Governing Peace: Global Rationalities of Security and UNESCO's Culture of Peace Campaign

Abstract

IntroductionThis essay is concerned with the relationship between governance and peace, and explores how campaigns for are being developed on scales. Keeping in mind that international agencies have history of rendering legitimacy for the deportment of other powerful agents, we examine one international organization that mobilizes initiatives. We illustrate how these initiatives constitute multitude of plans to shape the conduct of individuals, groups and populations for the future. This organization is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It serves as powerful example for illustrating how is conceptualized and rendered as problem of Specifically, we analyze how UNESCO's Culture of Peace program governs through what we call global rationalities of These are rationalities or ways of thinking that are developed, disseminated and embodied in diverse range of activities across the globe, including programs of action, training and capacity-building and the dispersion of information. Through interviews conducted with UNESCO policy and research personnel1 and through an examination of archival and policy documents, international declarations and plans of action, our analysis points to the ways in which international campaigns for a culture of are based upon orientations that attempt to make particular individuals and groups responsible for acquiring certain kinds of values associated with peace and security. These campaigns are future-oriented and call for (governed) spaces of education and institutional capacity training, and the circulation of information to prepare minds and bodies for particular notion of peace. In light of the current wars, violence and conflicts that besiege lives and livelihoods, the processes of governing force us both to interrogate the contradictions that inhabit efforts and to offer alternative thinking about and collectivities of peace.Peace and GovernanceWhy is it that we hear or read so much about peace now? Some groups might say that it is related to the recent and heavy deployment of military forces in countries across the globe which seductively appear under the banner of peace-keeping. Other groups might claim that it is tied to the sheer volume of individuals annihilated (such as the estimated 800 000 people in Rwanda over short period of weeks in 1994) and the large numbers of people left homeless and suffering from hunger and abusive treatment as consequence of recent ethnic conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and other sites. Many more claims could be recounted on the events relating to peace. However, in political climate where there is an increasing demand for (Hudson 2003) and move towards new individualization of security (Rose 1999:236), peace-related events are often reckoned as guarding against future misfortune. Within economic orientations of neo-liberalism-especially those that foster investing in oneself as way of taking responsibility for one's personal and that of one's children or family-there are efforts to act upon social and cultural environments in an attempt to secure the problematic zones and the life of population. Such endeavours aim to reduce the future likelihood of conflicts and threats to security, and often involve promoting particular understanding of and avenue for peace. This notion of not only becomes associated with the problem of but is used as defence of certain plans and rationalities. Within this context, as social justice issue concerned with resolving the problems of poverty, unequal access to resources, and social conflicts undergirding the economy remains marginal to those conceptions of which are primarily concerned with the preservation of As evident in the sections that follow, we demonstrate how is governed by rationalities of …