By Dr. David Adams
1 May 2025 – In my last blog I asked the question: “we cannot sit still, and we must act, but how?”
Now we have an answer, the Peace Manifesto 2025.
As we launch the Peace Manifesto today, May 1, 2025, it seems to me like a symphony of music composed and played by an orchestra that I have had the great privilege to conduct. Curiously for an orchestra, none of us met in person, but we met virtually in an ever increasing rhythm of emails and zoom and WhatsApp conversations.
It all began here on this blog last July with the title “A manifesto for action.” It was the result of a request in the blog of June for “suggestions on how to relaunch a global movement for the culture of peace.” Two other Davids, David Wick and David Hazen, responded to the request and together we called for “taking up the Manifesto 2000 where it left off, renaming it the Manifesto 2025, gathering signatures once again and initiating action.”
With the invitation of Fred Arment of International Cities of Peace (ICP), we three Davids designed a course for the culture of peace, based on a new manifesto and it was published on the ICP website in September.
Where to go from there? We bounced around various ideas, but the key advance came from Dane Ramshaw, an informatics specialist and friend of David Hazen. Dane agreed to join our little team that was now meeting weekly in zoom conversations. He suggested that we rely on social media, and especially youth, to disseminate a manifesto. And he criticized the website that we had constructed, saying it was old-fashioned, suggesting that we ask youth for advice on how to make it more appealing.
We received almost 300 suggestions, mostly from youth, when we asked for advice. In response, a young activist from Brazil, Myrian Castello, joined our team and she designed our new homepage that was attractive as well as new logos and graphics.
We now had a nice website, but remained a small team with a small following.
I received an email from Alicia Cabezudo who had worked with me on the report during the UN International Decade for a Culture of Peace, 2001-2010. She comes from Argentina, but is working for peace in Colombia. She said she was stepping down from some of her responsiblities and she joined our team to provide a Latin American and Spanish perspective.
I received another email from an old friend, Toh Swee-Hin, that I knew from my work at UNESCO thirty years ago when he won the UNESCO prize for peace education. Swee-Hin said he wanted to devote his energies to the culture of peace, and I asked him to join our team. He came in along with his wife Virginia, and lists of former students, many of whom the two of them had taught when they were on the staff of the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica.
We contacted the former students of Swee-Hin and Virginia and most of them agreed to participate in our initiative. Two of them, Nawal Amjad from Pakistan and Munira Beisenbayeva from Kazakhstan joined our team as youth advisors, bringing new ideas and perspectives. They assisted the translation of the website into Urdu (Nawal) and Kazakh and Russian (Munira) while others helped with Chinese and Korean.
Time was passing, and we decided to launch the project on May 1. We needed partners of the Manifesto that would give weight to our announcement to go to the mass media. I contacted the Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire who had helped us with Manifesto 2000. Although weakened by a hunger strike to protest the genocide of Gaza, she gave us her support and engaged the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Many other major peace and justice organizations joined our partner list, and this week we sent out press releases about this to progressive mass media around the world.
So here we are. The big day has arrived and the Peace Manifesto 2025 is launched into social media. I want to thank everyone who has contributed!
Reflecting about the way we have communicated, I think of the great classical and romantic composers of the 19th Century. They had their pianos to compose and their instruments to perform. What is the equivalent today? We have used emails, zoom and whatsapp conversations, and now more than anything else, the social media.
May they be the instruments of a grand orchestra that will bring us a culture of peace.
That would be the greatest music of all!
Dr. David Adams is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network.
5 May 2025
Source: transcend.org