Peace for our time

I feel sorry for former UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin, for wanting peace for our time. He is often criticized for wanting to appease Hitler.

He wanted peace, WWI had occurred, and he did not want another world war.

We all want peace, it is one of the big wishes we have for the world, world peace. Yet, we do not do that much to achieve it.

Peace and security philanthropy represented only 1% of all philanthropic funding in 2017.

Foreign aid and diplomacy funding in the USA in 2017, was under 50 billion. In the same year, the military budget requested by President Obama before he left office was 582.7 billion.

In Australia, foreign aid, which can help to reduce conflict in the world, is only around 1% of the Australian government's budget. It amounted to less than 4 billion dollars. The military budget in comparison, more than 34 billion in 2017.

Peace work also does not get that much attention from the public.

The war in Afghanistan has been going on for almost 20 years.

We can name some of the countries fighting there like America, Australia, and who they are fighting like the Taliban. Yet, how many of the peace groups working there can we name? In fact, how many of the peace groups in the world can we name, let alone support?

The United Nations Peacekeepers may be the peace group that must comes to mind.

The organization's funding for 2019-2020, 6.51 billion dollars. Not that much when you consider that China's military budget alone, is projected to be 178.2 billion US dollars in 2020.

Peace education does not get that much attention in Australia.

Peace campaigners do not always help.

They can reinforce the idea that peace campaigners are just hippies, without shoes, who go to protests.

There are, however, plenty of specific peace projects that can be done, that do not involve rallies and flower power.

So, if the Australian government {or any government} is serious about world peace, what would they do?

For one, all effective global peace projects should be funded.

The Australian government could establish a fund that could give out two billion dollars a year to peace charities and groups. The ones working on things like early detection of atrocities, helping ex-combatants peacefully reintegrate, and village level dispute resolutions projects.

Boosting foreign aid to strengthen local economies and civil society. Foreign aid can also support gender equality, something that has shown to be good for peace.

Poverty reduction, or better yet eradication, is also good for peace.

Ensuring foreign aid is linked to democracy and a good human rights record. This helps crowd out those countries that give foreign aid without those pre-conditions, given their own poor records.

Expanding peace education.

Australia is a very multicultural society, so lessons from peace education could be taken around the world as people travel back to their home countries.

Peace education means promoting the rule of law and human rights. It can mean lessons on how not to dehumanize groups, something many of us do.

Anger management and self-control, conflict resolution and the power of non-violence. In fact, non-violence has been successful in many cases, even against armed combatants.

Religious education in schools could also give more attention to peace.

There are strong peace traditions of religious groups like the Anabaptists, Quakers and Buddhists.

We often hear about the Christian crusaders but not the Christians peacemakers that tried to peacefully stop the Crusades.

They were against the violence, not thinking it Christian, but anti-Christian.

Peace education's most important lesson may be that peacemaking is legitimate. Peacemaking is not just wishful thinking.

There are evidence-based measures that can be implemented.

At the very least, it is no less reasonable than thinking joining the military and learning to kill is an effective way to resolve conflict. Not even guns have stopped the ongoing armed conflicts in the world.

Yes, we know that there have been many wars in history. We also know that there have been many peace treaties and the end of wars as well.

So, one lesson is that peace is not impossible.

Reducing arms sales is something else Australia could do. Basically, the opposite to what the Turnbull government announced, wanting to become a top arms dealer in the world.

Selling weapons, and critics have already noted this, to countries with poor human rights records is not a good plan.

At the very least, we can do better at protecting people in conflict-zones. Ensuring the protection offered to Australian staff overseas is stronger and that safe zones for civilians, are safe.

We know that violence is not just in war zones. We know that there is violence in homes and communities around the world.

Here again, governments are not that committed to peace.

Poverty has long been linked to crime, but not enough is being done to eradicate it.

Alcohol plays a significant role in violence in Australia. Many of the people getting arrested are under the influence at the time of arrest.

Yet, reducing alcohol does not receive the same attention as smoking does. Alcohol can still be advertised on television, and taxes are not increased to the same extent. In order to reduce the consumption of alcohol. Free and effective services to address excessive alcohol consumption, continues to be inaccessible to many.

Ask the Australian government, or state governments, how frequent and quickly prisoners get to see a psychologist.

Ask them what kind of support prisoners are offered on release, to reduce the chances of reoffending, of committing violence.

Not enough support is offered to them in prison, and they are usually released with little support.

The public's commitment to peace is not that impressive either.

Drugs fuel a significant amount of violence, so using drugs contributes to that.

There is also "privileged violence" discussed by Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We dismiss violence if it is happening to people, we deem less important, in bad parts of the community, we do not visit.

If we really care about peace, we will demand that governments do more to address violence in those areas as well.