Peace means societal friendship and harmony in the absence of hostility and violence. In a social sense, peace is commonly used to mean a lack of conflict and freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.
Freedom House is a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. It is best known for political advocacy surrounding issues of democracy, political freedom, and human rights. Freedom House was founded in October 1941, with Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt serving as its first honorary chairpersons. Most of the organization's funding comes from the U.S. State Department and other government grants. It also receives funds from various semi-public and private foundations, as well as individual contributions.
Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day.
The Global Consciousness Project is a parapsychology experiment begun in 1998 as an attempt to detect possible interactions of "global consciousness" with physical systems. The project monitors a geographically distributed network of hardware random number generators in a bid to identify anomalous outputs that correlate with widespread emotional responses to sets of world events, or periods of focused attention by large numbers of people. The GCP is privately funded through the Institute of Noetic Sciences and describes itself as an international collaboration of about 100 research scientists and engineers.
The bed-ins for peace were two week-long nonviolent protests against wars, intended as experimental tests of new ways to promote peace. As the Vietnam War raged in 1969, artist Yoko Ono and her husband John Lennon held one protest at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and one at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. The idea is derived from a "sit-in", in which a group of protesters remain seated in front of or within an establishment until they are evicted, arrested, or their requests are met.
A teach-in is similar to a general educational forum on any complicated issue, usually an issue involving current political affairs. The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific time frame or a strict academic scope. Teach-ins are meant to be practical, participatory, and oriented toward action. While they include experts lecturing on their area of expertise, discussion and questions from the audience are welcome, even mid-lecture. "Teach-ins" were popularized during the U.S. government's involvement in Vietnam. The first teach-in, which was held overnight at the University of Michigan in March 1965, began with a discussion of the Vietnam War draft and ended in the early morning with a speech by philosopher Arnold Kaufman.
The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was a grassroots anti-apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s out of the political vacuum created by the jailing and banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress leadership after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. The BCM represented a social movement for political consciousness.
[Black Consciousness'] origins were deeply rooted in Christianity. In 1966, the Anglican Church under the incumbent, Archbishop Robert Selby Taylor, convened a meeting which later on led to the foundation of the University Christian Movement (UCM). This was to become the vehicle for Black Consciousness.
Code Pink: Women for Peace is an internationally active left-wing anti-war 501(c)(3) organization that focuses on issues such as drone strikes, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Palestinian statehood, the Iran nuclear deal, human rights in Saudi Arabia, and peace on the Korean Peninsula. The organization has regional offices in Los Angeles, California, and Washington, D.C., and many more chapters in the U.S. and several other countries.
The International Day of Peace, also officially known as World Peace Day, is a United Nations-sanctioned holiday observed annually on 21 September. It is dedicated to world peace, and specifically the absence of war and violence, such as might be occasioned by a temporary ceasefire in a combat zone for humanitarian aid access. The day was first established in 1981 and first observed in September 1982 and is kept by many nations, political groups, military groups, and people.
The Honeywell Project was a peace group based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States that existed from the late 1960s until around 1990. During its existence, the organization waged a campaign to convince the board and executives of the Honeywell Corporation to convert their weapons manufacturing business to peaceful production.
The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) is an initiative that attempts to "galvanize international action against extremism" through the forging of international, intercultural and interreligious dialogue and cooperation. The Alliance places a particular emphasis on defusing tensions between the Western and Islamic worlds.
Food for Life Global is a non-profit vegan food relief organization founded in 1995 to serve as the headquarters for Food for Life projects. Food for Life Global has its roots in ISKCON dating back to 1974. It is a completely independent non-profit organization that supports the work of Food for Life projects both inside and outside of ISKCON. Its network of 291 affiliates span the globe, with projects occupying over 65 countries. Volunteers provide over 1 million free meals daily. Food For Life engages in various sorts of hunger relief, including outreach to the homeless, provision for disadvantaged children throughout India, and provision for victims of natural disasters around the world.
The Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) is a nonsectarian international network of engaged Buddhists participating in various forms of non-violent social activism and environmentalism. The non-profit BPF is an affiliate of the international Fellowship of Reconciliation working toward global disarmament and peace, helping individuals suffering under governmental tyranny in places such as Burma, Bangladesh, Tibet and Vietnam. Headquartered in Oakland, California, BPF was incorporated in 1978 in Hawaii by Robert Baker Aitken, his wife Anne Hopkins Aitken, Nelson Foster, Ryo Imamura and others. Shortly after other notable individuals joined, including Gary Snyder, Alfred Bloom, Joanna Macy, and Jack Kornfield. Generally speaking, the BPF has a tendency to approach social issues from a left-wing perspective and, while the fellowship is nonsectarian, the majority of its members are practitioners of Zen Buddhism.
BPF's work includes:
- Sparking conversation at the intersection of Buddhism and social justice;
- Training Buddhist political activists;
- Mobilizing people to action from a Buddhist perspective;
- Building a network of radical Buddhist activists.
The United Network of Young Peacebuilders (UNOY Peacebuilders) is a global network of young people and youth organisations active in the field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation. UNOY Peacebuilders was founded in 1989 and is working with youth mostly in violent conflict and post war regions. The core activities of UNOY Peacebuilders are capacity building as well as advocacy and campaigning.
Kathy Kelly is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and, until the campaign closed in 2020, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. As part of peace team work in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US–Iraq wars.
Oxford Research Group (ORG) was a London-based charity and think tank in Cambridge Heath, working on peace, security and justice issues. Its research and dialogue activities were mainly focused on the Middle East, North and West Africa, as well as influencing UK and international security policy.
A peace movement is a social movement which seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war or minimizing inter-human violence in a particular place or situation. They are often linked to the goal of achieving world peace. Some of the methods used to achieve these goals include advocacy of pacifism, nonviolent resistance, diplomacy, boycotts, peace camps, ethical consumerism, supporting anti-war political candidates, supporting legislation to remove profits from government contracts to the military–industrial complex, banning guns, creating tools for open government and transparency, direct democracy, supporting whistleblowers who expose war crimes or conspiracies to create wars, demonstrations, and political lobbying. The political cooperative is an example of an organization which seeks to merge all peace-movement and green organizations; they may have diverse goals, but have the common ideal of peace and humane sustainability. A concern of some peace activists is the challenge of attaining peace when those against peace often use violence as their means of communication and empowerment.
A Day of Prayer is a day allocated to prayer, either by leaders of religions or the general public, for a specific purpose. Such days are usually ecumenical in nature. They usually are treated as commemorative in nature, rather than as actual liturgical feast days or memorials.
The 2012 phenomenon was a range of eschatological beliefs that cataclysmic or transformative events would occur on or around 21 December 2012. This date was regarded as the end-date of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, and festivities took place on 21 December 2012 to commemorate the event in the countries that were part of the Maya civilization, with main events at Chichén Itzá in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala.
Hanan Daoud Mikhael Ashrawi is a Palestinian politician, activist, and scholar.
