Mahnaz Afkhami Reflects on Working Toward Peace
The
century just passed was marked by unprecedented violence
and cruelty. Most nations suffered or contributed to war,
destruction, and genocide, the most egregious of which-the
two world wars and the Holocaust-began and occurred mainly
in the West. Untold numbers were sacrificed at the altar
of ideology, religion, or ethnicity. Innocent people were
led in droves to destruction in various gulags-prisons large
enough to pass for cities and cities confined enough to
pass for prisons.
Women and children everywhere suffered most from violence
not of their making, perpetrated against them in national
wars, in ethnic animosities, in petty neighborhood fights,
and at home. Many of us have lived most of our lives under
the threat of total annihilation because mankind achieved
the technological know-how to self-destruct. The end of
the Cold War removed the immediate causes of wholesale destruction-but
not the threat contained in our knowledge. We must tame
this knowledge with the ideals of justice, caring, and compassion
summoned from our common human spiritual and moral heritage,
if we are to live in peace and serenity in the twenty-first
century.
The promotion of a culture of peace requires more than
an absence of war. In the past two hundred years most of
the world lived directly or indirectly within a colonial
system. This system reflected an increasingly divided world
of haves and have-nots. The modernizing elite in the technologically
and economically poor nations responded to colonialism by
seizing the power of the state and using it to change their
societies, hoping to achieve justice at home and economic
and cultural parity abroad. The politics of changing traditional
social structures and processes by using state power did
not always result in social progress and economic development,
but it did lead to state supremacy and autocracy. In the
more extreme cases autocratic regimes were transformed to
either forward-looking or reactionary totalitarianism-of
socialist-Marxist, fascist, or religious-fundamentalist
types. These systems clearly failed or are failing. But
at the time they were adopted, to many they represented
hope and a promise of economic change, distributive justice,
and a better future. As we move forward in the first decades
of the new millennium, economic and political globalization
is likely to weaken the state. Deprived of the protection
of the state, a majority of the people in the developing
countries will have to fend for themselves against overwhelming
global forces they cannot control. The most vulnerable groups,
among them women and children, will suffer most. Clearly,
any definition of a culture of peace must address the problem
of achieving justice for communities and individuals who
do not have the means to compete or cope without structured
assistance and compassionate help.
As we move into the twenty-first century, women's status
in society will become the standard by which to measure
our progress toward civility and peace. The connection between
women's human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development,
and peace is increasingly apparent. International political
and economic organizations invariably state in their official
publications that achieving sustainable development in the
global South, or in less-developed areas within the industrialized
countries, is unlikely without women's participation. It
is essential for the development of civil society, which,
in turn, encourages peaceful relationships within and between
societies. In other words, women, who are a majority of
the peoples of the earth, are indispensable to the accumulation
of the kind of social capital that is conducive to development,
peace, justice, and civility. Unless women are empowered,
however, to participate in the decision-making processes-that
is, unless women gain political power-it is unlikely that
they will influence the economy and society toward more
equitable and peaceful foundations.
Women's empowerment is intertwined with respect for human
rights. But we face a dilemma. In the future, human rights
will be increasingly a universal criterion for designing
ethical systems. On the other hand, the "enlightened"
optimism that spearheaded much of the humanism of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries is now yielding to a pessimistic
view that we are losing control over our lives. We sense
a growing cynicism engulfing our view of government and
political authority. In the West, where modern technology
is invented and domiciled, many people feel overwhelmed
by the speed with which things both moral and material change
around them. In non-Western societies, the inability to
hold on to some constancy that in the past provided a cultural
anchor and therefore a bearing on one's moral and physical
position today often leads to normlessness and bewilderment.
In the West or East, no one wishes to become a vessel for
a technology that evolves uncontrolled by human will. On
the other hand, it is becoming increasingly difficult for
any one individual, institution, or government to exert
its will meaningfully, that is, to ethically mold technology
to human moral needs.
This seemingly uncontrollable technology, however, will
be a harbinger of great promise, if we agree on the shared
values contained in our major international documents of
rights, and if we adopt a method of decision making that
justly reflects our common values. After all, we have gained
almost magical powers in science and technology. We have
overcome the handicaps of time and space on our planet.
We have uncovered many secrets of our universe. We can feed
and clothe the peoples of our world, protect and educate
our children, and provide security and hope for the poor.
We can cure many of the diseases of body and mind that were
deemed scourges of humanity only a few decades ago. We seem
to have passed the era of absolutes, where leaders assumed
the right to incarcerate, slaughter, or otherwise constrain
their own people and others in the name of some imagined
good. We have the ability to achieve, if we master the necessary
goodwill, a common global society blessed with a shared
culture of peace that is nourished by the ethnic, national,
and local diversities that enrich our lives. To achieve
this blessing, however, we must assess our present situation
realistically, assign moral and practical responsibility
to individuals, communities, and countries commensurate
with their objective ability and, most importantly, we must
subordinate power in all its manifestations to our shared
humane values.
Biography
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