William Pace is working on global and regional levels to reform democratic institutions, governing bodies, and citizen organizations by promoting peace and collaboration over competition. He launched the Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC), an initiative to encourage collaboration between citizen sector organizations with competing agendas and ideologies. The coalition enables an international treaty process for peace-making that includes a widely varied level of decision-making bodies. Pace is also working towards democratizing the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

Raziq Fahim, a lifelong native of Balochistan, is countering the youth recruitment activity by militant and extremist groups in economically-marginalized areas of Pakistan by launching the College of Youth Activism and Development (CYAD) to engage students about the idea of community participation in the development of their region. The program creates engagement opportunities for youth through workshops and seminars, and empowers hand-selected and high-risk youth to become mentors and leaders for others through development projects such as the construction of a girls’ school, construction and upgrade of a basic health unit, the establishment of a women’s education and vocational training center and the rehabilitation of local water channels.

An estimated forty to fifty million Pushtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan are surviving in dismal conditions as a result of the after effects of wars, tribal feuds, and sectarian conflicts. Asad Danish, an Afghan refugee who arrived in Pakistan in 1990, is bringing harmony to the region by promoting Pushtun culture through the establishment of Pushtun libraries, promotion of literary circles, and the launch of Pushtun radio broadcasts.  By focusing on Pushtun content, Asad has received approval from the government to use a combination of radio, books and libraries to create a pro-peace mindset to educate people and spread culture.

Dialia Keita is improving the social status of repatriated women by focusing on innovative solutions that involve farming and especially processing of farming products. The idea rests on a fundamental insight that repatriated women bring back with them new knowledge about making a product that they have learned in the time they were away from Mali – usually knowledge about a rural, farming-related product or process - that can be reproduced  and marketed by groups of repatriated women in Mali and sold to Malians. Dialia therefore founded an organization based in Sikasso on the Mali-Côte d’Ivoire border called the “Association of Women Repatriated from Côte d’Ivoire” ARECI. Today she works across the country, carrying her message that the key to the economic solution of repatriated women’s problems lies within them, in the knowledge they have gained about products while living abroad. The key is to figure out what that knowledge is, and for repatriated women to organize and commercialize that knowledge.

Informed by over a decade of battling infectious diseases in Africa and honed by years of careful implementation in North America, Dr. Gary Slutkin is now treating the serious public health problem of urban violence in the US and internationally. Through a unique approach that treats violence as an infectious disease, his CeaseFire model is eradicating the norm of violence in the most dangerous of urban areas. CeaseFire finds hot spots of gun violence and trains former perpetrators to disrupt armed conflicts and educate the community about the consequences of violent behavior. Gary is now working on spreading internationally; as of the middle of 2009, CeaseFire is moving close to launching in Brazil, Mexico and Jamaica.

By creating collaborative exchange and continuing education programs for medical students, health professionals and health centers from Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Canada, Arnold Noyek is creating a model of cooperation in the Middle East which is improving the professional capacity of these practitioners and medical care in these regions. As a result, he is fostering cross-cultural dialogue, understanding and peaceful co-existence across religious, cultural and political borders.

After stepping on a landmine on a camping trip in Israel and losing his leg, Jerry has devoted his life to creating a victim-free world by transforming passive victims into active survivors and leaders. Jerry’s Survivor Corps, a worldwide peer-to-peer support network, gives conflict survivors the tools they need to become leaders in their communities. By transforming survivors’ perceptions of themselves, Jerry is able to change global societal attitudes towards the role of conflict survivors in the prevention of violent conflict. Jerry’s efforts to marry the disabilities community with the human rights community has resulted in the creation of two of the most comprehensive United Nations human rights treaties. Since the treaty was passed, over 50 million landmines have been destroyed.

Reza Deghati and his organization, AINA, are helping rebuild a strong and democratic civil society in Afghanistan through the development and diffusion of independent media. His models of rapid media training and “emergency education” focus on empowering women and children in particular. They are now being replicated in areas heavily affected by war and conflict across the globe through Reza’s new initiative “Open Mind.”

Over a half-century ago, the international community pledged to “never again” allow genocide to occur. Repeated failure to keep that promise (in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Darfur) sparked Mark’s creation of the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-NET). Thousands in the international community are asking what they can do to stop genocide, and GI-NET is answering by empowering individuals and communities to hold governments accountable to contribute directly to protecting civilians around the world from genocide. A longstanding key strategy of the human rights movement has been to publish shocking reports of abuses to raise awareness and ultimately move U.S. and international leaders to act. GI-NET is expanding on that work by providing global citizens with the tools to more effectively advocate and fundraise to prevent genocide, thus fulfilling their moral and civic duties as citizens of the world. This represents a significant shift in past practices as it distributes the power to affect change from a concentrated few to a much larger group of citizen activists. The tools that enable this distribution are an important part of the “newness” of Mark’s work—as many of them involve the innovative use of technology in advocacy.

SFCG has developed a diverse toolbox, which includes such traditional techniques of conflict resolution as mediation, training, facilitation, and back-channel negotiations. Because violent conflict depends on stereotyping, demonizing, and dehumanizing, SFCG uses less conventional, mass communication tools to help reverse this process. Thus, it produces television and radio dramas that communicate messages of mutual respect, tolerance, nonviolence, and problem-solving, including a TV series in Nigeria (50-episodes), Egypt (29-episodes), Macedonia (51-episodes), Côte d’Ivoire (20-episodes), and Kenya (26-episodes); along with radio soap opera series in such places as Sierra Leone where over 2,000 episodes have been produced.  In addition, SFCG makes music videos that have turned into theme songs for entire peace processes.