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In November 1998, eight visionary recipients of the Nobel
Peace Prize gathered on the grounds of the University of
Virginia for two days of extraordinary dialogue. From the
words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Archbishop Desmond
Tutu's riveting description of chairing South Africa's Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, their conversation ranged
from familiar international-relations issues to areas
traditionally excluded from such discourse, like the need
for personal transformation and community organizing.
From the laureates' speeches and exchanges, the veteran
journalist Helena Cobban has drawn a powerful, prescient
vision of our shared global future. Unlike other recent
books on global change, The Moral Architecture of World
Peace is based on the heroic stories of nine
individuals, from as varied backgrounds as Rigoberta
Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, who base their view of
world peace on personal strength and public activism, not
economic trends.
Each chapter contains one laureate's version of a shared
message: that peace is grounded in the personal and
spiritual as well as the economic and military dimensions of
global interconnectedness. When the Dalai Lama speaks of the
need for inner as well as external disarmament, he is asking
for a greater commitment than the most complicated nuclear
arms treaty. Along similar lines, the Northern Ireland peace
activist Betty Williams tells of her hope to disarm "the
landmines of the heart," the bitterness that lives on in war
survivors that can be more destructive than physical scars.
Jody Williams and Bobby Muller, 1997 laureates, sound a
concordant note in the story of their successful campaign to
win an international treaty banning landmines.
Former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez,
architect of the five-nation peace accord in Central
America, challenges citizens of rich western countries to
recognize the gap between their luxury spending and the
amounts needed to fund basic human services in other parts
of the world. Indigenous-rights activist Rigoberta
Menchú Tum and East Timorese representative
José Ramos-Horta both lament the human and social
costs paid by what Ramos-Horta calls, sorrowfully, the
world's "expendable peoples." Harn Yawnghwe, speaking on
behalf of the Burmese democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi,
who was refused the right to travel by her government, talks
of the tough issues of preparing for a transition to
postauthoritarian rule in a country that has been run by a
military junta.
As Helena Cobban articulates, these leaders all seem to
subscribe to a broader set of truths that are not
necessarily self-evident: that human beings can easily
become locked into self-perpetuating "systems of suspicion
and violence" at any level, from the interpersonal through
the international; that when one is inside such a system, it
can be hard to see it and to recognize one's own role within
it; but that each one of us has the capacity to make a leap
from self-centeredness toward greater understanding. "Try to
change motivation," the Dalai Lama urges.
But while these laureates' stories are primarily of
personal and political triumph, they also tell of great
sacrifice, conflict, and pain. Bobby Muller's passionate
exchange with Archbishop Tutu on moral accountability versus
reconciliation, and the self-examination of Ramos-Horta, who
reflected that his own East Timorese independence movement
may have hurt the chances of United States' intervention to
prevent Indonesia's brutal invasion of his country, point
toward the new kinds of challenges we face in the next
century.
From the candor, eloquence, humor, and differences
expressed by these inspiring people, Helena Cobban has
sketched out a new international paradigm of peace.
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