List of Documents

The Drums for Peace are an initiative promoted by NOVA Center for social Innovation to make hear other sounds, other voices, new ideas and proposals, in a diverse clamor of drums, saucepans sounds,... in order to fight for peace.

Here is a testimony about how my wife and myself endeavor to *build Peace in our daily life*. We first of all endeavored *to conquer the hidden truths*, cross-checking informations and with confronting the experiences of people met and our own experiences.

Our approach to war must encompass all systematic forms of violence and the way these forms develop and reside in societies, finding their cultural roots in a patriarchal order that glorifies the use of domination and constraint as a means of assertion.

By transforming individual behaviors, unhindered art and culture form an essential dimension for building a just and sustainable peace. Similarly, the participation of women in public life contributes new ways of doing things in a political world regulated at best by the male value system, and at worst by military methods, as in the Philippines.

The proposal of an e-forum for understanding and acting, for building peace. This article was published in "Le Dauphiné Libéré", in September 2002, and describes the forum Pax

Nation states have failed in building institutions to promote peaceful change. They have failed to keep the peace. They have failed to eliminate the root causes of war. Military and economic dominance have fueled resentments which contribute to violence. War as an institution, protected by international laws, has proven a hopeless method to correct social and economic inequities.

On September 11, 2001, we were brutally thrust into questioning the world in which we live. Fears and doubts suddenly rushed forth and forced us to consider issues that some us thought we were only remotely concerned with: terrorism, international and geostrategic relations, the relationship between local situations and global imbalances, money laundering, our responsibilities as ordinary citizens, our possibilities for taking some kind of action in areas within our scope, and so on.

Any long term peace strategy must start by eliminating the factors of war that remain in people's spirits by bringing to the fore values found in particular among women and the young.

Promoting non-violent forms of action, an increasingly urgent need in the present world context, involves reconsidering in-depth all the features and modes of our behavior and actions in the public arena.

This article outlines a program of what schools can do to encourage the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which pre- pare children to live in a peaceful world. It describes four key components of such programs: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in leaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in schools.

By attempting to defuse the polarization of the entire population of Burundi into two opposing camps, groups of women and artists have devoted themselves to maintaining and restoring possibilities of communication and mutual recognition, in the midst of armed conflict.

This document has been conceived on the occasion of the involvement of the workshop "Yin Yang" (masculine - feminine) of the alliance, to the Hague Conference of Peace in 1999. Several women coming from peace movements were invited to Amsterdam, for working together during three days just before the conference. This preparatory workshop regrouped 17 women coming from different countries. After the workshop, the participants facilitated a session in The Hague, where they presented the network that they had constituted as well as the results of their collective work.

calendar of debate

This document presents a set of proposals developed by all the parties concerned, from the workers in the arms industries, to the persons in charge of the armed forces, and also political leaders, representatives of organizations working for peace, researchers, specialized organizations, etc.
The conversion of the arms industries deals today with the questioning, not only of one industrial activity, but especially of a the organization of the life of men and societies, in the center of which stands an essential concern, which is that of their safety.

The committee of soldiers' mothers, founded to protest against living conditions in the army, has been able to make itself heard by the authorities and media. In spite of the resurgence of militarism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have been a focal point in the fight against the war in Chechnya, by going to look for young conscripts on the battlefield and by collaborating with women on the other side.

To avoid a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by separation, it is vital that all those who work to build peace take inspiration from the experiences and relations formed between groups of women, acting to strengthen cooperation and interaction between the two peoples.

This document shows the initiative undertaken to establish a climate of peace and long-term sérennité in this region of the Great Lakes that was in the past so murderous.

(lightly-edited machine translation)

The occasion of the Hague conference, during which war raged in former Yugoslavia, gave an opportunity for women's networks to diffuse this appeal, likening NATO's reaction against the Serb's in Kosovo to the atrocities perpetrated by their government, and insisting on the role of civil society, particularly women and international institutions, in building sustainable peace in the Balkans.

Beyond the mythology that shows women to be by nature opposed to violence, it appears that it is often them who are at the forefront of peace movements. With the values that they put forward in these circumstances, they are often bringer, at a well larger level than just armed conflicts, of an opportunity for renewal in social life.

Instead of" terrorism ", it would be often wiser to speak of violence. Indeed the means used to fight terrorism are sometimes just as destructive and reprehensible. Why would not the civil victims of these military actions have any right to consider themselves victims of terrorist attacks? The actions that can be considered as "terrorists" are numerous, but let’s call things by their names. What we are confronted with here is violence, whatever can be its motive and by whomever it may be produced.

Before the Gulf War broke out, women from the Middle East, accompanied by several western and Japanese women, chartered a ship to supply milk and flour as a symbolic protest against military logic and the embargo hitting the civilian population of Iraq.

The center for women war victims is attempting to set up the conditions for peace among Croatian and Bosnian women by devoting itself to the reparation (at medical, legal levels, etc.) the traumas left by the conflict.

The Spanish mothers of conscientious objectors and deserters fight alongside their sons so that their refusal to join the army is heard everywhere as a refusal to accept the military-industrial policies of governments, and by consequence the preponderance of the logic of domination at every level.

In Rwanda, a large number of women's organizations took on the task of repairing the sequels of the war of April 1994, on both material and psychological levels. Those targeted first are often women and children, who form the support vital to any social reconstruction.

This text is a warning of Michel Sauquet for his book "one morning on Babel, one evening in Manhattan", written following the announcement of the news of the attempts that struck New-York September 11, 2001.

(lightly-edited machine translation)

This text is dedicated to the responsibility of the religions and believers to the consideration of the construction of the peace.

By presenting their conclusions at the Hague conference, the participants tried to introduce a wider horizon to preventing and solving conflicts. Their experiences and successes illustrate how peace building, to be efficient, must also deal with social behavior that favors resorting to violence.

The perception of the way in which male-female relations are expressed in the social order (and how they make it change) is an essential dimension of the analysis of the conditions that permit violence to occur in collective and systematic forms. Moreover, no approach for solving conflicts can ignore the experiences and strategies of women in this area.

The effort of women to influence the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come up against, on the one hand, their inability to form relations between them that differ from those that predominate among men, and on the other, the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society, which impedes any initiative and cooperation between women based on new foundations.

The participants gathered at Amsterdam agreed on the need to extend the definition of war to other forms of violence that affect society, and to assert that women have a permanent role to play in this area, by publicly expressing ideas and attitudes capable of preventing social relations from giving in to this logic of domination and constraint.

Andrée Michel, head of research at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and a feminist, decodes the economic reasoning that reinforces and legitimises the culture of war. She also exposes the patriarchal structure of societies that are built on the cult of violence and virility.