Originally published on the CGS blog on February 8, 2008.
I’ve traveled to Brisbane Australia to participate in the annual Global Action Plan to Prevent War (GAPW) conference. GAPW is the brainchild of Professor Saul Mendolvitz, Ambassador Jonathan Dean and the late Randy Forsberg. Each year a group of academics, advocates, and officials gather in some part of the world to review progress on a few of the 68 steps that needed to create the conditions necessary to effectively prevent war. The primary reason I am here is to plan the next steps needed to create a U.N. Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), one of GAPW’s current priorities. However, I’ll try to give you a flavor of the meeting over the next few days. Unfortunately, there’s no internet where the sessions are being held at the University of Queensland so these will be after the fact reviews.
From the onset it is clear how U.S. policies and politics impact the work that we do. Professor Kevin Clements, our host here at the Austrailian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in Brisbane, was interviewed by the national news prior to the meeting. While they were interested in our goals, what they really wanted to know is how the race for president would affect our outcomes?
Kevin introduced my friend Pera Wells, the Secretary-General of the World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA) who gave the morning’s keynote address. She read a message for Hans Blix, WFUNA’s president and former Swedish foreign minister and head of the IAEA. In it he noted that:
“The United Nations and all of its agencies and funds spend about $20 billion each year, or about $3 for each of the world’s inhabitants. This is a very small sum compared to most of the government budgets and tit is just a tiny fraction of the world’s military spending, estimated by SIPRI to be $1.3 trillion in 2007 … or about $184 for every person in the world. These funds could be much better used for peaceful purposes that serve the good of humanity as a whole, for instance helping to save our planet from disastrous global warming.”
More to come later.
