By Judith Hand. There are myriad reasons—psychological, proximate, and ultimate (biological)—for why we make war. We’ve indulged in this deeply embedded, very bad cultural habit for a very long time, so skeptics are on solid ground to believe that ending it may not be, most likely isn’t, possible. But in Shift: The Beginning of War, The Ending of War I explore how we CAN end war, if we choose to. No biological barrier prevents us from breaking this habit; as with all bad habits, including one as deeply engrained as war, breaking free is a matter of will.
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Once we resolve to act, two kinds of efforts will be required for success, admittedly more simply said than done. We must: 

• stop doing or tolerating things that engender wars (like picking warmongers as our leaders or tolerating poverty). And,
• do things that would prevent wars (like empowering women so we have parity governing, or establishing and fostering liberal democracies that include such characteristics as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, separation of church and state, and most especially, promotion of human rights and dignity).

As the essay below will explain, the unconscious and universally accepted worldview, the paradigm, that underlies war is: Domination of others using force and violence is inevitable and hence to be endured/accommodated/worked around.​ The vast majority of us believe we have always made war and always will. To end war, that paradigm must be eliminated and replaced by another. The essay introduces that replacement paradigm, and then explains how the global community can take action to bring about that replacement.

At this time, however, late 2019, as I update the AFWW website, I find that not everything in the essay will seem useful or relevant. This is particularly the case with specific ideas for how to go about weaning human societies from war. In some respects, the essay should be considered a historical piece. It was written over eight years ago, in 2011, and needs to be understood in the writer’s historical context. In my historical context as a peace advocate.
 
For example:

• In 2003 the women of Liberia had used a great many of the tactics of nonviolent direct action to force the men of the country to sign a peace agreement. One of the leaders soon after was award the Nobel Peace Prize for this accomplishment by the women.
• In 2005, Angela Merkel was elected German Chancellor, and I was encouraged that globally many women were rising to positions of influence and power. Women bring to leadership a concern for children, community, and common good that is essential if we are ever to end wars.
• In 2007, over seventy five women – current and former heads of state, influential ministers, and leaders of inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations—came together at a “Women Leaders Global Security Summit” in the Jumeirah Essex House Hotel in New York City. I attended as a member of the press.  By the end of the meeting they signed a “Call to Action” to shift conversations from National Security to Human Security. That would, of course, eventually include abolishing war.
• In 2013 I was invited, along with ninety-nine other women from around the world involved in peace issues, to a conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  It was organized by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead McGuire along with the Nobel Women’s Initiative. The task was to network and exchange best practices for how to advance global peace. I went there full of growing optimism.
• In 2019 an African American man, Barack Hussein Obama, was elected for the first time as President of the United States, leader of the free world. My optimism about what this suggested about the course of human history was shared by others, who awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

 
That was the backdrop against which I wrote the essay below: "A Proposal to Hasten a Global Paradigm Shift ​for the Security and Well-being of All Children Everywhere."

 Time moved on, and the backdrop changed.  For example:

• In 2014 Russia Invaded and annexed Crimea and subsequently eastern Ukraine. This was the first, and for me shocking, invasion and forceful annexation of land in another nation since WW II.
• In 2016 the citizens of Britain voted to leave the European Union. That peace system, an alliance of many nations was brilliantly crafted after the destruction of WW II specifically to keep the peace. The EU was a united voice with great power to support western liberal democracy. As a general rule, splintering as opposed to unity leads to weakness, so Brexit, as it was called, also alarmed me.
• In late 2016 Donald Trump was elected U.S. President. He has proved to be an engine for retrenchment from liberal democracy and from world cooperation.
• In 2019 the United States, under his leadership, surrenders to an authoritarian state, Turkey, a safe zone in northern Syria for America's allies, the Kurdish People. Turkey then invades Syria and begins ethnic cleansing of the Kurds.

 
The confidence in 2011 that I felt about the forward and upward progress of the global community toward embracing a global peace has taken a hit. The confidence with which I described in this essay the means by which the global community could undertake the serious work of dismantling the war machine has taken a hit. Although the material on paradigm shift is as germane as ever, I considered whether I ought to delete the essay entirely as having too many components that seem wildly undoable in today’s political and social circumstances.
 
But times do change. There will be a U.S. presidential election in 2020. That may set things right again in that great democracy. America may then reach out once more to move history forward and upward, seeking to unite the global community in common cause to deal with climate change for example, a cause that would surely benefit by simultaneous action to construct an enforceable global peace treaty.
 
Arguably the need for global unity to solve the massive problems that confront all nations at this time may also lead us to decide collectively that we must stop spending human and financial resources on war and spend them instead on building a future where our way of life does not include war. If we decide to change the course of history in that positive direction, the information in the essay, outlining some ways to proceed, will once again become relevant. For that reason I have chosen to keep the essay fundamentally in its original form. 

Adapt or die! This Darwinian imperative is arguably truer now than at any time in our brief history on earth.

Many of us look into the years ahead with dread, aware of monumental, self-inflicted problems that seem to be spinning us out of control: poverty that triggers revolution and war, the cruelty of slave and sex trades, the waste of lives due to drug addictions, violence in our homes and communities, the unsustainable consumption of life-sustaining resources. Then there are the potential horrors of newfangled weapons of mass destruction. Global climate change could result in—or trigger—a global pandemic, mass starvation, massive refugee problems, or global economic collapse. Can we adapt? Can we change?
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Our problems are super-sized, many are global in scope. Our disagreements are numerous and severe. A belief that virtually all of us can agree on, however, it is that if we could shape a culture that allowed our children to grow up in safe, healthy, and nurturing communities, we should use our collective wisdom and resources to create that reality. What is meant by security and wellbeing is that we build and sustain communities where children grow up with healthy food and clean water, have access to education to the level they choose, medical care essential to a healthy body, freedom to think and speak freely, and they do not live in fear of outsiders or members of their own community.

Economics and Ending War
​By Judith Hand
Shift Our Economies – it’s an AFWW cornerstone.  The need to shift deals not only with shifting spending on weapons to spending on ending war projects, but shifting spending to other related critical challenges, like restoring and preserving environmental resources. We desperately need money also to deal with nuclear weapon proliferation and with the now unavoidable impacts of global climate change. 

​In Egypt during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising TV footage of surging masses of men leave the impression that the protestors were virtually all male, but this is in part because the men push themselves into the spotlight. Articles from reporters indicate that many women were not only present in Tahrir Square, they made significant contributions. It is arguably possible that the presence of a critical mass of women was in no small part responsbile for the demonstrators’ consistent peacefulness.

​Here is a radical proposition, but one worth consideration. Movements committed to pressuring for any social transformation using nonviolence should, whenever feasible, adopt a controversial but potentially very powerful change in tactics. Rather than mobilize men as the majority participants of marches, sit-ins, demonstrations, work-stoppages and so on, women should be the protestors.

Why? Because this immediately alters the conflict chemistry. The context is no longer a male contest of wills, which provokes emotions that easily escalate into violence. Instead, men who are the enforcers of the system are facing, and threatening, determined women: their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters.

This single change maximally reduces the likelihood that the situation will turn violent. It does not guarantee it. As with all nonviolent direct actions, there will be risks for the activists, perhaps even arrest or beatings. If their opposition is led by a brutal dictator—a Hitler or a Kadafi—the risks may be to life itself.  But women roused to a worthy cause do not lack courage.

In a nonviolence movement, keeping a protest from turning violent greatly magnifies the protestors’ power. As an added plus, it does not require laborious training of men in how to respond nonviolently when attacked, something that is essential to well-planned nonviolent protests where men are going to be the chief protestors; women are already strongly inclined to avoid turning physically violent.
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Consider that the successful U.S. women’s movement to secure the vote was nonviolent...but required determined and courageous women. As a recent, real-world example, study the peace campaign of the Liberian Women’s Peace Movement.

Liberia isn't a "natural" African nation. It was formed when freed slaves from America returned to Africa at the end of the U.S. civil war. This movement didn't last very long, but it resulted in a country with a constitution, a democracy, and a name.

Things did not go well.  Over time, Liberia degenerated into a tyrannical dictatorship, most recently under the presidency of Charles Taylor. In 1999, a "second civil war" broke out. This set off the barbaric use of rape, mutilation, and murder, something seen elsewhere in Africa as well. Some studies indicate that 90% of Liberian girls and women would experience rape in their lifetime.
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After eight years of this mayhem, social activist Leymah Gbowee had a dream one night and when she awoke, she decided to call the women of her church together to pray for the end of the war.

 By the end of the meeting the women had pretty much decided that something more than prayer was necessary. They decided to begin a campaign, a nonviolent campaign, in which they would seek to have an audience with Taylor, to convince him to join in peace negotiations. They would wear white T-shirts and turbans, they would stake out the road along which his caravan drove each day, and they would stake out the market. They would not give up until Taylor conceded to see them.

​Then a woman stood up to say that, the fact was, she wasn't a Christian. She was a Muslim, and she knew a lot of Muslim women who felt exactly the same way. Women of the two faiths joined together and began their "action."

It was said of Charles Taylor, who put on a great show of piety,  that he was so evil that he could "pray the devil out of hell." An inspiring film entitled "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," documents how things worked out, including how the women of Liberia held the warring men hostage until a peace agreement was signed.  AFWW provides an educational viewing guide of the film that presents in detail at each stage of the film how the women's efforts demonstrate the best practices for ANY nonviolent social change movement.

​The film also shows how the women were supported by men of good will who were also eager to see the bloodshed cease.  The support of good men was also the case with the U.S. suffragists; for example, a great deal of the money for the movement came from men, most of the women having no money of their own.  But the women were the front lines.

But that's not the end of the Liberian story. When it came time for the next election, the women of Liberia helped elect Harvard Educated Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as the first elected women head of state on the African continent.
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At this time (2009), Johnson-Sirleaf and Liberia's men and women struggle to build on this wonderful transformation in a land that is bitterly poor and crippled with a debilitating history of strife. But clearly, a determined and savvy application of nonviolence could cut through a nasty, brutal, violent civil war even in this day and age. And such a movement can be achieved by determined women who have the support of men of good will.

by Judith Hand. 
A Film Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Moore
​Cutting to the bottom line immediately, my project AFWW urges that every citizen of the USA who loves the country and believes it still has the capacity to reclaim its democratic roots and liberating ideals needs to consider it a responsibility to see Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story“—maybe more than once, to ensure full understanding. One of AFWW’s nine cornerstones emphasizes that any campaign to end war must include the spreading of fully mature [i], liberal democracies and their preservation from degeneration.