Thanks, John, for taking the time to offer your interesting and thought-provoking perspective on the past, present and future of RJ in relation to peacemaking. Here at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, we have not chosen to embrace the terms and definitions of what you call “Active Peace.” Indeed we have our own ways of employing the terms “peacebuilding” and “conflict transformation,” and we trust that our 20-year history of popularizing and using such terms speaks for itself without our debating whether your preferred definitions or ours are the best. In short, may we all let our work speak. Thank you for your decades of work on behalf of Active Peace.

In 1996-97 I was Secretary of the UN Working Party on Restorative Justice. Once I had determined to my own satisfaction the answer to the above question, I left that position, plus my position in Vermont’s new Restorative Justice programming, and founded the Campaign for Equity-Restorative Justice (CERJ) as an international consortium of practitioners, theorists, trainers, analysts, and commentators dedicated to pursuing Restorative Justice from a more radical perspective.

Some seven years and tens of thousands of articles, correspondence, etc., went by, and we finally reached clearness on re-naming our consortium John Woolman College of Active Peace. You can ask John Braithwaite about this … he was part of it. Our work culminated with an innovative PACT workshop at the United States Maximum Security Prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Robert Yazzie was one of the lead trainers at that event, where 40 prisoners were trained in the AVP (Alternatives to Violence) method, in Restorative Justice, and in traditional Dineh (Navajo) peacemaking. Ironically, this training was funded by the George W. Bush White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

In more recent years I have reached clearness on some other theoretical statements about Restorative Justice which are designed to eliminate confusion on some of the terms we use. One of the biggest problems is that, after Lederach began to use it wrong, many people refer to Restorative Justice as “peacebuilding”. It is not — it is a sub-set of peacemaking, which is also known as conflict transformation. The other huge conceptual problem is the use of the term “conflict resolution” but we seem to gradually be getting away from that.

Please reference my article ‘Justice as Active Peace’ in the June, 2012 issue of Contemporary Justice Review, the journal of the Justice Studies Association. Also please read the further theoretical statement below, on the five stages of development toward Active Peace. I am currently working on some practical Restorative Justice oriented workshop approaches for white people to work among themselves in eliminating the roots and causes of racism, also incorporating some techniques of Theater of the Oppressed.

Many kinds regards,

John Wilmerding
former Secretary (1996-97)
United Nations Working Party on Restorative Justice

Excerpted from the forum Peace and Collaborative Development (2009):

Presented here, for comment and discussion, are the five developmental stages toward Active Peace.

[0. ‘Surface’ — conformity without question. Unconsciousness, unawareness, denial, or opposition to issues of social conscience involving violence, oppression, subjugation.]

1. ‘Aquiescence’ — You know there is something wrong, but take no action, or it doesn’t affect how you live your life. Your response is to remain ‘quiet’ to others and within yourself. “Things have always been this way … there is nothing that I or anyone else can do to change them.”

2. ‘Pacifism’ — You are no longer quiet within yourself. Your discomfiture with violence, oppression, etc. begins to affect how you live your life. You might turn the other cheek in a fight, for example. You are likely to witness to others (and to yourself) that organized violence and oppression is wrong.

3. ‘Passive Nonviolent Resistance’ — Many or all of your private decisions become influenced or governed by conscience. ‘Conscientious objection’. You make changes in your own behavior by reasons of conscience but are not necessarily social about it, or don’t publicly, systematically cite your actions or your reasons for them. It’s also akin to the concept of ‘standing aside’ or of ‘abstaining’ on a vote.

4. ‘Active Nonviolent Resistance’ — You take social leadership in attempting to thwart the forces of violence, oppression, and subjugation, or join with others who do, publicly, and attempting to spread the word about the initiative and get others to take part. ‘Standing In The Way’.

5. The triad of ‘Active Peace’:

5A. ‘Peacemaking’ — the transformation of conflicts away from violence, oppression, and subjugation by social and political means. Mediation, conferencing, circles peacemaking, and kindred ‘encounter’ forms. ‘Workshop’ methods such as AVP can also be effective. There are hybrid forms (encounter/workshop) such as HROC, a spinoff of AVP in Rwanda.

5B. ‘Peacekeeping’ — Nonviolent Accompaniment. Need not be organized or public in its motivations, but is more effective when it is done publicly, and the reasons are publicized. [Not what the UN does with guns and uniforms, though they call it that.] Most well-know exemplars are Nonviolent Peaceforce, the proposed Canadian Civilian Peace Service, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Muslim Peacemaker Teams. “Why are the missiles called peacekeepers when they’re aimed to kill?” — Tracy Chapman

5C. ‘Peacebuilding’ — Sustainable Development — providing for human needs so that the associated conflicts involving sustaining life (land, water, food, health care, etc.) are ameliorated or eliminated. Fair Trade as opposed to ‘”free trade”. Local economic initiatives. Local alternative currencies. Barter economies. ‘Organic’ agriculture. Methods of redistribution of wealth, including economic stimuli, may be useful on the way to more synergistic outcomes where the weal is more naturally held and distributed in common.

One interesting aspect of the five-stages theory seems to be that the next one only becomes visible or understandable to you once you have attained the one before. In this way, each stage represents a ‘perspective’, both individual and social, and social ‘organisms’ can be said to progress through the stages as well as individual ones.

Another dynamic is that, for various psychological reasons I won’t go into here, people or social groups can vary in how they move through the stages, and sometimes regress. However, my understanding is that one one has a firm purchase on a stage, retrogression becomes much more unlikely. Human beings and social organizations are very complex, however, so there is still much more to learn about how to bring everyone into higher stages. Education about these things is both inevitable and necessary.

Of the five stages, only Active Peace — stage V — can accurately be interpreted as ‘the ocean of light flowing over the ocean of darkness.’

Congratulations and acknowledgements go out to Gray Cox for first writing about Active Peace, and to Johan Galtung for his work in refining the development of the triadic theory — peacemaking, peacekeeping, peacebuilding. Thanks also to our colleague Howard Richards for his conceptual and theoretical treatise on Peacemaking, and his many other wonderful writings.

Incidentally, many peace studies and conflict transformation programs throughout the world use these ‘triadic’ terms interchangably, and therefore inaccurately and misleadingly. Of those who do, the ones most likely to do so are those influenced by governmental or corporatist entities and agents.

It is crucial that these terminologies be used accurately and consistently in order that humanity as a whole might progress toward Active Peace — or alternatively (as some see it) recover Active Peace as our natural state.