This year, we had a unique opportunity to honor the work of two Nobel Laureates- President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia (2016), and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) (2017). Friday’s plenary panel of Colombian activists explored forgiveness and rebuilding relationships after periods of violence. We are so glad we could host them. Saturday’s plenary featured Beatrice Fihn and representatives from ICAN. She provided excellent insights into how everyday people are a part of denuclearization and peace processes; from voting for leaders who support the nuclear ban, to divesting from nuclear weapons.

Several themes continued to appear in and around Forum programming, including youth leadership and peacemaking through music and art. We are so glad our partners at youthrive and NYLC brought hundreds of students to hear speakers and learn how to plan for community involvement. Musician and activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez showed the power of youth leadership, and representatives from SDSN-Youth shared stories from their youth changemaker report. Several large scale exhibitions were installed around campus, and the Friday night PeaceMeal concluded with Sinking, a motion arts exhibit by Jenny Schmid and Ali Momeni. Afro-Colombian singer Daira Quiñones gave spectacular musical performances on several occasions, tying together Colombia and Minnesota in song.

At the Forum, it was announced that next year, the Nobel Peace Prize Forum will begin a new chapter by moving the host location to a different city around the world each year. Here at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, we have decided to forge new partnerships to create a new destination gathering and discussion each year. We are still in talks about exactly what this will look like, remaining committed to the ideas of peacemaking and grassroots activism, engaging our community near and around the globe. We hope to see you at the next iteration of the Forum!

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This issue of Open Rivers, anticipating and drawing on the upcoming Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Minneapolis, explores the complex intertwining and paradoxes of water, conflict, and peace. Anything so fundamental and complex as water or peace must, of necessity, contain seemingly contradictory or opposite qualities. The beauty of water is in how it reconciles and provides space for those complex, muddy mixes of qualities and characteristics. The contributors The mixing of the clear and turbid, rural and urban at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers to this volume help us to see the manifold ways in which water, particularly in rivers, is a source of both peace and conflict, life and death, connection and separation, purity and filth, the sacred and profane. At a time when the human impulse to simplify and isolate from these complexities of the world is so apparent, these voices call us to recognize and live into what it means to exist on a planet soaked in water, and as such, a world saturated with paradox.

Holy Water

Thirsty People on a Watery Planet 

Waters of War and Peace 

Swimming in It 

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The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony in Oslo celebrated the work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the twelfth group or individual to be so awarded for work on the nuclear weapons issue.  Their ambitious goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons and they were a key player in the UN’s recent passage of the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons.  The award raises the eternal question about human progress, the prospects for peace, and the very fate of humanity on the planet.  In a period of time when political and cultural shifts seem particularly momentous, it is appropriate to ask if there is hope to escape from the dreadful shadow of nuclear weapons, which has loomed over us all since 1945.  Social and political and economic systems seem very stable and timeless and immutable, until they aren’t.  The Soviet Union was a superpower until one day it disappeared.  Authoritarian governments in the Arab world seemed fixed in stone, until they collapsed in the Arab Spring.  Gay marriage was socially unacceptable until suddenly it was not.  These shifts in social norms are hard to predict, but Beatrice Fihn, in her mid-thirties, speaks of and for a new generation of young leaders who do not see the need, wisdom, or certainly the morality of these weapons of mass destruction.

Her Nobel Lecture, delivered along with the Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow, was a rousing call to action to rid the world of nuclear weapons, warning that we are “one tantrum away” from a potential nuclear strike.  The nuclear story will end some day, she warned, with either the end of these weapons or the end of us.  It is more complicated than that, since even without the weapons, our knowledge of how to make them will always be with us, and even with the most primitive weapons, humans can wreck unimaginable horrors (it just takes longer to do them).  A full legal ban would not guarantee that some rogue nation did not possess a well-hidden stash of the weapons, or that a new international crisis would not prompt a chaotic scramble to re-acquire the weapons.  But there is little doubt that we should move toward a world free of these weapons or at a minimum, far fewer than we currently have. Though never perfectly safe, such a world would be immeasurably safer than the one we are in now.  Exactly what kind of military policies and goals we should pursue, and how to move toward them, will be part of the nuclear security dialogue sessions this coming May and June, co-sponsored by the Nobel Peace Prize Forum and the Foreign Policy Association, and funded by the Carnegie Corporation. We look forward to sharing the results and insights from those discussions at the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Minneapolis on September 14-15th.

Although this goal of a nuclear-free world might seem Quixotic, we have seen dramatic progress over the last thirty years, as the graphic below demonstrates.

Over the course of the last 70 years we have seen first terrifying increases, and then dramatic decreases in the number of nuclear weapons deployed around the globe since they reached the insane peak of over 64,000 such weapons in the late 1980s.  We are now at slightly less than 10,000, which is still much too high, but less than one-sixth of the previous level.  This is huge progress, for which we should be glad and on which we can keep building, even if the prospects for great power diplomacy on that front appear dim in the next few years.  The priority in the short term will be to keep the pressure on and prepare the foundation for the next round of U.S.-Russia arms reductions talks once there is leadership that is more open to this way of thinking in Moscow and Washington.

In the remarks delivered by the laureates, and the Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, there were frequent appeals to the nuclear powers and their allies to sign the nuclear ban treaty.  So far 54 countries have signed it, and only three have ratified.  Interestingly, Norway itself has not signed the Nuclear Ban treaty, even though it was one of the original proponents of the “Humanitarian Pledge” and nuclear disarmament efforts that led up to the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty’s passage in the UN this July.  But as part of NATO and a close ally of the U.S., Norway has chosen now to support the “nuclear umbrella” concept whereby it gains some level of the security afforded by an extension of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The current Norwegian government has taken a more hawkish stance on the world stage, recently purchasing 52 F-35 fighter jets from the U.S., at a cost of $8.4 Billion. The increased tensions with Russia are fueling concerns about potential Russian expansion of its sphere of influence into the Baltic region.  Having once been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany, Norway remains uneasy about letting its guard down too much.

The Norwegian Foreign Minister,in opposition to the Nobel Committee’s decision, did not attend the award award ceremony, but the current Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg was there, and the camera panned to her repeatedly when the calls were made for countries to support the nuclear ban treaty.  In its choice of Peace Prize laureates, the Nobel Committee sometimes directs its message at their own government, and in this case to all the nuclear states as well.  Will they listen?  Beatrice Fihn met with Prime Minister Sohlberg on December 11th, but there was no big announcement of a sudden change of heart. B ig changes do not appear imminent, but, as we have seen, it is always difficult to predict when big changes in policy and values will happen.

The presence in Oslo City Hall of some of the hibakusha, the Japanese survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was powerful.  For them, the change cannot come soon enough.  It is almost unimaginable to think of what they went through.  Humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty, short-sightedness, and violence.  But we also sometimes get it right. In spaces like the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, and in City Hall in Oslo on December 10th each year, we participate in part of building a better future, one built on kindness, patience, and hundreds of years of hard-fought wisdom. Hundreds of years from now I think people will look back and see these efforts as laying the groundwork for a more peaceful and just society and world order.  The pompous posturing and petty political dynamics that seem to so preoccupy us these days will be forgotten, or viewed with a certain bemused puzzlement by future generations (who will almost certainly still have to deal with whatever future version of that political pettiness still exists).  But I am confident they will admire the efforts of all those people, like the grassroots organizers of ICAN, and the wise, patient, and long-sighted diplomats working to address the challenges of climate change and nuclear threats, and be grateful for their tireless efforts to bequeath to future generations a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world.

People are tired of war and injustice, and ready to do the hard work of slowly and patiently addressing the big challenges we face. I am confident that the visions forwarded by the Nobel Peace Prize laureates are the future, not the kind of selfish, fearful, and violent behavior that is so often in the headlines. These kinds of venal behaviors, these aspects of human nature, will remain with us undoubtedly. But they will be countered by the institutions and frameworks and values being developed and strengthened in places like the UN and celebrated by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  We all look forward to being part of those efforts in the months, years, and decades ahead.

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This year, in addition to putting together the program for this September’s Nobel Peace Prize Forum, we have had the opportunity to help facilitate a set of dialogue sessions on the challenge of nuclear security in the 21^st Century.  On May 31^st at the United Nations in New York and June 7 & 8^th at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, experts from around the world gathered for two high-level dialogues that responded to the recent Nuclear Security Summits and the current UN negotiations on banning nuclear weapons.  Working with the Foreign Policy Association and Norwegian Nobel Institute, and funded by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, these discussions took on the crucially important topic of nuclear security in a time of dramatic political change and instability in the international arena.  Participants explored the path forward toward greater security of nuclear materials and next steps on arms control talks, including the current nuclear weapons ban negotiations taking place at the United Nations.

Speakers at the meeting at the United Nations in New York included:

• Senator Richard Lugar (click here for a link to video of his remarks)
• Ambassador Laura Holgate, Harvard’s Belfer Center
• Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
• David A. Hamburg, President Emeritus of the Carnegie Corporation of New York
• Maleeha Lodhi, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations
• Hahn Choong-hee, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations
• Vladimir K. Safronkov, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations
• Jan Kickert, Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations (click here for a link to video of his remarks)
• Christopher A. Ford, Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the National Security Council
• Toby Dalton, Co-Director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Nuclear Policy Program
• Kier Lieber, Georgetown University
• Daryl Press, Dartmouth College
• Mark S. Bell, University of Minnesota

Speakers at the Nobel Institute in Oslo included:

• Olav Njølstad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute
• Yukiya Amano, International Atomic Energy Agency, Director General
• Erlan Idrissov, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan
• Lassina Zerbo, Executive Secretary, Preparatory Commission of Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
• Chris Hobbs, Associate Professor of War Studies at King’s College London
• Kenneth N. Luongo, President and founder of the Partnership for Global Security
• Jacek Kugler, Professor, Claremont Graduate College
• Laura Holgate, Fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center, Former US Ambassador to IAEA
• Tariq Rauf, former Coordinator, Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle at the IAEA
• Elena K. Sokova, Deputy Director, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
• Målfrid Hegghammer, Associate Professor, University of Oslo
• Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, Senior Fellow and Head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), New Delhi.
• Anatoly Diyakov, Professor of Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and founding Director of the Center for Arms Control Studies
• Nils Bøhmer, Managing director of the Bellona Foundation

The Nobel Peace Prize Research Institute produced two nice synopses of the talks, which can be accessed here.

Given the robust debate and progress made with these two sessions on nuclear security, we will be building on this year’s talks, and picking up on several of the key issues identified at these sessions when we reconvene in New York and Oslo in 2018.  Given the need for new perspectives on these global challenges, and in looking toward the development of new leadership in the nuclear field, we will be inviting a set of young practitioners and scholars from government, non-profit, and academic institutions from around the world to pick up the torch of these dialogues.

For the third high-level dialogue, to take place in New York the week of May 27^th, 2018, we will explore the dynamics of great power politics and nuclear policy, particularly U.S.-Russia-China relations, in shaping a new regime around nuclear security and disarmament for the 21^st Century. This first round of dialogues focused primarily on the implementation and strengthening of the nuclear security regime, in the wake of the Nuclear Security Summits and Pres. Obama’s Prague agenda.  These security initiatives are crucial to the ongoing work of minimizing risks of nuclear materials falling into the hands of extremist non-state actors, and safeguarding the whole range of nuclear materials, under both civilian and military control.

But these efforts on many fronts, whether it is in relation to the militaries’ nuclear stockpiles, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), or the Iran or North Korea nuclear programs, all hinge on greater cooperation between the great powers.  The high-level dialogues in Oslo in June 2018 will examine the Humanitarian Pledge and efforts toward disarmament.  We will report out the cumulative results of these dialogues with a panel discussion at the 30^th Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum, to be held in Minneapolis on September 21-22, 2018.

The work of peacemaking and regime-building takes place slowly, day by day, mostly under the radar, and beyond the noise of the daily news and headlines.  It is in this difficult, painstaking work, however, that our greatest hopes lie, and we will continue to engage in this work in the months and years to come.

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It ranks as an impressive testimony to international cooperation, scientific know-how, logistical expertise, and “ordinary heroism.” As one of the few “good news” stories of the day, it was barely a footnote to yesterday’s “bad and getting badder” headlines. When Syrian chemicals killed and sickened hundreds just a year ago, it would have been considered laughably unlikely. And any talk of it being completed ahead of schedule would have been rightfully ridiculed. What is it? 

Of course, the notable event is the destruction at sea of all existing Syrian chemical weapons. 

A lot has happened for the better in the past year. After unleashing the toxins on civilians last July, Syria admitted that chemical weapons existed and had been used. In subsequently signing and ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention under intense international pressure last fall, Syria allowed the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to oversee events that culminated in yesterday’s good news. Despite the harrowing challenges of transporting Category 1 chemicals across bloody, conflict-ridden territory, the OPCW loaded them without incident onboard a Danish ship, which then sailed half way across the Mediterranean to an Italian port.

In Italy the cargo was transferred to the U.S.-owned container ship Cape Ray. Outfitted with technology which could safely destroy its hazardous cargo of sarin precursors and mustard gas, the Cape Ray retired to international waters to carry out its duties. Now neutralized but still considered hazardous, the residual chemicals will be sent for disposal in Finland and Germany.

Although it is rather easy to name the countries and agencies involved in this complex feat, it is not easy to estimate the number of human hands which have contributed to the successful outcome. Many of those hands belong to ordinary dock workers, data analysts, sailors, technicians, and inspectors who likely do not consider themselves heroes. If asked about their work, like heroes everywhere they probably would shrug their shoulders and say they were simply doing their job.

There remains another riddle. Of the six countries (Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea, and South Sudan) who remain outsiders to the world’s commitment to eliminate these indiscriminate weapons, which will be the next country to step forward? The OPCW is not alone in recognizing that bringing pressure to bear on these six will require ordinary citizens to vigorously voice their abhorrence regarding the production, storage and use of chemical weapons. That act doesn’t sound like heroism either, but it is.

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Smooth transitions are important in the life of every organization, and the recent announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Institute regarding its new Director Olav Njølstad is a case in point.  In the same vein, we at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum have an announcement of our own.  After thoughtful consideration, I have concluded that it is time for me to hand the reins of the Forum over to its next leader. 

In early 2011, I was deeply honored to become the Executive Director of the Forum as it was entering a new phase of its life.  At that time I knew that the Forum’s mission – to inspire peacemaking by celebrating the work of Nobel Peace Prize winners – was both worthy and necessary.  The world feels woefully short of inspiration.  People of all ages yearn for the opportunity to reflect on these luminaries called Nobel Laureates, to see their own lives in a new light, and to pursue new paths.

As my initial two year commitment to the Forum stretched into a fourth year, it became time to take a deep breath.  I find it deeply satisfying that the Forum’s growth and impact have been so substantial.  Yet — and this is the beauty of a robust vision in the service of a great mission — the Forum has in no way reached its full potential.  There are programmatic enhancements, academic partnerships, community relationships, and virtual expansions that promise even greater mission success in the future. 

The search for a talented, visionary, passionate new leader who will capitalize on those possibilities and build on the Forum’s success is now underway.  Should you know of someone who would be a great fit for this position, please do let us know. 

In September I will wrap up my work at the Forum, warmly welcome the new Executive Director, and then act upon a deferred dream of conducting historical research in Northern Ireland.  The future will unfold in unpredictable ways thereafter, and I am eager to see what professional challenges it holds.  It will be a pleasure to sit in the audience at the 2015 Forum and become a recipient of the life-changing inspiration that Nobel Laureates bring to us all. 

Warmly,

Maureen

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“BEIRUT — With its latest deadline days away, Syria is close to eliminating its stockpile of chemical weapons, monitors said Tuesday, an improbable accomplishment in the midst of civil war that is likely to diminish further the possibility of international intervention.

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