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[home]>[programmes]>[orientation
course]>report>Auditing/Learning Peace
Auditing Peace, Learning Peace
In 1998 when the peace studies programme was being planned, from the
beginning two things were clear in planners' minds - first, the peace
studies programme would be based not only on theories of human rights
and peace, but experiences in human rights and peace activism, in peace
studies. Peace studies would be an act in experiential education; second,
there could not be better way in providing as inputs the direct experiences
of peace activism than to organize each year on a regular basis a public
peace audit exercise whose reports, findings, and recommendations would
become study material in the course.
Thus three courses have been accompanied by three peace audit exercises
whose reports have been made available to the course participants. Classes
have been specifically designed in each course to deal with these reports,
provoke discussions, deliberate on the methodology of auditing peace in
a public manner, and the experiences. Some of the participants became
organizers of later audit exercises, some joined the course as faculty
members, and the idea of assessing the peace building capacity of a society,
the significance of plural constituencies of peace, the dynamics of human
rights content in any peace process, the economic and social issues neglected
in peace process, the early signs of a resumption of conflict, new political
structures emerging after a settlement, the significance and otherwise
of ceasefire in a protracted armed conflict - these and many others -
have be come central in peace studies course. Audits of peace have interrogated
from many angles the central idea in current peace building strategy,
that only states and state-recognized adversaries matter in peace process,
and that the members of a political society constituted in as many ways
are irrelevant for peace.
The first peace audit was held in Dhulikhel, Nepal on 8-11 September
1999 to reflect on the peace processes in Nagaland and the Chittagong
Hill Tracts. The report of the first audit was published as SAFHR paper
5, and the findings formed part of the first orientation course material.
The Peace Audit on Sri Lanka held in Bangkok in 2000 was SAFHR's second
peace audit exercise. The report of the Bangkok audit was published as
part of the course material of the Second South Asian Human Rights and
Peace Studies Orientation Course in 2001 (SAFHR Paper series 8). As these
two reports bring out, the documents submitted for the audit exercise
speak of the complexities of peace politics. They also tell us the need
to gaze at this politics in the long glass of the history of efforts at
peace and the varieties in peace politics and peace activism. In this
sense, a peace audit is not only an exercise in forming historical judgment,
but is also a political-educational task. Ideally therefore its structure
of study, participation, interaction and report should help the participants
in the course in appreciating visions of peace inscribed by justice, and
learning methodologies of peace politics. The third peace audit exercise
was, held in Kathmandu in 2002 on the national and the federal question
in Pakistan with particular reference to the issue of Baloch autonomy,
whose report will be published soon. While the annual peace audit exercises
have features in common and will in time concretize the audit methodology,
each exercise has its own particularity. Thus the peace audit exercise
in 2002 intended to find out how a lack of adequate recognition of the
importance of the national question can put the democratic process of
a polity in peril and how minority rights and national rights sit at the
heart of human rights in this region today. It also aimed to discuss how
these national rights are invariably predicated by cross-border experiences
of South Asia, new wars in the region, and their impact on a country's
democracy. The lessons of participation and deliberations in the third
audit exercise became a part of the third peace studies orientation course.
The themes taken up in the past three audits have reflected the plural
nature of the peace question.
The third orientation course specifically worked on the lessons of the
Sri Lankan peace audit. A one-day workshop was designed to discuss in
details the practice and the significance of holding public audits of
peace, and in particular the dilemmas and the problematic of the peace
question in Sri Lanka.
These audit exercises undertaken by SAFHR have brought out certain rules
and procedures of auditing, which indicate how to improve these exercises.
The rules are namely, transparency has to be combined with confidentiality
and trust, lessons of constitutionalism and federalization with political
dialogue, open sessions with focused working group exercises, concrete
reports with statements of understandings, issues of humanitarianism with
human rights, juridical exercises with reconciliation, and reflections
on the past with charters for future. Hopefully these ideas and methods
will help forthcoming audit exercises.
These audit exercises engage in discussions on the history of the social
and political capacity of peace building in particular societies, humanitarian
issues and their relation to peace building, actors in peace process,
levels in peace activism, constraints and prospects of peace activism,
locating peace constituencies and peace groups, the role of media, women
as peace campaigners, and finally, the concrete linkage between justice
and peace. The findings and recommendations of the audit exercises are
integrated in the syllabus of the peace studies course and are also brought
out as SAFHR Publications.
The central idea behind such a design of the peace studies programme
is that working for peace is the best way to learn peace.
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