Our conference for peace activists and scholars to discuss methods and strategies to lead us in a new direction is taking shape.
We have an excellent line-up of confirmed speakers, who will inspire us all to new endeavours. They include: Paul Rogers, Diana Francis, John Gittings, Jonathan Cohen, Andrei Gomez-Suarez, Gwen Burnyeat and Tanya Hubbard.
The Conference will take place on Saturday, 14 September and will run from 10.30am to 4pm.
It will be held at a really great venue:
Sands Film Studio,
82, St Marychurch Street,
Rotherhithe, London SE16 4HZ,
The Conference will also be available to view online.
As well as talks and discussions, there will be time for participants to network. We look forward to seeing you in September!
Book now on the Sands Studio website!
Speakers’ summaries and Bios are below
Paul Rogers:
‘The core challenges of the Global Crisis are a failing economic system that marginalises billions of people and a world facing environmental limits to growth, with the increasing risk of climate breakdown. What makes it worse is the common response to challenges is to maintain the status quo, all too often by military violence.
The positive news is that we can still prevent climate breakdown, not least through rapid decarbonisation, through modifying the economic system so that it works for everyone, and through demilitarising our approach to security. The numerous failed wars of the last 25 years should convince us that ‘If war is the answer it must be a very stupid question.’
John Gittings:
Towards a World Voice Diplomacy: There has always been a struggle between the voice of the world majority and that of the great powers. It was expressed in the efforts of the General Assembly to win authority from the Security Council, in the Non-Aligned Movement, and in the long years of struggle for disarmament, from the Test-Ban and Non-Proliferation Treaties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. John Gittings will discuss how to carry this forward in today’s adverse international climate, promoting a people-based global diplomacy with peace as its objective and a central role for the United Nations.
Diana Francis:
Conflict is inevitable in human relationships. Violence, whether direct, structural or cultural, is not. Power can be used cooperatively, for the common good, or abused to achieve domination over others.
‘Conflict Transformation’ embraces the different processes by which situations of ‘structural violence’ or oppression can be addressed nonviolently, by ‘people power’ and dialogue, so that ‘Conflict Resolution’ can begin. Even when agreement is reached, further processes of demilitarisation and peacebuilding will be needed to establish lasting peace.
Since geopolitics often overcome local peace processes and wars are ravaging people and planet, these processes are desperately needed at the global level. A worldwide ‘peace constituency’ is now vital.
Jonathan Cohen:
Conflict is more widespread, protracted, and complex with more actors than at any point in the post-Cold War world. What does this mean for peacebuilding and what does it mean for NGOs that engage in supporting dialogue and mediation? Jonathan Cohen will share insights from the experience of Conciliation Resources, an NGO founded in London 30 years ago with the aspiration to prevent and transform violent conflicts, working alongside those directly affected. He will share insights from conflicts and peace processes in the South Caucasus, Africa and Asia and reflect on challenges faced in engaging with armed groups, such as asymmetries in power relations and impartiality.
Andrei Gomez-Suarez & Gwen Burnyeat
Can we build sustainable peace by nurturing a culture of dialogue? Based on 12 years of peacebuilding work in Colombia we will share practical examples of civil society initiatives of using dialogue to contribute to ending the armed conflict in Colombia and bringing about possibilities for social cohesion and reconciliation.
Tanya Hubbard
Tanya will speak about her experiences of using participatory peace-building approaches with communities in conflict in different parts of Myanmar as part of MASC (Myanmar Art Social projeCt) between 2013-2021.
Bios:
John Gittings
John Gittings is the author of The Glorious Art of Peace: Paths to Peace in a New Age of War (2018) and was on the editorial team of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace (2010). He was East Asia editor and foreign leader-writer for The Guardian from 1983-2003 and wrote extensively on China and on international issues. His current work is in the field of existential risk. He was active in the early years of the anti-nuclear and Vietnam war campaigns, and he writes a regular column for Oxford CND.
Diana Francis
A peace activist since her teens, Diana Francis is a former President of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and for many years chaired the Committee for Conflict Transformation Support (CCTS), a group of professionals in the field of peacebuilding.
Until her retirement an affiliate of Conciliation Resources, she worked for many organisations in supporting local peacemakers: in the former Yugoslavia, in different parts of what had been the Soviet Union, and in Africa, the Middle East and South and South East Asia.
She has written many articles and several books (see www.dianafrancis.info) and been a public speaker on gender, peace, power and transformation, and on the demilitarisation of culture and policy on conflict, security and international relations. She was the original convener of the group that grew into the Rethinking Security network. She remains a member of its Council and convenes a local group. She is a Vice-President of the Movement for the Abolition of War.
Paul Rogers
Paul Rogers is Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at Bradford University, working there for over forty years. He trained initially in the Life Sciences at Imperial College before working in crop research in East Africa and then lectured on environmental security. He has worked on the causes of war, especially how they relate to global limits to growth, a failing economic system and military cultures often dominated by the need for control. He’s lectured at Britain’s senior defence colleges for forty years, engaged with government ministries, given evidence to parliamentary committees and is a past chair of the British International Studies Association.
Jonathan Cohen
Jonathan Cohen is Executive Director of Conciliation Resources. Over the past 27 years at Conciliation Resources, initially as Caucasus Director and then as Director of Programmes, Jonathan has supported dialogue and peacebuilding initiatives in contexts including the South Caucasus, Kashmir, the Philippines, Colombia, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea. Previously he served as Deputy Director of the Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations in The Hague working with the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. Jonathan is an Associate of the Institute for the Public Understanding of War and Conflict at the Imperial War Museum and a Board Member of the Peace Dividend Initiative. From 2018-2024 he was Chair of the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office, a network of 50 peacebuilding organisations.
Gwen Burnyeat
Dr Gwen Burnyeat is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, currently researching the role of stories in polarisation and bridgebuilding in Colombia and Britain. She is a political anthropologist, writer, and peacebuilder, with over 14 years’ experience working on peace and politics in Colombia as both scholar and practitioner, author of two books, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia (University of Chicago Press 2022) and Chocolate, Politics and Peacebuilding: An Ethnography of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), producer of award-winning ethnographic documentary Chocolate of Peace (http://chocolatedepaz.com/english) and member of peacebuilding organisation Rodeemos el Diálogo (ReD, or “Embrace Dialogue”). See http://gwenburnyeat.com for more.
Andrei Gomez-Suarez
Andrei Gomez-Suarez is the co-founder and general director of peacebuilding organisation Rodeemos el Diálogo (ReD, Embrace Dialogue). He is visiting scholar at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh, research associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London, Senior Consultant at Positive Negatives, and member of the Reimagining Victim’s Reparations Global Network. He is author of Genocide, Geopolitics and Transnational Networks (Routledge, 2015) and El Triunfo del No (Icono, 2016). He is the writer and producer of the graphic short story Jessica: coca-growing, development and stigmatisation in Colombia and Colombia’s broken peace (PositiveNegatives, 2020, 2022). He co-produced La Confianza (2018), a song for rebuilding trust in Colombia. Andrei has over 20 years’ experience working and researching on conflict and peace in Colombia.
Tanya Hubbard
Tanya Hubbard is a facilitator and trainer of conflict transformation and dialogue. Her passion is in using non-violent communication and creative approaches to enable people to re-connect compassionately with themselves, to re-humanise and connect with people who are ‘other’ and to collectively re-imagine a future of justice and peace. Some of her favourite tools for this are physical theatre, art with natural or recycled materials and storytelling.
