There is a growing peacebuilding community internationally, and we should strengthen that movement.

We established the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict as a worldwide civil society-led network to build a new international consensus on peacebuilding and the prevention of violent conflict, linking local, national, regional and global levels. The network was established four years ago in response to a UN report on the prevention of armed conflict, organised itself through 15 regional networks worldwide, and held a large international Conference at the UN last July in New York. One of our aims was to give a voice to the peacebuilders in the world and to make visible to governments and the UN that civil society has a crucial role to play in ending civil war and building peace !

We can and should broaden and strengthen our global network:

• By inspiring ideas like Departments of Peace: how to inspire groups in many more countries to work towards such Departments, but link it as well to countries in conflict regions that already have Ministries for Peace or Reconciliation.
• By organising ourselves better: for instance, involving the thousands of people that organise activities around September 21st, the UN International Day of Peace, in a more structured way in the work of peacebuilding.
• By establishing new partnerships: for instance, with parliamentarians, governments and the United Nations. I attended some months ago an international conference on Parliamentarians and the Prevention of Conflict. I was especially impressed by one regional network of Parliamentarians from the Great Lakes Region in Africa. The so-called Amani Forum (“Amani” is peace) links parliamentarians from the seven countries from the Great Lakes, a group of some 650 parliamentarians. They build the capacity of parliamentarians to engage in peacebuilding and undertake missions to one of the countries.
• By focusing more on peace, the prevention of conflict, and HUMAN security: as many governments are convinced we should do. We visited some 40 embassies to the UN in New York, from the Scandinavian countries to Chile, Costa Rica, South Africa, Kenya, Philippines and many more, finding that there is a far larger constituency, also from governments, for peace! With new Presidents such as Oscar Arias from Costa Rica and president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf from Liberia we could have more Champions of Peace!
  

We believe we should work together towards a global movement for peace: People Building Peace, with involvement of peacebuilders from all over the world, women groups, religious groups, parliamentarians, youth for peace and many, many more, including the groups promoting the establishment of Departments of Peace – organised in national chapters, uniting all the committed people working for Peace!!

* Paul van Tongeren is Executive Director of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC ).