I received an email recently telling me about a non-traditional walking tour that allows citizens in Telaviv to ‘meta-tour’ Palestinian Gaza, and New Yorkers to explore Baghdad in their own city.   The concept confused me a bit so I decided to check it out. 

Youarenothere.org (YANH) calls itself a ‘dislocative tourism agency’.  A Jewish and Palestinian-founded group, Palestinian Laila El-Haddad and Israeli New York-based Mushon Zer-Aviv have created a city tour to explore conflict zones from a distance.

How does the tour work?

For each project (New York and Baghdad and Tel Aviv and Gaza) they created a two-sided downloadable map that pastes the two cities together, finding the equivalent of each site within the other city.  The tourist prints off the map and starts the walking tour, holding the map up to the light to see the Gaza/Tel Aviv destination.  Once at that site in Tel Aviv, the YANH team has stuck a sticker (playing with the ‘you are here’ sign) at the site with a phone number to call for an audio tour of Gaza.  (Yes, this does seem disorienting, but that’s the point).

They refer to themselves an ‘urban tourism mashup’.  A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two different sources to create a new service.  (Think many of the handy iphone apps). According to its founder, Mushon Zer-Aviv, “The tour does not try to blend the two cities. Rather, its intention is to momentarily disorient the tourist and then reorient them with a new perspective – one that includes Gaza as part of their consciousness.” Zer-Aviv launched the project to ‘fight a perception among Israelis who associate the territory with violence.’

Though they have discontinued the New York tour, and some have criticized the Gaza tour for being too political, it’s a powerful start and a creative idea. 

What can we learn from mashups?

YANH is an interesting concept, and one in the growing set of questions of how can mashups make our lives better? The government of the District of Colombia has held two “apps for democracy” competitions to encourage designers to create mashups that will help the city govern better. Interestingly, the gold place winner was a historical walking tour that mashes up a Google map with Flickr photo feeds and Wikipedia entries. (The government of Finland has started their own competition, as has Germany and Australia, and the organization has just created a Launch Your Own “Apps for Democracy” Guide for communities all over the world to do the same.) 

Mashups for Peace

• Why not hold an Apps for Peace competition?
• How can we use technology, and particularly cell phones, to break down barriers?
• How do we create mainstream technology apps that help increase peace?

As important, of course, as creating these apps, is implementing them in a way so that a variety of citizens are using them, not only those that are already sympathetic to the cause.  It would be interesting to see who in Tel Aviv has gone on the ‘youarenothere’ tour, for example.  Nonetheless, YANH is an interesting example of a service developed across boundaries using the principles of design, technology, new media and the politics of space to increase our capacity for the ‘other’.

A piece I worked on recently from Afghanistan highlights both the opportunities and the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in post-conflict reconstruction. The US military has, for the first time, set aside more than $350 million over five years in contracts for Afghan businesswomen to produce tees, socks and outdoor gear for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. As the American military sees it, the initiative is part counter-insurgency and part economic development.

Says Air Force Maj. Charles Seidel, who is overseeing the program: "Fifty percent of the country are women.  If we are going to make a difference, we have got to create jobs, we have to give hope. How better to do that?’’

On the opportunity side: Women are eager for the business and hungry to win the military contract.  For the past eight years Afghan women have ventured into entrepreneurship and created start-ups in fields ranging from tailoring to trucking.  Their profits have gone to educate their children and support their families, and along the way they have helped to reshape their roles among their relatives. 

On the challenges side: Few Afghan businesswomen have the manufacturing capacity and quality control experience required to win so large and so demanding an order.  And even fewer can understand the American Request for Proposal (RFP) process whose arcane intricacies  are often unintelligible even to native English speakers.  While women may be succeeding in small business, large-scale factory production presents a formidable challenge.

The test of the program will come next month when the RFPs are turned in. In the meantime, Afghan businesswomen are working hard to fill out their proposals and assemble their plans to produce en masse -- if only they can get the Americans to give them a chance.

(Click here to read the full article)

Zachary Angafor, Founder of African Conflicts Response Foundation, discusses his ideas for mitigating conflict between farmers and pastoral communities in North West Cameroon, and his insights in formulating this entrepreneurial approach.

The history of violent conflict in African pastoral and farming communities is an old saga. Indeed, disputes between pastoralists and farmers over water, pasture, grazing land, as well as the proliferation of small arms and light weapons, have transformed the arid lands of the continent into theatres of war. From Sudan to Kenya on the East coast to Cameroon and Nigeria on the West coast, the conflicts are legion and often deadly. However, in this saga of recurrent conflict is a possible solution which, if well exploited, could considerably mitigate, if not, put an end to the violence. This is encouraging and opens up an opportunity to implement a people-to people approach or coexistence to peace and reconciliation in agro-pastoral communities. In other words, to create an environment where there is deep and active coexistence of community, where pastoralists and farmers live with and amongst each other, and where everyday interaction is rich and multifaceted.

North West Cameroon has a history of some of the most violent and bloody farmer-grazer conflicts on the West coast of Africa. Attempts at finding lasting solutions to the communal internecine have often failed because of the entrenched interests of politicians and government as well as traditional authorities. In fact, because of greed, some authorities do not want to resolve the conflicts. Rather, they gain more by its continuation than its resolution since they collect rents from the antagonists and/or leverage them for their political interests. Against this background of greed and unending violence, Zachary Angafor, Founder of African Conflicts Response Foundation (ACRF), has come up with a bold idea that will engage the pastoralists and farmers as the answer to the problem of sustainable peace in their own communities. Pending funding, his project idea will create an environment where pastoral women and women farmers come together to discover their common ground and coexist without discarding their values.

Pastoral women and women farmers in North West Cameroon are talented producers of cultural artifacts such as baskets, calabashes and beads. Handicraft work is therefore their common ground, but they remain divided, poor and unable to read and write. Inspired by his conviction that disparate groups work for peace when they engage in mutually beneficial enterprises, Zachary will work to unite the women in small handicraft cooperative groups where they can interact informally, learn from one another, generate more income, and foster inter-group integration. Zachary believes that by bringing the women together, they would influence their spouses and sons who are responsible for most of the violence to work for peace. And that prejudice and conflict decrease and trust increases when dissimilar groups come together.

Zachary draws his inspiration from some of the writings of authors like Kriesberg Louis on “Coexistence and the Reconciliation of Communal Conflicts” in the Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence, 1998 as well as from real life experiences in disparate communities such as South Africa where black and white South Africans are now living in peace as a result of coexistence. He intends to replicate the project in other countries of the central African sub-continental region once it takes off the ground.

Zachary Angafor is the Founder of African Conflicts Response Foundation, a nascent US based 501 (c) 3 pan-African nonprofit organization. He studied at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the University of Lancaster, and the London School of Economics. He holds Masters Degrees in International Relations and Strategic Studies and in International Public Policy with a focus on Conflict Management and African Studies. Contact: info@acrfonline.org

Join Ashoka Peace for a Social Entrepreneur Twitter chat (#SocEntChat) this Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 from 4-6pm EST. The topic is Social Innovation in Peace Building. Share your work, thoughts and insights to help us answer the following questions:

1.Why is innovation important in the fields of peace building and conflict resolution?

2.What are the most innovation ideas and solutions you’ve seen to build peace, tolerance and empathy around the world?

3.What patterns or best practices are we beginning to witness in the work of social entrepreneurs in the peace building field?

4.What is (or what should be) the role of business in peace building and conflict resolution?

Leave a comment if you have any more questions or topics you’d like to include, and find instructions on how to join the chat here. We hope to connect with you!

Guest blogger Derek Brown is Executive Director of the Peace Appeal Foundation. In this two-part blog entry, he describes the state of the art in the field of peacebuilding as we leave behind an extraordinarily conflict-ridden decade and enter a new and hopefully more peaceful one.

Exploring Touchstone's "If": The State of Peacebuilding - Part 2

(Click here to read Part 1 of this essay)

The need for skilled, sustained, on the ground peacemaking, working with political leadership to develop new alternatives in conflicts remains acute. Historically, technical advice in this arena was provided sporadically by international diplomats (and occasionally independent solo practitioners), who often parachuted in and out of conflict zones, with mixed results. Today we recognize the need for more robust, comprehensive initiatives that can address the adaptive complexity of our world’s most challenging conflicts.

With this recognition, the predominance of such short term diplomatic initiatives has receded in favor of more systemic, comprehensive approaches.  One aspect of this transition is visible in the evolution from the efforts of the earliest UN special representatives (Count Folke Bernadotte and his successor Ralph Bunche, who served as mediators to the Arab Israel conflict in the late 1940’s) to the Secretary General’s Special Representatives of today, whose mandates are much broader, and whose supporting institutions often entail hundreds of staff working in countries in conflict with multi-million dollar budgets.

Another aspect of this evolution to a more comprehensive approach has been the recent growth of independent practitioner organizations, with the ability and access to work in a sustained fashion directly with key leaders in societies in conflict.  While too few of these emanate from regions and countries in conflict themselves, there are several well known international organizations, including the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, and Nobel Laureate Martti Ahtisaari’s Crisis Management Initiative. Both were founded in the late 1990s.

Predating these new players in our field is the tradition of religious peacemakers, often operating in loose networks but over long periods, who have played critical constructive roles in conflicts around the globe. Among the most notable are the efforts of the many Quaker peacemakers of the Society of Friends, and the contributions of the Catholic lay person society, the Community of St. Egidio, founded in 1968. 

The cumulative experiences of all these organizations highlights the potential for independent organizations to make substantive contributions to peacebuilding alongside the official diplomatic efforts of governments and multi-lateral institutions.

Yet, despite the impact of many of our field’s organizations, the predominance of violent intrastate conflicts suggest that they have yet to amount than more than the sum of their parts. For the promise of the field to be realized, much more will be required: increased innovation and collaboration among growing numbers of institutions spread widely throughout our globe, a much more nuanced legal and regulatory environment, enhanced research and training institutions, more responsive and pro-active funding mechanisms, and most certainly a vastly increased public awareness. 

Only as the field matures in these and other ways will it be able to serve the needs of societies in conflict – helping communities explore the possibilty of “if”, and leading to a peaceful, just and promising future.

Guest blogger Derek Brown is Executive Director of the Peace Appeal Foundation. In this two-part blog entry, he describes the state of the art in the field of peacebuilding as we leave behind an extraordinarily conflict-ridden decade and enter a new and hopefully more peaceful one.

 Exploring Touchstone's "If": The State of Peacebuilding - Part 1

“Your If is the only peacemaker, much virtue in if” - William Shakespeare, As You Like It

As Shakespeare’s fool Touchstone noted four centuries ago, peacemaking requires the exploration of the possible. Peacemakers challenge us to look at the world as it can be: What if violence was not the means we choose to resolve conflict? What if we recognized the grievances of our enemies, What if...? This insight applies as much today as it did in Shakespeare’s time.

How to promote the exploration of “if” is then the central question all peacemakers. How do we equip and aide ourselves and others in conflict with the knowledge, material and human resources - be they ideas, insights, skills, relationships, funding, arguments, or institutions that can lead to peaceful relations?

The record of international support for peace initiatives in intra-state conflicts in the last several decades suggests that the capacity of our world to come to the aid of local peacemakers in conflicts, let alone to prevent them, is modest at best.  The experiences in Sri Lanka and Somalia this past year illustrate the limitations of international action.

No single multi-lateral or bilateral entity, no matter how large, can meet the needs of the field.  Multi-lateral institutions, from the UN, to the EU to the African Union, are severely constrained by limited financial resources and competing political agendas in their peacemaking activities. Bi-lateral governmental efforts face many of the same constraints. The lesson we at the Peace Appeal have drawn from our experience to date is that the field of peacebuilding as a whole needs to develop further so that it is adequate to the challenge at hand.

The field of peacebuilding, as distinct from the practice, is still young. The most mature segment of the field is its educational and research arm, which witnessed remarkable growth with the arrival of several dozen university-based interdisciplinary centers in Europe and the United States in the 1970’s and continuing to this day. Though universities and colleges are graduating growing numbers of future practitioners, their ranks are still small.  It may take decades before the full impact of an expanded knowledge base and professional community is felt.

Other segments of the field of peacebuilding are even younger. The field’s most prominent policy research and advocacy organization, the International Crisis Group, headquartered in Brussels, was founded in 1995. Despite its size, reputation and stature, its influence is often limited without broader constituencies advocating alongside it. In the realm of peacebuilding, examples of effective global citizen action are still few in number. Two of the best known citizen lobbying efforts, Americans for Peace Now (founded in 1981) and the Save Darfur Campaign (founded in 2004) dwarf the constituencies advocating for peace in conflicts in other regions of the globe. Yet even with their resources and clout, their impact too is limited without concrete alternatives emerging on the ground.

One of the more promising developments in the field of peacebuilding over the last several decades has been the growth of citizen organizations and networks internationally engaging in peacebuilding work both at Track II and at the grassroots level. Most operate out of the limelight working diligently to end conflicts in their own communities, societies and across the globe. While many of these efforts achieve success within local communities, or build relationships of trust at the Track II level, without the engagement and commitment of political leadership in the process of conflict transformation, securing a broader peace in a society in conflict is nearly impossible. 

(Click here to read the rest of this essay)
 

Photo credit: Guineanews.org

In my last post less than a month ago I discussed the various theories on Guinea’s future. About a week ago there was a major turning point: the President and Interim President of Guinea, as well as specially appointed mediator Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, signed an agreement outlining a peaceful transition back to constitutional law. The agreement included plans to form a national unity government and a 102 person council to guide the transition, and to hold elections in six short months. While this has been in the works for months now with international diplomats, the Guinea military government, Guinea opposition groups and civil society organizations in rounds of negotiations, the agreement is a sudden burst of hope.

In recent decades more than 90 percent of wars have ended at the negotiation table. With strong international support and consensus and an ever-growing civil society, Guinea has been able to avoid civil war. The ability of Guinean civil society to take a stand on the international stage enabled external actors to support a Guinean agenda for the country. Without strong and unified internal voices external negotiations could have taken much longer and been more complicated. 

As Guinea lays a foundation of peaceful and fair governance we applaud all actors, from those whose names will be credited with this great achievement to those whose names we may never know, for this moment in Guinea's history. We hope the path to national healing will be a smooth one.

Want to learn more about the changing situtation in Guinea? Check out the BEFORE Project's Guinea: Challenges in Transitions.

Ashoka Peace is proud to present a recently published article in the latest issue of Beyond Profit that describes the rationale and goals and inspiration behind our work.

In this article, we discuss the stories of two classic social entrepreneurs - Jerry White and Neichute Duolo - who came up with new solutions for problems of violent conflict, and through those stories, we begin to elicit the principles and patterns that are driving innovation in the peacebuilding field.

You can also read the article in full on the Beyond Profit blog.

We welcome your comments, suggestions and dialogue.

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Kissing the Tiger: Peace as a Pre-Requisite for Development

Roshan Paul and Sarah Jefferson

Jerry White was a 20-year-old college student when, on a camping trip in Israel, he stepped on a landmine and lost his left leg. A Massachusetts native, he spent the following year in Israel, learning not just how to walk again but also how to live as a survivor in society. Thirteen years later, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. But this was merely the beginning. Today, Jerry and his organization Survivor Corps are setting out on a more difficult journey: to build a world where there are no victims, only survivors.

Unlike Jerry, Neichute Doulo grew up in conflict-stricken Nagaland, a region in India comprising 17 different hill tribes. The area was never fully conquered by the British and its residents have carried that proud legacy into their battle against the state of India, one of the longest running secession movements in history. Convinced that Nagaland will not have a viable future (regardless of the outcome of the conflict) without indigenous small-scale industry, Neichute created Entrepreneurs Associates (EA) to foster a new generation of socially responsible business entrepreneurs that strengthen the Naga economy and allow youth the opportunity to actively contribute towards shaping a positive future.

Jerry and Neichute are classic social entrepreneurs, people who come up with new ideas to solve intractable social problems and work relentlessly to execute them in order to achieve lasting social impact; in this case, that of preparing society to overcome the effects of violent conflict. But why is building peaceful societies so critical for economic and social development?

No Development without Peace

Peace is a pre-requisite for development as a whole because it creates an enabling environment for the fundamentals of a society’s progress: human capital formation, infrastructure development, markets subject to the rule of law, and so on. In the absence of peace, education and health structures break down, systems to provide infrastructure disintegrate, and legal commerce is crippled. Critically, peace also frees up resources, both financial and human, that would otherwise be diverted to controlling (or creating) violence.

Intuitively, we’ve long known that peace and development go hand in hand – generally speaking, the more peaceful a society, the more prosperous and stable. But we’re only now starting to understand the economic costs of violent conflict. Over the last ten years, in about 60 countries, violence has significantly and directly reduced growth – in Brazil, 5% of GDP is lost due to violence and crime; in El Salvador it is 25%. The economist Paul Collier has shown that, on average, annual GDP growth of a conflict-affected country is reduced by 2.3% as a result of the conflict.

Moreover, there is a strong relationship between business enterprise and peace. In a 2008 worldwide study conducted by the United Nations Global Compact, 80% of senior managers felt the size of their markets grew with increasing peacefulness and 79% felt costs decreased with improving peacefulness. Yet, only 13% were aware of the metrics and tools that shed light on the peacefulness of the markets in which they operated. Businesses can play a central role in peace building, since they have an interest not just in profitability but the longer term stability of the markets in which they operate. Recognizing this, Daniel Suárez Zúñiga is developing a series of steps that the private sector in Colombia can follow in order to build peace. These include identifying ways to make business practices more transparent, resolving internal conflicts more constructively, and directing their attention to communities in ways more cognizant of social justice.

The Urgency of Now

Increasingly, peacebuilding is not just an economic necessity but a fiercely urgent one. Climate change, food and water scarcity, and the global economic crisis are all projected to exacerbate violent conflict in the years ahead as resources become scarcer, political instability rises, and inter-group tensions flare. For instance, a National Intelligence Assessment, prepared for American policymakers in 2008, predicted that the impacts of changing climate would emerge as a significant source of political instability over the next few decades, with water shortages in particular likely to create or exacerbate international tensions. Just this past July, there were community killings over water shortages in Bhopal, India when a family was falsely accused of stealing water from a pipe. Food shortages in Kenya and Nigeria are also of international concern, with Kenya especially on everyone’s watch list given its relatively recent tryst with election violence. Indeed, the US National Academy of Sciences published fresh research in November 2009 indicating that, across Africa, violent conflict is 50% more likely in unusually warm years and is often connected to depleting food supplies. As these forces make themselves felt with ever-pressing urgency, it is critical that we learn how to live and work together peacefully to overcome these challenges to our planet.

The Social Entrepreneur’s Response

When facing a society in conflict, social entrepreneurs respond very much like they would to other social problems. They identify the root of the problem and look for the levers and jujitsu points that they need to press in order to change the nature of the system. As Jerry White got involved in the global anti-landmine campaign, he realized that the most important voice of all was missing from the debate: that of landmine survivors, the vast majority of whom are civilians. Through this crucial (and deceptively simple) insight – that the most authentic and compelling voices against destructive weapons are the civilians who are maimed and left bereft by them – Jerry introduced a new player in the global battle to rid the world of weapons such as landmines and cluster bombs. At the same time, he transformed previously disempowered victims into a powerful movement of survivors. Survivor Corps currently runs healing and rehabilitation programs in 59 countries and has successfully organized global movements to change international norms and laws regarding the use of such weapons.

Far away from the negotiating tables of the UN, Neichute Doulo, the first ever college graduate from his village in Nagaland, understood that one of the biggest drivers of the Naga conflict was that young people had few options to channel their energies towards something productive – Indian security forces did not allow groups of youth to simply hang out. Furthermore, the local economy was being taken over by immigrant businesses from other parts of India, which exacerbated Nagaland’s unemployment problem and increased the frustration and resentment felt towards the Indian state. On the other hand, Naga culture had well-developed social institutions – churches and village councils – that could play key roles in mentoring and fostering youth activity but were prone to look at business and commerce with a jaundiced eye. Believing that socially responsible businesses were the key lever to unlocking many of these problems, Neichute’s organization began to recruit a corps of Naga business leaders to pool their resources and goodwill towards helping youth entrepreneurs get off the ground, all the while mobilizing churches and village elders to play mentorship and cheerleading roles.

Today, there are 80 Ashoka Fellows like Jerry, Neichute, and Daniel working to prevent violent conflict. From their innovations, patterns and principles are emerging, insights that can point us towards the best solutions for resolving conflict in our world. Like Jerry White, many social entrepreneurs understand that those most affected by violent conflict are often the best people to lead us away from it. Like Neichute Doulo, others approach conflict from another angle altogether: creating a mutually beneficial environment outside the conflict that indirectly provides incentives to all to refrain from violence. A soon-to-be-published paper by Ryszard Praszkier         and Andrzej Nowak in Columbia University’s Journal of Peace Psychology argues that this approach, which they call the employing of “positive attractors,” is often more successful than traditional negotiation and conflict resolution processes. In other words, peace becomes a collateral benefit, sneaking up on both parties before they know it.

There is still, of course, a place for traditional conflict resolution. Indeed, many social entrepreneurs are devising innovations in the manner in which conflicts are negotiated and resolved within or between societies. But if there’s one characteristic that distinguishes the social entrepreneur’s response from that of many leading political voices, it is that you don’t build peace by carving out your ideological territories. Rather, you engage the very people affected by the conflict, harnessing and redirecting energy towards a better alternative. It requires a shift in the way we often think about conflict, a shift that one social entrepreneur likens to “kissing a tiger.”

Only by being willing to “kiss the tiger” will we ultimately reverse the predicted escalation of global conflict, replacing it with an increasing number of peaceful societies well positioned for economic growth and social development and, by extension, social enterprise.

Roshan Paul, originally from Bangalore, India, now works with Ashoka in its Washington, D.C. global office. A graduate of Davidson College and the Harvard Kennedy School, he is especially interested in how to enable social entrepreneurship in the hardest parts of the world

Sarah Jefferson works in Ashoka’s headquarters in Washington DC, helping to conduct the global search and selection of social entrepreneurs. She received her BA from Lehigh University and her LLM in International Human Rights and Criminal Law from The University of Edinburgh, prior to joining Ashoka.

We're looking for writers to contribute to the Ashoka Peace blog. Become one of our official contributors and help grow a movement that believes in the power of social innovation to resolve conflict and build a more peaceful society. You'll have the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurial approaches to building peace and to explore and share your ideas on some of the most innovative ideas out there.

Who's the ideal Peace Blogger?

• A background in social entrepreneurship and/or the peace building/conflict resolution/human rights fields.
• Experience writing, preferably prior blogging experience.
• Interest or experience using social media tools.
• Ability to seek out creative stories and recognize innovations, and write about them in a compelling way.

Time commitment: At a minimum, you'll commit to contributing one blog post per week from now through May.

Application process:  Send your resume and a 250-450 word blog post on peace and social entrepreneurship (or a past blog post you've written) to Sarah Jefferson at sjefferson@ashoka.org.

Everyday in the news Afghanistan is tagged with words such as "war", "terror", "killings", "explosion", "bomb" and many other destrutive terms. Rarely, if ever, do we see positive news about Afghanistan, particular that coming directly from civil society. This is why the 3D Security Initiative's "Video Tour of Peacebuilding in Afghanistan" is so critical to the peace building field - it's the most positive news coming out of Afghanistan that I've seen in quite some time. 3D recently published a set of 11 videos that highlight peace building initiatives throughout Afghanistan, including educational peace and conflict programs, individual-led peace projects, civil society organizations, and a new Afghan website dedicated to peace building, all initiated and led by Afghans in Afghanistan. You will be both inspired and comforted to hear from these changemakers.

For more on-the-ground peace solutions led by Afghanis check out these Ashoka Fellows working in Afghanistan.