near Subic Bay, Norma Abraham, 58, holds an X-ray showing the lung disease that killed her husband, Guillermo.

Her husband worked through the 1980s and early 1990s sorting the Navy waste that went into local landfills, which are the most polluted sites at Subic Bay.

Many aborigines like Abraham, who are among the poorest in a poor country, were paid about 30 cents per day to hand-sort recyclable metals from Navy waste that included asbestos, paint and batteries, villagers told Stars and Stripes.

No protective equipment other than gloves was ever used, and asbestos dust was often thick in the air, the villagers said. Sometimes, when a truck dumped new waste for sorting, they said the workers would faint from the toxic fumes.

Guillermo Abraham began to cough, feel tightness in his lungs and have trouble breathing while working there, his wife said.

The lung ailment plagued him through his life and after an X-ray in January showed he was terminally ill with lung disease, he died on May 29, Norma Abraham said.

His disease, which mirrors asbestosis, is the most common ailment and killer among the 70 or so families who worked with the Navy's waste, according to the villagers.

The aborigines rarely get quality medical treatment and do not keep birth or death records. But they compiled a list for Stars and Stripes of 41 people who they believe died over the years from toxic exposure.

Any real chance for an environmental cleanup was scuttled by the two governments in the agreement that gave the Philippines billions of dollars in base infrastructure and real estate in return for absolving the United States of any responsibility for the pollution.

As a result, the United States has no legal responsibility or authority to conduct a cleanup, and an influential Philippines politician said that government has little interest in the problem.

"It is not one of its priorities," said Philippine Sen. Aquilino Pimentel Jr., a former majority leader and Senate president. "If it was, it would have been done a long time ago."

Dolly Yanan keeps the records and photos of the gray-faced, emaciated and disabled children believed to have been poisoned by U.S. military pollution in the Subic Bay area.

The records count 38 deaths from disease between 2000 and 2003.

But the record-keeping has begun to lapse in recent years as hope for a cleanup and enthusiasm for the cause recedes.

"For the past four or five years, we cannot track the leukemia," said Yanan, who runs a community center in Olongapo City.

A coalition of citizens known as the People's Task Force for Bases Cleanup has fought for U.S. accountability for two decades and met with a string of disappointments.

The Philippine Senate inquiry and task force in 2000 led to no action, and a lawsuit designed to force a U.S.-led environmental assessment survey, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, was thrown out in 2003.

"If only our government was strong enough, I think there would have been a cleanup or at least an initial assessment," Yanan said. "First, it should be our government who should have a strong will and call for a cleanup."

Nov. 8, 2009 Residents fish at the mouth of the Santa Rita river, where the U.S. Navy dumped its untreated sewage until it left Subic Bay in 1991. A landfill used by the Navy still sits along the river.
TRAVIS J. TRITTEN / S&AMP;S

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Decades later, U.S. military pollution in Philippines linked to deaths

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Watch video CLARK AIR BASE, Philippines - The U. S. military is long gone from bases in the Philippines, but its legacy remains buried here. Toxic waste was spilled on the ground, pumped into waterways and buried in landfills for decades at two sprawling Cold War-era bases.

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Here is a recommended short video about the experience of refugees.

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Here is a recommended short video about the experience of refugees.

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Your phone is now a refugee's phone [watch on a mobile]

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By Ed Horgan, World BEYOND War, February 4, 2021

When we think of militaries, we mostly think of war. The fact that militaries are also almost exclusively used as peacekeepers is something we should take time to question.

The term peacekeeping in its broader sense includes all those people who endeavour to promote peace and oppose wars and violence. This includes pacifists, and those who follow the early Christian ideals even if too many Christian leaders and followers subsequently justified violence and unjustified wars under what they called the just war theory. Likewise, modern leaders and states, including European Union leaders, use bogus humanitarian interventions to justify their unjustifiable wars.

Having been an active military officer for over 20 years and then a peace activist also for over 20 years I tend to be viewed as a warmonger turned peace-monger. This is at best only partly true. My military service from 1963 to 1986 was in the defence forces of a genuinely neutral state (Ireland) and included significant service as a United Nations military peacekeeper. I joined the Irish Defence Forces at a time when 26 Irish peacekeepers had been killed over the previous few years in the ONUC peace-enforcement mission in the Congo. My reasons for joining the military included the altruistic reason of helping to create international peace, which is the primary purpose of the United Nations. I considered this to be important enough to risk my own life on several occasions, not only as a UN military peacekeeper, but also subsequently as a civilian international election monitor in many countries that had experienced serious conflicts.

In those early years of UN peacekeeping the UN, especially under one of its very few good Secretaries General, Dag Hammarskjold, who tried to play a very genuine neutral role in the broader interests of humanity. Unfortunately for Hammarskjold this clashed with the so-called national interests of several of the most powerful states, including several of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and probably resulted in his assassination in 1961 while trying to negotiate peace in the Congo. In the early decades of UN peacekeeping, it was normal good practice that peacekeeping soldiers were provided by neutral or non-aligned states. Permanent members of the UN Security Council or members of NATO or the Warsaw Pact were usually excluded as operational peacekeepers but they were allowed to provide logistical backup. For these reasons Ireland has been frequently asked by the UN to provide troops for peacekeeping and has done so on a continuous basis since 1958. This onerous duty has come a significant cost. Eighty-eight Irish soldiers have died on peacekeeping duty, which is a very high casualty rate for a very small army. I knew several of those 88 Irish soldiers.

The key question I have been asked to address in this paper is: Are militaries the most appropriate Peacekeepers?

There is no direct yes or no answer. Genuine peacekeeping is a very important and very complex process. Making violent war is actually easier especially if you have overwhelming force on your side. It is always easier to break things rather than to fix them after they have broken. Peace is like a delicate crystal glass, if you break it, it is very difficult to fix, and the lives you have destroyed can never be fixed or restored. This latter point gets far too little attention. Peacekeepers are often installed in buffer zones between waring armies and they do not normally use lethal force and rely on dialog, patience, negotiation, persistence and lots of common sense. It can be quite a challenge to remain at your post and not respond with force went bombs and bullets are flying in your direction, but that's part of what peacekeepers do, and this takes a special type of moral courage as well as special training. Major armies that are used to fighting wars do not make good peacekeepers and are prone to revert to making war when they should be making peace, because this is what they are equipped and trained to do. Since the end of the Cold War especially, the US and its NATO and other allies have used bogus so-called humanitarian or peace enforcing missions to wage wars of aggression and overthrow the governments of sovereign members of the United Nations in gross breach of the UN Charter. Examples of this include the NATO war against Serbia in 1999, the invasion and overthrow of the Afghan Government in 2001, the invasion and overthrow of the Iraqi Government in 2003, the deliberate misuse of the UN approved no-fly-zone in Libya in 2001 to overthrow the government of Libya, and the ongoing attempts to overthrow the government of Syria. Yet when real genuine peacekeeping and peace enforcement was needed, for example to prevent and stop the genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda these same powerful states stood idly by and a number of the permanent members of the UN Security Council even provided active support for those who were committing the genocide.

There is scope for civilians also in peacekeeping and in helping to stabilise countries after they have emerged from violent conflicts, but any such civilian peacekeeping and democratisation missions must be carefully organised and regulated, just as it is vital that military peacekeeping must also be carefully organised and regulated. There have been some serious abuses by both civilian and military peacekeepers where such controls are inadequate.

In Bosnia when the war ended in 1995, the country was almost over-run by NGOs rushing in inadequately prepared and in some cases doing more harm than good. Conflict and post-conflict situations are dangerous places, especially for the local population, but also for strangers arriving unprepared. Well-equipped and well-trained military peacekeepers are often essential in the early stages but can benefit also from the addition of well-qualified civilians provided that the civilians are included as part of the structured overall recovery process. Organisations such as the UNV (United Nations Volunteer Program), and OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and the US based Carter Center do some excellent work is such situations, and I have worked as a civilian with each of them. The European Union also provides peacekeeping and election monitoring missions, but from my experiences and research there has been some serious problems with many such European Union missions especially in African countries, where the economic interests of the European Union and its most powerful states, take precedence over the genuine interests of the people in these countries whose conflicts the EU is supposed to be solving. European exploitations of African resources, amounting to blatant neo-colonialism, takes precedence over maintaining peace and protecting human rights. France is the worst offender, but not the only one.

The issue of gender balance is of critical importance In peacekeeping missions in my view. Most modern armies do pay lip-service to gender balance but the reality is that when it comes to active military operations very few women tend to serve in combat roles, and sexual abuse of women soldiers is a significant problem. Just as an unbalanced engine or machine will eventually get seriously damaged, likewise, unbalanced social organisations, like those that are predominantly male, tend not only to get damaged but also to cause serious damage within the societies in which they operate. We in Ireland know to our costs the damage that has been caused by our unduly patriarchal Catholic clergy and male dominated Irish society since the foundation of our state, and even before independence. A well-balanced male/female peacekeeping organisation is far more likely to create genuine peace, and far less likely to abuse the vulnerable people that they are supposed to be protecting. One of the problems with modern military peacekeeping operations is that many of the military units involved now tend to come from relatively poor countries and are almost exclusively male and this has led to sone serious cases of sexual abuses by peacekeepers. However, there have also been serious cases of such abuse by French and other western armies, including US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, who we are told were there to bring peace and democracy and freedom to the Afghan and Iraqi people. Peacekeeping is not just a matter of negotiating peace with the opposing military forces. In modern warfare civilian communities are often far more damaged by conflicts than are the opposing military forces. Empathy and genuine support for civilian populations is a vital element of peacekeeping that is far too often ignored.

In the real world a certain proportion of humanity driven by greed and other factors are prone to using and abusing violence. This has necessitated the need for the rule of law to protect the vast majority of human society from abusive violence and police forces are necessary to apply and enforce the rule of law in our towns and countryside. Ireland has a well-resourced mainly unarmed police force, but even this is backed up to an armed special branch because criminals and illegal paramilitary groups have access to sophisticated weapons. In addition, the police (Gardai) in Ireland also have the support of the Irish Defence Forces to call on if needed, but the use of military forces within Ireland is always at the behest of the police and under the authority of the police except in the case of a serious national emergency. Occasionally, police forces, even in Ireland, abuse their powers, including their powers to use lethal force.

At the macro or international level, human nature and the behaviour of humans and states follow very similar patterns of behaviour or misbehaviour. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unfortunately, there is, as yet, no effective global level of governance or policing beyond the anarchic international system of nation states. The UN is perceived by many as being such a global governance system and as Shakespeare might say "oh would that it were so simple". Those who drafted the UN Charter were primarily the leaders of the USA and Britain during World War 2, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union as France and China were still under occupation. A clue to the reality of the UN is contained in the first line of the UN Charter. "We the peoples of the United Nations ..." The word peoples is a double plural (people is the plural of person, and peoples is the plural of people) so we the peoples does not refer to you or I as individuals, but to those groups of people who go to make up the nation states who are the members of the United Nations. We the people, you and I as individuals, have virtually not authoritative role within the UN. All member states are treated as equals within the UN General Assembly, and Ireland's election to the UN Security Council as a small state for the fourth time since the 1960s is indicative of this. However, the system of governance within the UN, especially at Security Council level, is more akin to that of the Soviet Union rather than to a fully democratic system. The UN Security Council, and especially the five UN Security Council permanent members, exercise a stranglehold over the UN. To make matters worse, the drafters of the UN Charter gave themselves a double locking system or even a quintuple locking system by virtue of their veto over all important decisions of the UN especially with regard to the primary objective of the UN, which is spelled out in the UN Charter, Article 1: The purposes of the United Nations are: 1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: etc, ..."

The power of veto is contained in Article 27.3. "Decisions of the Security Council on all other matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members including the concurring votes of the permanent members;". This innocent sounding wording gives each of the five permanent members, China, USA, Russia, Britain and France absolute negative power to prevent any important decision of the UN that they consider may not be in their national interests, regardless of the larger interests of humanity. It also prevents the UN Security Council from imposing any sanctions on any of these five countries regardless of any serious crimes against humanity or war crimes that any of these five countries may commit. This veto power effectively places these five countries above and beyond the rules of international laws. A Mexican delegate to the proceedings that created the UN charter in 1945 described this as meaning: "The mice would be disciplined and while the lions will run free". Ireland is one of the mice at the UN, but so is India which is the largest genuine democracy in the world, while Britain and France, each of which has less than 1% of the world's population, have far more power at the UN that India with over 17% of the world's population.

There powers enabled the Soviet Union, USA, Britain and France, to seriously abuse the UN Charter throughout the Cold War by waging proxy wars in Africa and Latin America and direct wars of aggression in Indo China and Afghanistan. It is worth pointing out that with the exception of the occupation of Tibet, China has never waged external wars of aggression against other countries.

The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which has been ratified and came into force on the 22 January 2021 has been widely welcomed across the world.[1] The reality however is that this treaty is likely to have no impact on any of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council because each of them will veto any attempt to curtail their nuclear arsenal or to curtail their use of nuclear weapons if, as may well be likely, they decide to use nuclear weapons. In reality also, nuclear weapons are being used indirectly daily by each of the nine countries that we know have nuclear weapons, to threaten and terrorise the rest of the world. These nuclear powers claim that this M.A.D Mutually Assured Destruction strategy is maintaining international peace!

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the so-called Cold War international peace should have been restored and NATO disbanded after the Warsaw Pact was disbanded. The opposite has occurred. NATO has continued to operate and expand to include almost all of eastern Europe right up to the borders of Russia, and to wage wars of aggression including the overthrow of the sovereign governments of several UN member states, in gross breach of the UN Charter and NATO's own Charter.

What bearing has all this on peacekeeping and who should be doing it?

NATO, led and driven by the USA, has effectively usurped or side-lined the primary role of the UN for creating international peace. This might not have been a bad idea if NATO and USA did actually take over and implement the UN's genuine role in maintaining international peace.

They have done the exact opposite, under the guise of so-called humanitarian interventions, and later under the additional guise of the new UN policy known as R2P Responsibility to Protect.[2] In the early 1990s the US intervened inappropriately in Somalia and then precipitously abandoned that mission, leaving Somalia as a failed state ever since, and failed to intervene to prevent or stop the Rwandan genocide. The US and NATO intervened too late in Bosnia, and failed to adequately support the UN UNPROFOR mission there, indicating that the breakup of the former Yugoslavia may have been their real aim. From 1999 onwards the objectives and actions of the US and NATO seemed to become more overt and in more obvious breach of the UN Charter.

These are huge problems which will not be easily solved. Those who support the existing international system, and this probably includes the majority of political science academics, tell us that this is realism, and that those of us who oppose this anarchic international system are just utopian idealists. Such arguments might have been sustainable prior to World War 2, before the first aggressive use of nuclear weapons. Now humanity and the whole ecosystem on planet Earth face possible extinction because of out-of-control militarism, led primarily by the USA. However, let us not forget that three other nuclear powers, China, India and Pakistan have had violent conflicts over border issues even in recent times, which could easily lead to regional nuclear wars.

Peacekeeping and maintaining international peace were never more urgent than it is right now. It is vital that humanity must utilise all its available resources to create a lasting peace, and civilians must play a significant role in this peace process, otherwise the civilians of this planet will pay a terrible price.

With regard to the alternatives to military as peacekeepers it is likely to be more appropriate to apply far more strict controls over what types of military are used for peacekeeping, and far more stringent regulations governing peacekeeping operations and over the peacekeepers. These should be combined with the addition of more civilians in peacekeeping rather than replacing military peacekeepers with civilian peacekeepers.

An important related question we need to ask and answer, which I do in my PhD Thesis completed in 2008, is whether peacekeeping has been successful. My very reluctant conclusions was, and still is, that with a few exceptions, United Nations peacekeeping, and the performance of the UN towards achieving its primary role of maintaining international peace have been serious failures, because the UN has not been allowed to succeed. A copy of my Thesis can be accessed at this link below. [3]

Many civilian organisations are already active in creating and maintaining peace.

These include:

1. United Nations Volunteers unv.org. This is a subsidiary organisation within the UN that provides civilian volunteers for a wide variety of peace and development type tasks in many countries.

2. Non Violent Peaceforce - https://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/ - Our Mission - Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is a global civilian protection agency (NGO) based in humanitarian and international human rights law. Our mission is to protect civilians in violent conflicts through unarmed strategies, build peace side by side with local communities, and advocate for the wider adoption of these approaches to safeguard human lives and dignity. NP envisions a worldwide culture of peace in which conflicts within and between communities and countries are managed through nonviolent means. We are guided by principles of nonviolence, non-partisanship, primacy of local actors, and civilian-to-civilian action.

3. Frontline Defenders: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/ - Front Line Defenders was founded in Dublin in 2001 with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders at risk (HRDs), people who work, non-violently, for any or all of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Front Line Defenders addresses the protection needs identified by HRDs themselves. - The mission of Front Line Defenders is to protect and support human rights defenders who are at risk as a result of their human rights work.

4. CEDAW The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women is an international treaty adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly. Described as an international bill of rights for women, it was instituted on 3 September 1981 and has been ratified by 189 states. Such international conventions are vital for the protection of civilians especially women and children.

5. VSI Volunteer Service International https://www.vsi.ie/experience/volunteerstories/meast/longterm-volunteering-in-palestine/

6. VSO International vsointernational.org - Our purpose is to create lasting change through volunteering. We bring about change not by sending aid, but by working through volunteers and partners to empower people living in the some of the world's poorest and most overlooked regions.

7. Love volunteers https://www.lovevolunteers.org/destinations/volunteer-palestine

8. International organisations involved in election monitoring in post conflict situations:

Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) osce.org provided election monitoring missions mainly for countries in eastern Europe and countries formerly associated with the Soviet Union. OSCE also provides peacekeeping personnel in some of these countries such as Ukraine and Armenia/Azerbaijan

European Union: The EU provides election monitoring missions in parts of the world not covered by the OSCE, including Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Carter Center cartercenter.org

The above are just some of the many organisations in which civilians can play important roles towards creating peace.

Conclusions:

The role of peace movements within countries is important but this needs to be expanded to create a much stronger global peace movement, by networking and cooperation between the multitude of peace organisations that already exist. Organisations like World Beyond War can play very important roles in preventing violence and preventing wars taking place in the first instance. Just as in the case with our health services where preventing diseases and epidemics is far more effective than trying to cure these illnesses after they take hold, likewise, preventing wars is many times more effective than trying to stop wars once they occur. Peacekeeping is a necessary application of first aid, a sticking plaster solution to the wounds of war. Peace enforcement is the equivalent of applying triage to epidemics of violent wars that should have been prevented in the first place.

What is necessary is to allocate the resources that are available to humanity on a priority basis towards prevention of wars, making peace, protecting and restoring our living environment, rather than to militarism and making wars.

This is one of the important keys to successfully creating international or global peace.

The estimates for global military expenditure for 2019 calculated by SIPRI, STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE amounts to 1,914 billion dollars. However, there are many areas of military expenditure not included in these SIPRI figures so the real total is more likely to be in excess of 3,000 billion dollars.

By comparison the total UN revenue for the year 2017 was only 53.2 billion US dollars and this has probably even reduced in real terms in the meantime.

That indicates that humanity spends over 50 times more on military expenditure than it spends on all the activities of the United Nations. That military expenditure does not include the costs of wars such as, financial costs, infrastructural damage, environmental damage, and loss of human lives. [4]

The challenge towards achieving the survival of humanity is for humanity, and that includes you and I, to reverse these spending proportions and to spend far less on militarism and wars, and far more on creating and maintaining peace, protecting and restoring the global environment, and on issues of human health, education and especially real justice.

Global justice must include a system of global jurisprudence, accountability and reparations from states that have perpetrated wars of aggression. There much be no immunity from accountability and justice and no impunity for war crimes, and this required the urgent removal of the power of veto at UN Security Council.

[1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/

[2] https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/assets/pdf/Backgrounder%20R2P%202014.pdf

[3] https://www.pana.ie/download/Thesis-Edward_Horgan%20-United_Nations_Reform.pdf

[4] https://transnational.live/2021/01/16/tff-statement-convert-military-expenditures-to-global-problem-solving/

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Are Militaries the Most Appropriate Peacekeepers? - World Beyond War . . .

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By Ed Horgan, World BEYOND War, February 4, 2021 When we think of militaries, we mostly think of war. The fact that militaries are also almost exclusively used as peacekeepers is something we should take time to question. The term peacekeeping in its broader sense includes all those people who endeavour to promote peace and oppose wars and violence.

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Listen to Suad and Yaser's powerful messages again

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Listen to Suad and Yaser's powerful messages again

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A World BEYOND War? Conversations on alternatives: Part 4

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A World BEYOND War? Conversations on alternatives: Part 3 with Dave Donnellan

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Need a recap of what Clare Daly covered?

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Need a recap of what Clare Daly covered?

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A World BEYOND War? Conversations on alternatives: Part 2 with Clare Daly

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A World BEYOND War? Conversations on alternatives: Part 1 with Denis Halliday

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Follow this link and tell us how! :)

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Sign the Declaration of Peace - World Beyond War . . .

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English. 日本語. Deutsch. Español. Italiano. 中文. Français. Norsk. Svenska. Pусский. Polskie. বাংলা।. हिंदी।. 한국어. Português. فارسی العربية Organizations sign the pledge here. Get sign-up sheets. "I understand that wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, that [...]

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Follow Ireland for a World Beyond War on FaceBook

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Ireland for a World Beyond War. 413 likes · 20 talking about this. World Beyond War is a global nonviolent movement to fully end the institution of war and establish a just and sustainable peace.

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Ireland for a World Beyond War

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World Beyond War is a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. https://WorldBeyondWar.org

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War Abolition 101: How We Create a Peaceful World.

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War Abolition 101: How We Create a Peaceful World.

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Upcoming WBW course!

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War Abolition 101 (online course registration)

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How can we make the best argument for shifting from war to peace? What must we understand and know about the war system if we are to dismantle it? How can we become more effective advocates and activists for ending particular wars, ending all wars, pursuing disarmament, and creating systems that maintain peace?

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Great video about how war impoverishes us

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Great video about how war impoverishes us

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Short video about the worst weapon of all

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Short video about the worst weapon of all

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Martin Sheen on the Weapon that Kills the Most

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We Can't Save the Climate Without Ending War

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1. Categories:

2. Regional Studies

3. Regional Studies

4. Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution

5. Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution

6. Poverty & Unemployment

7. International Relations

8. Human Rights

Description

"It's really a horror to live in a war", Antoine Makdis told me in Aleppo. And over the next ten days we were witnesses to that horror. "The war has aged me not just psychologically but in my way of thinking. It aged me in my body. I have pain when I walk. I have pain when I'm sleeping. I'm not wiser but I'm older."

Featuring stories of human rights violations and struggles in a world of human- and earth-destroying globalised capitalism, the RTE What in the World? television series has filmed in over fifty countries across Africa, Asia and The Americas. This is the second book published by The Liffey Press based on the award-winning series.

With a focus on war and its consequences, this book tells profoundly moving stories of how conflict has convulsed the lives of people caught up its insidious grip, plunged people into the depths of despair and crushed the hopes and dreams of whole generations. None of this is accidental. Wars don't just happen. They are the inevitable result of the military industrial complex, the colonial legacy, the economic dividends of war.

War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights describes the suffering of ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Russia, South Sudan, Syria, Uruguay, Western Sahara, Palestine/Israel, Brazil, South Korea, Somalia and Timor Leste. Above all, the reader will be left with an understanding of how wars live on in the lives and bodies of the injured and the traumatized long after they are deemed officially over.
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Product details

Format Paperback | 250 pages

Dimensions 156 x 234 x 27.94mm | 521.63g

Publication date 06 Apr 2020

Publisher The Liffey Press

Publication City/Country Dublin, Ireland

Language English

Illustrations note 60 colour photographs

ISBN10 1916099823

ISBN13 9781916099821

Bestsellers rank 36,568

About Peadar King

Peadar King is the presenter/producer of the What in the World? documentary series shown on RTE Television, as well as an author and lecturer on a variety of political topics. His book What in the World? Political Travels in Africa, Asia and the America was published by The Liffey Press in 2013.
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War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights

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We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies. Categories: Regional Studies Regional Studies Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution Poverty & Unemployment International Relations Human Rights "It's really a horror to live in a war", Antoine Makdis told me in Aleppo.

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Clare Daly and Mick Wallace's latest book

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Clare Daly and Mick Wallace's latest book

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For over two decades the Irish government has allowed Shannon airport to be used as a United States military base to facilitate its endless imperialist wars, which have destroyed the lives of millions in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

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Posted by Eamon Rafter

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Ed Horgan's webinar which examined the appropriateness of militaries as peacekeepers

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Ed Horgan's webinar which examined the appropriateness of militaries as peacekeepers

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A World BEYOND War? Conversations on alternatives: Part 5 with Ed Horgan