Global Forum

Nobel Peace Prize Forum 2018 Recap

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:52:46 +0000

Thank you to everyone who attended the 2018 Forum and explored the Paradoxes of Peace and Water with us. In our 30th year, we continue to feel honored to uplift and bring together so many peacemakers from near and far. This year we had over 70 speakers, presenting on topics ranging from nuclear disarmament to water rights in the Middle East to youth activism. We hope you took away meaningful strategies for building peace in your own communities.

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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The Paradoxes of Peace and Water

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 17:39:23 +0000

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.

The Nobel Peace Prize Forum, taking place at Augsburg University on September 13-15, 2018, will include, among many others, the authors of the five forum articles in this volume. Each explores different dimensions of the complex relationships between humans and water. Water, as the great solvent, carries with it our collective waste, and in washing away our sins, then tells the tale of them. To know how we are doing, we need look no further than the waters around us. Clear waters reflect attentiveness and mindfulness. Polluted waters tell the tale of late industrial capitalism and the collective impacts of what is being called the Anthropocene—stolen lands, removed populations, topsoil erosion, contaminants, PFCs, and eutrophication. In this great rinse and mix of stories, we find room for both hopefulness and grave concern. Today we swim and drink and fish from the river, yet at its mouth in the Gulf lies the hypoxic dead zone, so rich in nutrients that it chokes out all marine life from an area that grows to the size of Connecticut. At the same time (but for different reasons), the Louisiana Delta itself dissolves into the Gulf at a rate of about an acre every two hours. The mixing of the clear and turbid, rural and urban at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers (detail).

As Irene Klaver recounts in her essay, the early Greeks extensively explored these paradoxes of change and constancy; we see variants of these paradoxes in so many aspects of water in our lives today. Economists point to the water-diamond paradox that, despite water’s value, we pay so little for this vital substance. Water is both something wild and civilized, a force that we try to control, yet one that is continually slipping through our fingers. It is at the same time global and local, universal and particular. There is both the great joy of being in water (the “oceanic feeling of oneness”) and the terror of the deep. It is a source of great pleasure, but also of “water torture” and waterboarding. Too much and we drown; too little and we die of thirst. We use it constantly, but instead of being “used up,” it is endlessly recycled.

Holy Water

Given these complex and contradictory qualities of water, it is no surprise then that it is both sacred and profane. From the beginning, humans have gone to the watering hole to dip their cup and drink. We have planted seeds and raised animals and gathered around the table for the communal meal. Terje Oestigaard, in his rich account of the religious significance of water, reminds us of the multiple ways that religious traditions have conceptualized water: as purifier and purified (consecrated); as punishment (flood) and blessing (nourishing rain); as the body of the goddess, a divinity itself with the ability to purify, even as it is contaminated with the untreated sewage of millions of people (as in the case of the Ganges). Oestigaard’s essay, drawing on his fieldwork in Ethiopia and Uganda, delves into the complex theology of water at the headwaters of the Blue and White Nile. The source of the White Nile is seen as flowing directly from heaven—the holiest of waters. In contrast, the Blue Nile is conceived by the local community as not having special religious significance, while the waterfalls and cataracts there are seen as powerful spirits, in need of appeasing, sometimes with blood sacrifice.

Thirsty People on a Watery Planet

Reflecting this theological notion of water as both a divine gift and divine punishment, water is both abundant and scarce. The figure is often cited that only 1 percent of the earth’s water is readily available for human use. But the flip side of that equation is that we get by with using only a fraction of that 1 percent, and that there is still 99 percent of the world’s water available as a reserve. Each year, humans use about 5 cubic kilometers of water; but each year, the earth receives from the heavens 500,000 cubic kilometers of distilled water in the form of rain. The earth’s surface receives in one hour more solar energy than is used by humans in an entire year. In this aggregate sense, our cup runneth over. As with most resource issues, it is a matter not of the total supply, but how access to those resources is distributed and controlled. The global economy produces a superabundance of food and material goods, while over a billion people still live in the absolute poverty of less than $1.25 a day. In the Jordan River Valley, Darfur, or the Aral Basin, water demand far exceeds supply, while wealthy countries and communities enjoy virtually unlimited access to clean water. To meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 (Access to Clean Water and Sanitation) will require providing almost a billion people with clean drinking water, and over 2 billion people with access to sanitation by the year 2030.

This contrast between plenty and water scarcity is being exacerbated by climate change. Al Gore, in his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, characterized it as “a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likewise noted the “the link between climate and security” has “raised the threat of dramatic population migration, conflict, and war over water and other resources as well as a realignment of power among nations . . . the possibility of rising tensions between rich and poor nations, health problems caused particularly by water shortages, and crop failures as well as concerns over nuclear proliferation.” In this issue, noted water scientist Peter Gleick provides us with an update and report on the many water management challenges we face in the twenty-first century and the very real dangers of water conflicts, as well as the ways in which we can mitigate these threats and reduce the chances of water being a trigger, or weapon, of war.

Waters of War and Peace

The research clearly shows that water, as often as not, is the foundation for the diplomatic and negotiated settlement of disputes. The roots of the modern nation-state system are often traced back to the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. It is here that international relations scholars trace the problem of anarchy and the bloody dynamics of geopolitics in the Modern Age. Westphalia established clear lines between sovereign nation-states, but that story, as the Norwegian water historian Terje Tvedt points out, is also one of cooperation and recognition of the complex interconnectedness of communities in seventeenth-century Europe. The negotiations included extensive discussion and agreement on the joint management of shared waterways, particularly the Rhine River. So the Westphalian system is one in which the paradoxical coexistence of war and peace can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Giulia Giordano’s article in this issue shows how water diplomacy, facilitated by a range of regional stakeholders such as Ecopeace, has provided one of the few promising areas for constructive dialogue between Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. These cooperative ventures are rooted in the fundamental need of everyone in the region to have adequate access to clean water and provide one of the few rays of hope in that otherwise deeply troubled region.

In seeking these pools of hope, the paradoxes of water call us to draw on the Greek notion of metis, a kind of artful cleverness, in addressing these political and environmental challenges of our day. In the face of these complexities, we must avoid the problem of over-engineering, or what John McPhee has called “the control of nature.” McPhee, in his discussions of lava flows, the Mississippi Delta, and mud slides, points to this basic problem of the inevitable need for humans to attempt to control nature, in the face of our ultimate inability to do so. Living with paradox requires of us the difficult give and take that stands in contrast to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ mandate to maintain the flow of the Mississippi River at Old River Control at the precise and Congressionally mandated balance of 30 percent flowing down the Atchafalaya and 70 percent down the main stem. Historian Richard Campanella recounts these problems of over-engineering in the quintessentially paradoxical city of New Orleans, half of which is below sea level. New Orleans remains an illogical and magical place, its residents engaged in a defiant and dream-like suspension of disbelief in the face of this engineered vulnerability. And there are great lessons to be learned, both from the problems caused by over-engineering, and in the exercise of metis and hopefulness, by the residents of New Orleans.

Swimming in It

The answer to many of these “problems of Modernity,” we are learning in our meandering way, lies in letting in more water, more mud, more wetlands. In trying to “stay dry,” the city engineers have made the Crescent City, particularly the lower-income and lower-lying neighborhoods, vulnerable to the kind of inundation and destruction experienced during Hurricane Katrina. Paradoxically, to keep the city from drowning, it must let in more water. Irene Klaver invites us to embrace this “fluid” and meandering frame of mind and draw on the wisdom of the river’s slow, steady, circuitous traverse of a landscape. To move toward justice, peace, and sustainability will require a fuller and deeper understanding of how water works and flows. The multifaceted cultural understandings of water in our lives, and a balanced way of living with water call us not to be subjugating or conquering rivers, but dancing with them. We fight each other, we fight nature, we fight water, we fight rivers, trying to tame them and bend them to our will to suit narrowly defined human interests. And in the process, our societies and cities are made more precarious and less sustainable.

The Kenyan environmental and human rights activist Wangari Maathai concluded her 2004 Nobel lecture by reflecting on her childhood experience: I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.

Rivers, as I have learned in taking students out on them for many years now, are patient teachers. They flow endlessly, tirelessly, efficiently, the perfectly complex manifestation of the combination of water, topography, and gravity. The peace that “flows like a mighty river” lies not in the stark divide between black and white, but in the countless shades of brown and tan and grey. It is to be found neither on dry land, nor in the deep blue sea, but in the messiness of mud and wetlands, in the semi-permeability of the letting in of some things and the keeping out of others. Peace is in the both-and, not the either/ or. As the authors in this issue show us, to be at peace is neither to surrender nor to try to walk on water; it is to be in the agonistic space between selfishness and selflessness, to be in the water but afloat, to be both carried by the current but also steering the boat, in the ongoing dance between agency and contingency. In the images of the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers at Prescott, Wisconsin, we see this muddying of the waters. Human development, wilderness of a sort, run-off from the farmlands of the Minnesota River watershed, rail and road infrastructure, all combine to create the turbid and fecund mix of human and natural, primeval and modern that constitutes the waters we must navigate, with metis and a thorough embrace of paradox, if we are to create more just, sustainable, and peaceful communities.

About the Author

Joseph B. Underhill is an associate professor of political science at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN, where he serves as Program Director of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Environmental Studies, International Relations, and River Semester programs. He is the author of Death and the Statesman (Palgrave 2001) and his current research and writing explore democratic practice and sustainability in higher education.

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Nobel Peace Prize Forum Minneapolis 2017 Recap

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Mon, 14 May 2018 19:16:36 +0000

Enjoy this summary from the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Forum Minneapolis. We are proud to look back on last year’s program, honoring the work of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet as well as other peacebuilders and engaged attendees. Now we look forward to what’s in store for 2018!

Come join us on September 13—15!

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Watch the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony, featuring ICAN

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 16:54:30 +0000

The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition on such weapons,” according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee announcement on October 6, 2017.

2017 Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony

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Nuclear Disarmament and the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 21:11:38 +0000

Reflections from Program Director, Joe Underhill, in Oslo December 10, 2017.

The City Hall fills for the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony

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.

A timeline compiled by Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris of the Federation of American Scientists.

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.

The torchlight parade in front of the Grand Hotel in Oslo on the evening of December 10th, the crowd celebrating ICAN, and chanting, “Yes, I Can!”

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Idea | Action, Podcast: Episode 4

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 15:04:36 +0000

Leading up to this year’s forum, the Nobel Peace Prize Forum is collaborating with Changemaker to launch a podcast mini-series featuring some of the speakers. We’ll learn how they came up with their ideas for peace and what steps they took to make a change.

This fourth and final episode features Ulfat Haider. As a Palestinian in Israel, Haider was born into conflict. Despite this, her family raised her to be accepting of and open to everyone, no matter their nationality or beliefs. It was on a trip to Antarctica, after a weeks long journey, that Haider realized the power of going outdoors and facing challenging conditions. Cold and tired, finally at the top of a mountain they named the Mountain of Israeli-Palestinian Friendship, a team of Arabs and Jews found a shared experience. After this trip, Haider decided to lead expeditions with Arab and Jewish youth and women. They hike, camp, climb, and cook together on adventures in the Alps and Himalayas. She is promoting a peaceful coexistence by creating safe spaces for conversations. In addition to these expeditions, she’s program manager of Beit Ha’Gefen, an Arab and Jewish cultural center, and a member of the Access Water team. At the Forum, Haider will participate in a panel discussion concerning the ways experiences in nature can be used for peacemaking and healing. We are very excited to welcome her to the Forum.

Learn more about the Mountain of Israeli and Palestinian Friendship, Beit Ha’Gefen, and Access Water.

The Ideas to Action Podcast is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Listen to the fourth episode:

Music in this podcast is by:

Lee Rosevere – CC BY-NC 4.0

Ingenuity

Josh Woodward – CC BY 4.0

I’m Letting Go (Instrumental)
Shadows in the Moonlight (Instrumental)

Jahzzar – CC BY-SA 4.0

The Shine

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Idea | Action, Podcast: Episode 3

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 20:18:31 +0000

This episode features Yemi Melka. Though not a speaker at this year’s Forum, Yemi is a former Peace Scholar and an Augsburg Alum, and has since been heavily involved with peacemaking projects in her community and beyond. After Yemi graduated from Augsburg College with dual degrees in Chemistry and International Relations, she didn’t know where life would lead her. But she knew that somehow she wanted to use her voice for others. During a gap year after graduation, Yemi became passionate about energy poverty. Millions of people around the world don’t have access to energy, which means they live without light or heat. She wanted to use her skills and education to help. Yemi became a grad student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs where she led a project called SolEnergy. She and a team of students went to her home country of Ethiopia to talk with rural farmers, demonstrate solar irrigation pumps, and better understand problems so they can offer effective solutions.

The Ideas to Action Podcast is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Listen to the third episode:

Music in this podcast is by:

Lee Rosevere – CC BY-NC 4.0 and CC BY 4.0
Ingenuity
Sad Marimba Planet
Southside
Josh Woodward – CC BY 4.0
Bloom (Instrumental Version)

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Idea | Action, Podcast: Episode 2

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:24:04 +0000

This episode features Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin. Growing up in Guatemala, Haslett-Marroquin lived with his family on a small farm. After studying agriculture and business in Guatemala and the United States, he settled in Minnesota, and founded Peace Coffee, a Minnesota-based fair trade company. He also served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Program’s Bureau for Latin America and as an advisor to the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and was a founding member of the Fair Trade Federation. Through all of this, Haslett-Marroquin developed an idea to completely transform farming as we know it. This farm would produce healthy and organic food, regenerate the soil, and help farmers earn a good living. Seeking to turn his plans into reality, Reginaldo needed a team and found support with Main Street Project. Working together on this idea they found a solution centered around one powerful animal – the chicken. This method, known as the Poultry Centered Regenerative Agriculture System, has transformed the fields of food and agriculture. At the Forum, Haslett-Marroquin will lend his view to discussions on the role of worked owned cooperatives in societies around the world. We are very excited to welcome him to the Forum. Listen to this episode to hear more about Reginaldo’s theory for change.

Learn more about Main Street Project.

The Ideas to Action Podcast is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Listen to the second episode:

Music in this podcast is by:

Lee Rosevere – CC BY-NC 4.0
Ingenuity
Josh Woodward – CC BY 3.0 and CC BY 4.0
Border Blaster
Symmetry and the Pocket of Angels – Instrumental
Perfect

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Idea | Action, Podcast: Episode 1

Bettine Hoff Hermanson — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:00:29 +0000

The first episode features Isabel Pérez Dobarro, project leader of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Youth Initiative’s project Arts Twenty Thirty, and a concert pianist. Pérez Dobarro was in law school when she discovered the Sustainable Development Goals- a global initiative set forth by the United Nations for solving the world’s biggest problems. Arts Twenty Thirty uses the arts as a tool to raise awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals, and engages a network of artists committed to sustainable development. Through the initiative, she has organized artistic events in Vatican City, New York, and Madrid, and elsewhere, and has used art to connect with audiences to inspire global change. Pérez Dobarro represented SDSN-Youth at the Winter Youth Assembly, and at the High-Level Debate on the Sustainable Development Goals and at the High-Level Signing Ceremony of the Paris Agreement at the United Nations Headquarters, among other events. She is also the Western European Representative of the Fair Air Coalition organization. At the forum, Pérez Dobarro will participate in several sessions concerning the roles of artists and youth in creating peace, fostering healing, and engaging in dialogue. We are very excited to hear from her, and hope it will inspire others to get involved.

Learn more about Arts Twenty Thirty.

Explore the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Ideas to Action Podcast is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Listen to the first episode:

Music in this podcast is by:

Isabel Perez Dobarro

Lee Rosevere – CC BY-NC 4.0 – Ingenuity

Josh Woodward – CC BY 4.0 – Spirit World

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High-level Dialogue Sessions on Nuclear Security

Joe Underhill — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 20:02:29 +0000

Participants at the High-level Dialogue Session at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, June 8, 2017.

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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