Conflict is inevitable. War is not.
Donate

Get Updates

 
Home / Learn More / The BW Blog

Parkdale Peace Gathering

Winslow Myers's picture
By Winslow Myers on June 07, 2011

Elaine Hallmark, the President of the Board of Directors of Beyond War, and Winslow Myers, Board Member and author of “Living Beyond War,” attended the first Parkdale Peace Conference, held in the foothills of Mt. Hood on the weekend of May 13-15. The Parkdale Conference was sponsored by the Jubitz Foundation, which has supported Beyond War in the past. One of its purposes was to gather a group of peace-committed officials from Rotary with peace studies academics from Oregon institutions of higher education and the grass roots focused Beyond War, to explore how we could all help each other articulate stronger models of preventive peace.

The Conference was convened with the following context statement:

Despite dominant social discourses justifying the necessity of war in multiple
contexts, we believe war is obsolete. It is time to deconstruct the social truism
that war is inevitable. There is overwhelming practical and scholarly evidence
that peaceful processes are the better alternatives to waging war. Historically
it has been proven that nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution led to
more just and sustainable solutions. The challenges that an interconnected,
globalized world has brought to us are an opportunity to change dominant
bellicose narratives.



We believe we are at a time in history for a paradigm shift, where it is understood
that a sustainable future depends on the realization of the interconnectedness
of everything. The ultimate goal is to develop strategies transforming global
structures of violence into a structure of nonviolence, and transforming the
culture of war into a culture of peace.



This peace gathering is designed to allow participants from various backgrounds
with extensive experiences an opportunity to examine a wide range
of factors that they feel may address the complex issue of ending war within
a generation. We hope to identify ways and establish an agenda for achieving
peace through a process of networking and dialogue with peace groups, international organizations and universities. not return to the old days of military might but turn to cooperation, communication and dialogue to discover what America’s proper role in the world should be.


The working model that gave some structure to our work together on the sprawling topic of global peace was the format of multi-track diplomacy. We brainstormed ideas within the 8 tracks of that process (and also added a 9th, the arts):

  • government;
  • professional conflict resolution;
  • business;
  • private citizen;
  • research, training and education;
  • peace activism;
  • religion; and
  • funding.

One of the most powerful examples we experienced was the European Union, where the peoples of strongly sovereign nations have painfully ceded some of their independence for the sake of the greater good. This sacrifice of financial and cultural independence was a price worth paying to lessen the threat of violent conflict that had plagued the history of Europe for hundreds of years. Perhaps the international community could explore more deeply the potential of applying such a model to robust protocols of war prevention. By the end of the weekend working groups had formed which confirmed that the creative ideas that bubbled up during the weekend would continue to percolate.  Full report is available here.