A Different Future

A chronicle of Paul Root Wolpe’s sabbatical travels, inviting you to join in with thoughts and ideas for creating a new center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation (PACT) at Emory University in Atlanta. Email him at pwolpe@emory.edu

Geneva, “The City of Peace”

Dec 3, 2024

Ah, Geneva.

My second trip to Europe started in Geneva. Geneva is a remarkable city – it is easy to get around (known as the world’s most compact metropolis). It is a world financial center and a global diplomatic hub, and over 40% of its residents are international. And it doesn’t hurt that it is beautiful, sitting on the shore of Geneva Lake and surrounded by the Alps. In fact - not sure why - pictures of Geneva just don’t seem to be able to capture its beauty and charm.

Of course, for me, the main attraction was its renown as the “City of Peace.” It has hosted high-stakes negotiations and peace talks such as the oft referenced Geneva Convention, is the home to countless organizations that engage in peace and conflict work (more people from the United Nations are housed in Geneva than in New York), and its infrastructure is set up to host international meetings and conferences. Geneva is unique not only in the scope of organizations and activity, but in the investment the city itself has made—hundreds of millions of dollars—to situate itself as a premier city for diplomacy, conflict resolution, and humanitarian work internationally.

One example is the Geneva Graduate Institute (GGI). Founded in 1927 by the League of Nations, it was one of the world’s first academic and research institutions dedicated to the study of international relations. The intent was to have GGI be the leading authority on the nature of peace and conflict, and to train future diplomatic leaders. It continues in that vein today, both in its research and scholarship, and as an applied center for conflict resolution and peace services. The campus (the “Maison de la Paix,” or House of Peace) is a vibrant set of buildings that house a dozen other NGOs in addition to GGI, such as Interpeace, the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, and, as you will see, the Small Arms Survey.

Marie-Laure Salles

Achim Wennman

Keith Krause

I met with Marie-Laure Salles, the Director of the Geneva Graduate Institute; Achim Wennman, Nagulendran chair in Peace Mediation, and Keith Krause, Director, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, and Curt Gasteyger Chair in International Security and Conflict Studies.

GGI quickly determined that peace should be defined not only in terms of the cessation of conflicts, but through a restoration of justice and equity, including a plan for the sustainability of the gains. Stopping conflict is not that helpful if there is quick backsliding toward violence, or if the conditions that started the conflict in the first place still remain.

In order for the work of an accord or reconciliation to proceed, and for sustainability to be achieved, trust must be earned, established, and maintained. In order to do their work, the mediators must first earn the trust of the stakeholders, with the goal of eventually generating trust between the stakeholders themselves.

My discussion with these exerts ranged across the field of conflict and peace itself. It is a crowded, competitive field; funds are generally available for a limited number of conflicts, and everyone is going after the same pots of money. At the same time there is endless work to do be done throughout the world, wars and conflicts for which there is little money and therefore far fewer organizations willing to try and help.

GGI has carefully curated a culture of conversation. With students from over 100 countries, they believe in and teach reflection before action. It is very Swiss. To the Swiss, diplomacy is not a profession but a way of life. Dialogue is the Swiss way. But it also has its downside. In a neutral country, the ethic of dialogue and compromise, the striving for peace and harmony, can tend to avoid the tougher, more dangerous problems, the extreme issues, placing the comfort of consensus over the struggle with those issues not amenable to it.

Mark Downes

I also met with Mark Downes, Director of the Small Arms Survey, one of the many NGOs hosted by GGI. It is a database tracking global violent deaths and the global possession of small arms and light weapons. They track armed violence, arms trafficking, stockpile management, and so on. While what they do really falls outside the scope of the center I hope to build, the conversation was fascinating. While we in the US often think of gun deaths as a uniquely US problem, small arms wreak havoc all over the world. There are a half million global violent deaths because of small arms. And here was the surprising news, at least to me: while the arms they used to track were almost exclusively guns manufactured by the major companies, now up to 40% of the weapons they track are 3-D printed, polymer weapons; massive numbers of kits (basically incomplete guns and therefore often not considered firearms, but easily converted); and gas powered weapons. These non-industrial guns are beginning to be manufactured on an industrial scale; and when you add drones, IEDs, etc. we are entering a new world where guns will be easier to access, harder to detect, and more widespread. In fact, that new world is already here.

The Villa Moynier Rue de Lausanne

Zachary Douglas, MIDS Program Director Professor, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

Laurence Boisson de Chazournes

CIDS, the “Center for International Dispute Settlement,” is a joint center of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and the University of Geneva. I spoke to two of the legal scholars who run its degree program, MIDS, the “Master in International Dispute Settlement” program. MIDS is a leading LL.M. program offering advanced and specialized legal training in international dispute settlement. Geneva bills itself as birthplace of modern international law, so it is fitting to study it there.

MIDS is run from the beautiful Villa Moynier, a historic villa surrounded by a beautiful park with a view of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc. Idyllic. I met with Zachary Douglas, the Program Director, at the villa.

Zachary pointed out his effort to always step back, to try and see the whole, broad picture of disputes and how we resolve them. He felt the European perspective can get too narrow, too specific, tied up in silos, and is often too short-term. After stopping violence on the ground - always the primary goal - peace efforts take many, many years; he suggested 50 years at leasts (incidentally, exactly the same time frame mentioned by Gary Mason of Belfast). MIDS is legalistic, its students all practicing lawyers, and it teaches international arbitration and litigation between state actors, so its focus departs somewhat from my efforts to establish PACT. But the legal framework is crucial in much conflict resolution and peace efforts, so PACT has to walk hand-in-hand with the legal community. (I recently spoke at a meeting of ATLas, the Atlanta International Arbitration Society).

I met with the gracious Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, the former Director of MIDS, at GGI. Laurence and I also discussed the role of law in peacekeeping. And she was thoughtful about offering me a number of valuable contacts. I continue to be amazed at the generosity and interest of almost everyone I have met in this field. While don’t want to idealize those who go into this field, as I am sure, like all fields, it takes many types, I also believe that those who choose peacekeeping as their focus must start with an impulse of service and reconciliation. I have not met a single person yet who has not been generous with their time and willing to help me build this new center.

The Hague Humanity Hub

Dec 3, 2024, updated on Dec 3, 2024

This will be a short one.

My trip to he Hague was a bit of a bust – I had a wonderful visit with The Hague Humanity Hub (HHH from now on), as you’ll see, but my hosts were out of town and my other appointment cancelled at the last minute due to illness, so I do need to go back. And I am happy to, because The Hague is a fun and interesting town, a cultural center and a fun town to walk around. It is also the third-largest city in the Netherlands, known as “International City of Peace and Justice.”

Valerie snapping Girl with a Pearl Earring (circa1665), Vermeer’s most famous work, at the Mauritshuis Museum. Really wonderful art all around The Hague.

I met with Jill Willkinson and Alexandre Taillander at the HHH, and they were gracious and welcoming. The HHH is a bold idea – The Hague is chock full of organizations that do international law, peacekeeping, diplomacy, and conflict work. The Permanent Court of Arbitration, set up as an alternative to countries going to war (and very busy right now), has been adjudicating international disputes for 125 years. Peace and justice is the second largest sector of the city, involving more than 40,000 people and over 900 NGOs.

An interesting tidbit - some say ‘geography is destiny,’ and the Netherlands is a perfect example. The Netherlands is a natural location for this sort of work because of its history coping with its polder. Polder? (I had never heard the word either.) Polder is land reclaimed from the sea, protected by dikes. Over twenty-five percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, on land reclaimed from the sea from as far back as the 14th century. Some areas are over 20 feet below sea level. Preserving the dikes and controlling the sea is a national priority.

Because of this constant threat of being inundated, the Netherlands had to cooperate as a nation on the monitoring and protection of its land and water. So it set up “Water Boards” that are not subject to the kinds of national politics other parts of government are; they hold elections, levy taxes, and function independently from other government bodies. The country cannot afford to let the politics of water threaten its very existence, and so has agreed to depoliticize the Water Boards to the degree possible. This ethic has filtered through society — an ethos of cooperation for the mutual good. It is in that spirit that The Hague developed into the center for international law.

One might naively appreciate the beauty of buildings in the Netherlands, such as the Mauritshuis Museum with its beautiful wood interiors, until you read placards like the one below, in an exhibit at the Museum about Holland’s slave history.

The Netherlands seized the country of Suriname in 1667 and ruled it mostly until 1975. The majority of the population was enslaved people from Africa until the mid-19th century. There is still a large Surinamese presence in Holland, and excellent Surinamese restaurants. But it all comes at a high price.

In the 1990s the city began to capitalize on its identity as a city of peace, law and diplomacy and over the following decades tried to see what else they could be doing to promote and develop their brand. They realized that there was no central place for the thousands of people and hundreds of NGOs and government workers involved in these pursuits to interact, to meet each other intentionally, to train, to run mutually beneficial programs. And so the The Hague Humanity Hub was born, funded in large part by the city itself.

HHH had to define the parameters of this sprawling and diverse community they were meant to serve, figure out how to support it and develop its ecosystem. They decided to focus on the individual doing the work so that people could could interact more freely and could join even if their organizations didn’t want to. HHH, therefore, has only individual members, no institutional members.

They try to bring sectors together, especially those seemingly fragmented. For example, they started a group for climate change and justice, and many who joined had no idea the other people working in the same sector even existed. Their main goal is to foster trust; they have no agenda, are not competitive, and so promote trust building.

They are a wonderful model for how to connect – they don’t think of themselves as “building” community, but as connecting communities already there. There are other, similar models – the Impact Hub based in Vienna, for example, runs over 300 programs in 59 countries, and tries to build networks of businesses to create “impactful solutions” for the future. In the US there are groups like the Open Gov Hub in DC whose mission is to encourage open government, or the Simmons Center in Chicago (connecting NGOs, philanthropists, and business). But HHH is unique in its focus on the peace sector. Can we incorporate this model into PACT? Hmmmm….

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a radical philosopher of the early modern period and a forerunner of The Enlightenment, lived the last seven years of his life and wrote much of his latter works in The Hague. He was Jewish and had a Jewish education - he even composed a Hebrew grammar for the Bible (his family were Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity and practiced Judaism in secret). He was excommunicated by the rabbis for his heretical ideas, and therefore could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Spinoza is buried in the Churchyard of the New Church in The Hague.

Tromsø, Norway – Irony in the Arctic Circle

Oct 12, 2024

Tromsø, Norway

So, in the midst of my visits to all these peace centers, Valerie and I flew to Tromsø, almost the northernmost point of Norway, well within the Arctic Circle. Two funny, ironic things about it; one on me, the other, well, on higher powers.

The one that is on me is I had never heard of Tromsø, I found it just by Googling good places to see the aurora borealis. A number of possibilities arose, but, needing to be in Oslo and Helsinki on either side of the trip, and wanting a convenient airport, I needed something relatively easy. Tromsø it was.

Tromsø, I imagined, was a remote, sleepy Arctic Circle town on the far northern coast, probably like a fishing village, where we could do rough excursions into the wilderness to see the aurora. Though we knew it was October, not January, we also knew it could be cold and windy. So we bought clothes that would keep us warm if the temperatures plummeted to 30 below zero and we were buried under an avalanche.

It wasn’t until we got here that I realized that Tromsø has the major regional airport, the regional hospital, The University of Tromsø (The “Arctic University of Norway,” the northernmost university in the world, ranked #512 out of 20,966 universities in the world) - over 100 resident nationalities, very chic shops and restaurants, and a population of over 70,000. When people starting settling here centuries ago, the cod was so plentiful, and fishing so lucrative, that it made it one of the richest cities in Norway, known as the “Paris of Norway.” The women wore Paris fashions (albeit warm ones) and the elite traveled here as a destination city.

Late 19th century Tromsø schoolteachers

So much for my sleepy fishing village. A large, modern, thriving town, wifi everywhere and nice stores, and incredible natural beauty all around it. I no longer wonder why people would want to live up here.

Second ironic thing – we planned this trip to see the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, and booked a late night excursion to the middle of nowhere to best see it. Where did we go? See the map below – the little blue circle on the top of the big map is Tromsø, and the cutout shows where our guide, Hans, took us to see the lights, Kvaløya Island. A lovely crew of Val and I and six international travelers - from China, South Africa, the Philippines, and so on. We camped for a few hours at the base of the inlet at the red circle in the cutout.

Tromsø sits almost at the northernmost point of Norway, within the Arctic Circle, and we traveled from there to Kvaløya Island for our aurora borealis adventure.

It was windy and cold, and Hans built us a small fire. He was a delightful guide, eager to please, always checking on our desires and welfare. He is also an excellent professional photographer, and so he took shots of us and the lights.

Our camp and the Northern Lights behind us (picture by Hans Markus)

Seeing the lights was wonderful, special, especially so far north.

A spectacular show, courtesy of the night sky (picture by Hans Markus)

Val and Paul looking dramatically off into the lights (picture by Hans Markus)

Just one problem. As great as it was – and the journey and the experience was 2/3 of the greatness – it was the DAY AFTER the aurora dipped into the United States, and people started sending around the pictures they took in Connecticut, Illinois, and so on just as spectacular as what we saw. With colors we didn’t see. We had to travel to the ends of the earth to see what we could have seen from Springfield, Illinois. But traveling to the Arctic Circle was worth it on its own.

Life is different up here. People travel from everywhere - our taxi driver was from Afghanistan, Hans was from Estonia, our waitress was from Argentina. The winter is long, and you are pretty far away, though these days just a short plane ride gets you to major cities like Oslo, Helsinki, or Stockholm, or even into mainland Europe. But there is a richness, a starkness, and a singular beauty to this area. I loved it here.

Off to Helsinki. Farewell, beautiful Tromsø.

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