SUGGESTED ACTIONS FOR PEACE AND NONVIOLENT RESOLUTION OF CONFLICTS Write to your head of state, government representative, city council, and local representatives, stating your opposition to the use of violence and war as a means of resolving crisis. Send copies of all of these letters to your local and national media.
Ask for a meeting with them. | Prepare a petition or statement opposing the use of violence to respond to conflict and calling upon political, economic, social, religious, cultural, and military leaders and your fellow citizens to act responsibly, refuse to take part in violence, and work for peace. | Send a press release to the media about every activity you do.
Write letters to the media asking for reporting that includes focus on proposals and suggestions for nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution. | Speak to your family, neighbours, and colleagues about what is happening. Listen to them, to their feelings, to their concerns. Dialogue here is a vital tool, and for dialogue to occur it must be based upon mutual respect and listening. | | Organise discussion and action groups, within your school, your community, over the internet, learning, sharing, discussing and acting together, trying to understand what is behind the conflict and violence, and the impact of violence upon your/our communities and lives, as well as what can be done and what is needed to transcend violence and work actively and constructively for peace. | Reach out and contact local peace organisations, women's groups, human rights movements, youth organisations, and other civil society organisations, encouraging them to become involved and to demonstrate, stand up, and work actively for the peaceful resolution of current conflicts and to the conflicts and crises that gave rise to it. Ask them how you can be involved and offer to help. | | Unions, ship and dock workers, truckers, pilots, airlines, and shipping companies can refuse to transport any and all forms of military equipment, soldiers, and weapons for making war/death. | Organise and carry out peace demonstrations. Show people that there are alternatives. Prepare placards, signs, and hand-outs that show clearly your deep sympathy for all the victims of conflict, and that state categorically your opposition to violence, and that offer suggestions and proposals for what can be done and how others can get involved. | | ACTIVITIES FOR THE LONGER TERM | | Promote and organise dialogues across borders, between communities, cultures, and religions. Do the same within your own community, bringing together people of different backgrounds and religious and spiritual faiths and ideological beliefs. Focus on those elements of your belief and value systems that emphasise and promote values and cultures of peace, nonviolence, respect, understanding, dialogue, unity of life, and the celebration of diversity. | Organise training programmes, teachins, lectures, seminars, educational events, fairs, celebrations, and activities for peace and for teaching, learning and sharing skills in peacebuilding, conflict transformation, community empowerment, reconciliation, and dialogue. | | Create a peace organisation or movement to study, learn, and carry out what can be done for peace and the transformation of conflicts by peaceful means at the personal, interpersonal, social, and global or international levels. | Contact your local school board and ministry of education and call for the introduction of peace education at all levels of the school curriculum. | | Encourage your local city council, state or provincial representatives, and national government to establish a Ministry for Peace or Department of Peace to commit the community and its government to finding effective and constructive ways of transforming violence and promoting healing through peaceful means. | Organise and act to have your village, town, city declared a village, town or city 'for peace'. Then, as a next step, reach out to villages, towns, and cities in other parts of the world, forming 'twin-cities for peace', promoting exchanges, dialogue, and mutual learning across borders, cultures, religions, civilisations, uniting together for peace. | | Refuse to be silent | Speak your truth | | Get involved and take action | Say no to violence and yes to nonviolence | | Insist on what you know to be right | You are the one who can make it real | |
