Long-time peace advocate awarded Pearson Peace Medal
WATERLOO, ON - The global face of war may be shifting, but peace advocates now have a recognized role in the response, says Ernie Regehr, founder and former executive director of ,a href=http://www.ploughshares.ca/>Project Ploughshares.
Governor General David Johnston recently presented Regehr with the Pearson Peace Medal for Regehr's work in advocating for disarmament and peace. Regehr co-founded Project Ploughshares with former Pearson Peace Medal recipient Murray Thomson in 1976. The ecumenical agency of the Canadian Council of Churches works with faith, governmental and non-profit groups to build peace, prevent war and promote the peaceful resolution of political conflict. Both men have also received the Order of Canada.
For Regehr, such awards are broader recognition that peace advocates have “a serious seat at the table."
“It hasn't always been so," he says. “When we started, back in the 1970s, it was a big struggle to gain a sense of being a legitimate part of public debate, because there was a clear sense of who was in the mainstream and who was on the margins. I think that's changed a lot in the last 30 plus years. There's a much stronger recognition that in the problems of peace and war no one has 'the answer.'
“But I think there's a growing sense in governments that they alone cannot build the conditions for peace that civil society needs. So civil society needs to be a prominent part of the process."
Regehr says he realized the dangerously unstabilizing impact that the quest for arms can have on a society when he and his family were working as missionaries with the Mennonite Central Committee in Africa.
“There was this sense of militarization driving underdevelopment," he says. “Relatively new countries were spending vast amounts of money on military establishment. But everyone knew that the basis for long-term stability in those societies was not going to be having a powerful military. It was going to be from government meeting the rising expectations of the population for access to healthcare, education, just having their most basic needs met on a reasonable, reliable and daily basis. But their capacity to do was undermined by diverting resources from meeting basic needs to things like buying fighter aircraft."
Since Project Ploughshares first began advocating for the placing of limits and regulations around the global sale of arms, Regehr says, world opinion has shifted considerably in understanding why such policies are needed. World opinion on nuclear disarmament has also shifted considerably, with less than a third of the nuclear weapons deployed globally today than there was when Ploughshares started.
“In the last few years the de-legitimization of nuclear weapons has really taken hold," he says. “There's still a long way to go, of course."
John Siebert, executive director of Project Ploughshares, says one of the pressing issues for the organization as they look forward to the future is the shift in global violence from “armed conflict" to “armed violence."
Siebert says while there has been a 40 per cent reduction in the number of global armed conflicts in the past 15 years, the number of people dying from different types of violence has remained static.
“People are now dying less in wars, but more in criminal armed violence," he says. “Between 7,000 and 8,000 people die every year from small arms and light weapons, so the control and restriction of the transfer of those weapons is vitally important for the human family."
Some of the organization's ongoing efforts include working in partnership to press for strict and comprehensive regulations around the sale of light arms and small weapons, advising the Canadian government and other global stakeholders on the development of an international arms treaty, working with the Caribbean Coalition for Development and Reduction of Armed Violence to combat gun crime and advocating to keep weapons out of space.
Regehr retired from Project Ploughshares at the end of December 2010. He continues to work as a research fellow at the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies of Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo.
“I think there is an urgent requirement for the international community to develop a much better understanding of how you collectively intervene into local conflicts,' says Regehr. “There's kind of a sense that when all else fails we're going to intervene militarily. But experience shows that when all else fails military interference fails also.
“So, I think the international community needs to find ways of intervening constructively much earlier on with the kind of social political and economic responses to the insecurities which people are really experiencing, in the way they feel them on a daily basis."
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