One of the events of 2009 that I found to be among the more surprising, was the decision by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to award Barack Obama the Peace Prize. The man had barely been in office for one year when he was awarded and the most he had achieved in the area of peace was to formulate an initiative for nuclear disarmament. Was the state of the world really so awful that there was now only good intentions left to promote?

Some voices were fiercely critical of the decision. The Irish peace campaigner and 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire was quoted in a New York Times article as saying: “They say this is for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples, and yet he continues the policy of militarism and occupation of Afghanistan, instead of dialogue and negotiation with all parties to the conflict. … The Nobel committee has not met the conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will, where he stipulates it is to be awarded to those who work for an end to militarism and war and for disarmament.”

The committee obviously wanted to influence future events, a “preemptive peace strike” if you like, but what they got was instead a decision by their laureate to increase US troops in Afghanistan only weeks after the prize ceremony. It started to smell like a major embarrassment for the people in Oslo.

It is not the first time that the The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is in the eye of the storm, but what seems at first sight to be an institution that has lost its compass, may actually be an institution in perfect sync with its time. A quick look at the list of laureates reveals that it has seldom in recent years awarded individuals or organizations where peace is at the core activity or issue (with the shining exception of the Finnish mediator Martti Ahtisaari in 2008). Undoubtedly Grameen Bank, Al Gore or Wangari Maathai deserve awards for their work, but what the committee actually states between the lines by constantly refraining from giving the prize to peace organizations is that there are none worthy the prize. Or even worse: that it is undesirable to work for peace in an organized manner. I have to go back over twenty years, to 1997 and the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, to find a good example. Surely there must be other similar organizations whose actions have made an impact during the last twenty years? I can think of a few.

I would say that this tendency is quite symptomatic for our time, in which the peace efforts worthy of promotion seem to be such that are handled by armies or police forces, trough “humanitarian intervention”, with ”peace-keeping” and “rapid deployment” as keywords. The Orwellian newspeak classic ”war is peace” has perhaps never seemed more relevant than today where peace is “waged” trough warfare, where peace no longer seems to be synonymous with non-violence, disarmament and peace building.

It was when I visited the Nobel Peace Prize Gallery at Le Mémorial in the French city Caen in August that I was first struck by this ambiguous approach to the issue of peace. Right from the start the Peace Prize Committee awarded military people such as Theodore Roosevelt, who received the prize in 1906, side by side with pacifists and humanitarians, such as Carl von Ossietsky, the German journalist who became a pacifist after the first world war and who subsequently promoted peace relentlessly trough activism and his writing (When he received the prize in 1935 he was incarcerated by the Nazis and could not come to Oslo. He died three years later from the tuberculosis he retrieved in the concentration camps). In reality the Nobel Peace Prize never was a stand for pacifism, even though pacifists were sometimes awarded. But that was quite a long time ago.

Some, as Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine, sides with the people in Oslo in when it comes to Obama being given the prize. I don’t. Instead I ask myself why it seems so difficult to promote the Ossietsky’s of today.

Photo:  Carl von Ossietsky in a concentration camp. Deutsche Bundesarkiv, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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The EITI deals exclusively with industries that extract natural resources such as oil, natural gas, diamonds or other minerals and the states that have these resources on its soil. The idea is that this process would disclose corruption and unfair deals that are not benificient to the public in these countries and that contracts between companies and states can be re-negotiatiated if necessary. The Guardian now reports that EITI has approved its first two members: Liberia and Azerbaijan and that it already has renegotiated contracts in Liberia:

Liberia, rich in mineral wealth, was until 2005 one of Africa’s most notorious killing fields. The first peace-time president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, decided early on to sign up to the EITI. Its inaugural report reveals that the main contractor, the Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal, was asked to renegotiate its initial contract after analysis suggested it had been negotiated with the company rather than the country’s benefit in mind. Now the taxes it pays are the main source of mineral-related revenue for the government.

The report also revealed a payment the company had made but the government had not received. And it exposed other companies that had not reported at all, and other payments that had apparently been made, but not received. This, it said, generated local comment and inquiry.

EITI’s model seem to be one way out for countries that have been bogged down in corrupt practices and plagued by plundering and injustices. It will be very interesting in the coming years to see wheter it will work for other countries as well.

Watch video from EITI

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I have previously mentioned the notion of utopia as one of the starting points for my exploration of the alternatives to today’s society, with the viewpoint that even the simplest idea for change has to be imagined, evaluated and planned before being brought into play. In this video, which was recorded at the University of Buenos Aires at an unknown date and uploaded to Vimeo, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds me of another aspect of this classical term in much need of re-invention; “The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible, that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not a kind of a free imagination. Utopia is a matter of innermost urgency. You are forced to imagine it, as the only way out.” Utopia, in other words, has to grow out of, not only the possible, but also the limitations, the situation at hand. In many situations the ideas that will change a part of the world can not even be imagined. It has, by necessity, to be created here and now, as when Argentinian workers saw it necessary, as a means to survive, to take over and cooperatively run their workplace after its owner had abandoned it as a result of the country’s grave economic crisis in 2001.

Jon Brunberg

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You may argue that we have already fulfilled parts of his vision of the perfect society. That we have developed democracy and spent a lot of efforts building institutions to defend human rights and secure peace that goes further than More could have even imagined.

You may argue that most people in this world have a higher level of freedom, education and income than More’s Utopians.

And still: all these checks and balances, the riches and the freedom is granted only for a minority of the world’s population. There is appalling poverty and starvation in this world. Torture and human rights abuses committed every day. An enormous destruction force that unleashed could wipe out humanity. Corruption and abuse of power.

I do believe that we need to test and use new models, strategies and tools to reduce the suffering in the present and pave way for the transformations that our societies will go trough in the future. New ways of organising our societies and distribute our wealth, new ideas how democracy can be further developed, new models for power sharing and conflict resolution and new strategies for tackling poverty, disease, human rights abuse and environmental issues. In short: ideas for change.

The good news is that hundreds of thousands are already working with social innovation, in theory as well as in practise. My task as an editor for Ideas for Change will be to dig up the most interesting of those projects from a variety of internet-based sources. It is going to be a truly delightful task that I expect to be as enlightning for me as I hope it will be for yourself.

Jon Brunberg

Stockholm 30 Sep. 2009

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