Thoughts About the Conference Theme
The theme for this year’s UN Day Peace Conference is “Community, Diversity, and Peace” Integrating Inquiry and Action.” Making this very general phrase accessible for thinking, brainstorming, and picking topics will itself require some brainstorming.
First, it might be helpful to know that the full name of the planning committee is “The Committee for the Study of the Understanding of Community, Diversity, and Peace”; it is devoted to efforts to promote closer communities, better toleration, and workable peace-building techniques.
Second, the theme emphasizes:
* Inquiry means becoming informed: learning, knowledge, discovery – but about what? Being informed means knowing background, facts, strategies, past and current efforts and outcomes about real situations of whatever kind. Acknowledging that problems are complex, not black-and-white, and that no one person or one solution is going to be right.
* Action: how to act, what to do, who is already acting, what can be done, what is needed; of course these are closely related to and dependent on the results of inquiry.
Third, any considerations of peaceful relations must also be concerned with basic living conditions for all, so human rights, economic justice, and civil stability are necessities. These can be related to almost any problems in society, personal, domestic or international. Since we can all relate to this at some level, it is a good starting place to learn what the United Nations’ goals are. Although there may be objections from some instructors, there are very good foundational articles in Wikipedia which give overviews of the UN and human rights and are more accessible than tackling the myriad possibilities of the web in general.
Fourth, students should know that we do not expect them to solve any problems, but rather to think about and talk about what is meaningful to them. Here it is useful to have them read past winning essays on the site; they are many and varied. Another wonderful source is the NPR (National Public Radio) series “This I Believe,” accessible through any search engine. It is a forum for citizens to write short essays to be read on the radio about basic beliefs, mostly having to do with human relations.
Be sure to read the updated Introduction and Instructions page on this site and see the links at 2008 Readings. The 2007 readings are good sources too.
Good luck with this challenging project; be sure to email questions and suggestions to me.
Wendy Scott
Peace Essay Contest Coordinator