Creating a network for peace – 2025
Jane Harries, Peace Education Manager at the Welsh Centre for International Affairs writes:
For over 10 years from the mid-1990s I was an active member of Mothers for Peace (later Women to Women for Peace), a grassroots peace organisation which sought to bring women from countries which were in conflict together to create networks of understanding and peacebuilding. For 2 decades, this small movement created opportunities for exchange and understanding. Relationships were formed and networks built across geographical and political boundaries. Sadly, the organisation was eventually forced to close because of lack of capacity.
Since that time the world has changed. In some ways communication is easier, with a variety of ways of connecting individuals and groups both on and off-line. At the same time the world seems even more polarised and methods of communication can mean that people never get to hear points of view or experiences which are outside their own comfort zone, let alone try to understand them. With global confrontations high on the agenda, there is also a move to increased ‘security’ through militarisation, with very little public dialogue challenging that direction of travel.
In this context, I would like to be instrumental in reviving a 21st century version of Women to Women for Peace – a space where people who would like to build a world based on understanding, peacebuilding and collaboration can come together to share their feelings and views and discuss how more peaceful and sustainable societies can be built from the ground up. These would be spaces where participants would:- Come together on a basis of shared principles and behaviours, based on mutual respect and nonviolence;
- Feel free to express difficult feelings and truths, and be heard;
- Develop methods of critical yet respectful and empathic dialogue;
- Be able to share ideas for challenging unpeaceful and divisive narratives, and to share feedback as to how this has worked out in practice;
- Develop ideas and projects for peacebuilding in and across different contexts.
The idea is not to re-create the wheel, so if this is already being done somewhere else, please do let me know!
If people are interested in working on this project and perhaps developing it into a movement, please contact me at jane.crynwyr@gmail.com
