This article sketches the origins of the program, describes the PeaceGames, and invites interested people and organizations to participate in this pioneering work. 1999
The Strategy Group, working in harness with UNESCO’s “Venice Process”, designs and demonstrates practical conflict prevention measures, notably including “PeaceGames.” This article sketches the origins of the program, describes the PeaceGames, and invites interested people and organizations to participate in this pioneering work.
How did this get started? Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. I first twigged to that famous UNESCO precept in Newport, Rhode Island twenty years ago. The quotation appears in large gold letters in the long corridor that connects the classroom buildings of the Naval War College to the research offices. A naval officer and Pentagon strategist, I frequently repaired to the wargaming facilities in Newport to test different scenarios for preventing World War III, or if deterrence failed, for fighting to restore global peace after what would clearly be a long and destructive struggle with the Soviet empire.
Of course, at the time I had no idea this was the opening line of UNESCO’s charter. The saying was unattributed; I assumed it was another of those hundreds of hand-me-down quotations-perhaps from one of our more literary admirals-that pleasantly enfold the military in a professional culture. Years later in Venice I discovered its true parentage. While still on active duty and serving as a strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, I was included in an eclectic group gathered in Venice in 1994 by Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO, and co-author Tom Forstenzer to air the ideas in their book-in-progress, The New Page. As many readers will already know, The New Page is the Director-General’s response to the end of the Cold War. If we are to follow the founders’ precept, Mayor said in Venice, “We must know the characteristics of conflict; we must know what war is. That is one reason we are gathered here.” “There is a second problem for us to talk about-how to make real the intangibles of peace.”
I found Mayor, Forstenzer, and the ideas at Venice most appealing. Throughout the Cold War the diplomats and we tough-minded military strategists assumed that we held the franchise on matters of war and peace. Organizations like UNESCO did not appear on our list of “security” institutions. But as the strategic climate evolved, I had been veering to the conclusion that traditional military instruments could at best play a supporting role in a profoundly changed and changing security climate. In Venice I found some new colleagues of the same mind. Triangulating from our different perspectives, we economists, educators, scientists, business leaders, politicians, and security strategists from several continents agreed on several points. We worried that the international community was getting caught up in a tail chase, reacting to tragedy only after the disaster was unfolding on television. However necessary and well-meaning those responses, the UN system and the international community needed, in Mayor’s phrase, to “move upstream”. Required were some fresh “stitch in time” measures-practical ways of conducting conflict prevention and crisis avoidance campaigns. We agreed that, if it were to be concrete, any such program would have to draw in the military but ought to be rooted in the broader dimensions of the community and its civil society. The adage “If you want peace, prepare for war” was now less useful advice than, “If you want peace, prepare for peace-and get everyone, not just the military, involved.”
Soon after, Mayor and Forstenzer invited me to Paris to talk about follow up. Before long we had embarked on the “Venice Process”-a series of activities to demonstrate that conflict prevention could be practical. To date we have launched a pioneering regional conflict prevention process in Central Asia, started a series of security-through-self-development pilot projects in Jordan, published three “Venice Papers” (see box), and conducted many “PeaceGames”. I direct this work as a Senior Advisor to the Director-General, coordinating almost daily with Tom Forstenzer, CEO of the Executive Office of the D-G. Rochelle Roca-Hachem in Dr. Forstenzer’s office manages the small account that funds the direct costs of our events and provides outstanding managerial leadership.
What are PeaceGames? PeaceGames are upside-down wargames. As wargames help the military prepare for war, PeaceGames help all the various stakeholders in peace think through practical conflict prevention campaigns. PeaceGames are by far the more complex. War usually erupts as a contest of arms between two opposing sides. Any prevention campaign must invoke simultaneously the multiple dynamics of politics, economics, education, culture, etc. as they are played out among many different actors in a complex web of cooperative-competitive interactions.
To learn more about prevention and gaming, read Venice Paper No. Three, Professional Peacebuilding. It walks through the steps of designing and conducting a game enroute a prevention campaign.
The Venice Papers
VP1. The Venice Deliberations-
Transformations in the Meaning of “Security, Practical Steps Toward a New Security Culture.” 124 pages in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Presents the conversations in Venice. Judged “one of the most useful books of the past five years” by longtime Dutch Prime Minister and Club of Rome member, Ruud Lubbers.
VP2. Security for Peace-
A Synopsis of the Inter-American Symposium on Peace Building and Peace Keeping. 31 pages in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Outlines ways in which the military can find productive new roles in the conflict prevention mission.
VP3. Professional Peacebuilding-
A Preliminary Guide. 47 pages published in Spanish and English. Walks through a six-step planning process for conflict prevention, describes how to design your own PeaceGame.
To read these booklets online, go to http://www.unesco.org/cpp/venice.html.
This is serious business, why a game? Role-playing simulations-games-deepen the participants’ understanding of the different actors and their motivations engaged in a particular situation. These exercises help generate a synoptic overview of the very complex interactions that are carrying a people toward a crisis or that are building their community’s capacity for a peace-filled future. Games raise useful questions, test new ideas, and help decision-makers to dial in to the realities on the ground. Mutual understanding being a critical ingredient in a resilient peace, PeaceGames aim to enlarge the common ground among individuals and groups. Real world case studies keep things realistic and serious. Often the case study presents a current problem from another region, allowing the players to import some fresh insights from tackling someone else’s problems. The following is a sample of the ten games we have done just since last Thanksgiving:
CENTRAL ASIA OBSERVATORY DESIGN. Co-sponsored by Kyrgyz State Secretary Abdurazakov and Foreign Minister Imanaliev, 65 participants gathered in early December ’98 in Bishkek with the goal of building a workable conflict prevention mechanism in the region. Thanks to some extra funding by the office of conflict prevention in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, security civilian and military professionals came from four of the Central Asian states, from Georgia and Azerbaijan, and from Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Western Europe and North America. Using Afghan as a case study, the participants surfaced a number of practical ideas for conflict prevention machinery in the region. Out of this came a top-level commitment from the Kyrgyz government to work toward a functioning conflict-prevention “Observatory”-an independent analytic capability that would, by enabling consultations across borders, among different ministries, and between officials and academic analysts, be able to foresee looming problems and launch crisis avoidance campaigns. At a recent follow-up workshop in the Foreign Ministry in Bishkek, we began to work out the mechanics of the Observatory. The group selected “water and regional security” for the first exercise in finding ways to transform a potentially divisive problem into opportunities for trust and cooperation. I am now looking for a few international experts who can advise the regional experts and officials as we develop a working paper enroute a conference in the region. Future PeaceGames will help put the resulting ideas on their feet.
Joining us in the Central Asia work is General Sir Garry Johnson and his British-based organization, the International Strategic Advisory Board. General Johnson, formerly NATO’s Northern Commander has been working for several years with the Baltic States and with Georgia to assist in the modernization of the security concepts, security institutions, defense strategies, and military-in-a-democracy policies of those newly independent republics.
MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT PREVENTION. In April Tom Forstenzer and I ran a PeaceGame in Amman, Jordan co-sponsored by the Dr. Kemal Abu Jaber, former Foreign Minister and President of Jordan’s Institute of Diplomacy (a world-class mid-career diplomat school) and General Mohammed Malkawi, Chief of Staff of the Army. The Conflict Prevention Unit of the British Foreign Office helped fund the event. The game’s 70 participants-Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, and, notably, an Israeli-divided into teams which took the roles of the Serbs, Kosovar Albanians, NATO, and the international humanitarian emergency response agencies in a exercise designed to use Kosovo as a source of ideas about practical mechanisms for peacebuilding in the Middle East. We were immediately invited back to conduct a simulation addressing regional water security and environmental issues.
EDUCATION AS THE ENGINE OF PEACEBUILDING. Recently we conducted a day-long PeaceGame in Washington for 55 international educators. Co-sponsored by Dr. Emily Vargas-Barón, Director of USAID’s Center for Human Capacity Development and Dr. Frank Method, Director of UNESCO’s Washington office, the simulation used three case studies to enable a side-by-side comparison of ways in which education policies and investments could be used to avoid an oncoming crisis (East Timor), contribute to the resolution of an on-going conflict (Colombia), and help a crisis-torn region rebuild (Kosovo). The game was designed to encourage innovative approaches and to set education within the broader context of enhancing overall community peacefulness. The feedback was instant and positive; educators in Colombia have already invited us to go to Bogota.
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND MILITARY CADETS. Looking to the next generation of leaders, we have completed a number of university-level games. In Central Asia, the PeaceGames have become a self-sustaining series. The last game in July drew teams from seven universities and a large press contingent. We have also run well-received games at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis-in both cases with the objective of encouraging these officers-in-training to expand their conception of the roles and expertise of the military officer. Invited to return immediately to Annapolis, we then ran a huge, day-long PeaceGame for 250 students gathered from universities and military academies from the U.S. and a number of other countries. I take special pleasure in these student games-which can also be effective with younger students: The students are always wonderfully articulate and engaged; they help encourage their elders to take conflict prevention seriously. In Central Asia the games are credited by the State University faculty for bringing in a fresh, “democratic” style of teaching in which students are encouraged to have opinions and to wrestle with the societies problems.
What’s ahead? We doing two things: applying the PeaceGames to a steadily growing series of problems and, in places where we are already well underway like Central Asia, moving to the next stage. More invitations are coming in than we can accept. As the idea spreads we hope to see local organizations learn the techniques and take charge of a gaming series in their region.
It is important to follow up the fresh thinking and enthusiasm generated by the PeaceGame experience with a practical network which applies this cross-border thinking to regional crisis avoidance and peacebuilding opportunities. We are focusing on a three-track pilot project in Central Asia to assist the region’s governments, security services, and universities to create an “Observatory”—an independent regional analytic capability that is capable both of recognizing clouds on the horizon and of devising concrete peacebuilding campaigns to transform those looming threats into opportunities to strengthen cooperation and democracy.
Can you get involved? Yes! We would be delighted to welcome you to the team. This is an invent-it-as-you-go project. Your ideas, especially about practical, affordable ways to draw more people into the games through modern telecommunications and collaborative software systems and ways to put an electronic collaborative infrastructure under our regional “observatory” networks would be most welcome. Also welcome is your help in encouraging others to help fund and expand this work. And, of course, I invite your ideas on which conflict-prevention problem-opportunities ought to be on our worklist. Please contact us:
- UNESCO Paris: Dr. Tom Forstenzer, +33.1.45 68 13 66, e-mail dgfor@unesco.org.
- UNESCO Washington: Dr. Frank Method, +1.202.331-3755, unesco1@cais.com.
- Washington: Larry Seaquist, +1,202.234-4370, larry@strategygroup.org.
September ’99 Biographical note:
Larry Seaquist is the founding Chairman of a non-profit NGO, The Strategy Group, a independent, international “do tank” devoted to conflict prevention. A former U.S. naval officer who commanded the battleship USS IOWA and other warships, Mr. Seaquist served as the head of the Policy Planning staff and director of policy research in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in other security policy and military strategy positions in the Pentagon. A member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and other professional associations, he has conducted seminars on security strategy and conflict prevention at Harvard, Stanford, American and other universities. He serves as a Senior Advisor to the Director-General, UNESCO and directs the Venice Process described in this article. The ideas expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Director-General or UNESCO.