War is the worst thing that humans can inflict on each other. We all have a part to play in preventing it and helping it end.
Four decades ago, a group of activists started meeting to discuss the urgent threat that violent conflict posed to fundamental human rights everywhere. A series of planning conferences led to the founding, in 1986, of International Alert.
Chaired by the Dutch jurist and human rights defender Theo van Boven, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as Vice-Chair (and later our organisation’s patron), Alert’s original aim was to “draw attention to problems of group conflict which seriously affect human rights, inhibit development and result in mass killings and even genocide”.
The coming years would illustrate only too clearly the importance of that mandate.
International Alert started life with a mission to draw attention to the risks of mass violence – to raise the alert – but also to bring people together to do something about those risks. That started with fact-finding missions, research and publications, connecting groups of experts and the like; it later evolved into larger-scale programmes with a much wider range of partners and teams based in the places where the work was needed.
Along the way was much learning and adaptation, within the organisation and with others, codifying established approaches and norms that drew on real-world programming experience across different contexts.
This has never been about a single recipe for peace: local context is always key. Instead, it’s about connecting local, national and global issues to address conflict’s root causes.
That’s why you’d find Alert colleagues in DRC today working on conflict-free supply chains, so the region’s mineral wealth can legitimately benefit its communities rather than flow into a bandit economy of armed group violence. That work involves relationships in each community, supporting legislative and normative change within DRC, and influencing regulations set in global capitals thousands of miles away.
Or across the border in Rwanda, you’d find Alert colleagues and our local partners still working with survivors and perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi, transforming individual lives through trauma healing and forgiveness and bringing those lessons into shaping policies set by the central government.
This has never been about a single recipe for peace: local context is always key.
Alert’s sense of our own role has changed over the past 40 years, including to transform the power relations which exist within international NGO partnerships – something we continue to work on. Our strategy, drawn up in deep and iterative consultation with local peacebuilders, sets out how we add value to locally-led efforts – whether that’s through connecting across contexts, global advocacy, specific technical expertise, or (when needed) the more external mediation role which an organisation based further from the conflict context is sometimes requested to play.
The human rights principles that lie deep in Alert’s DNA remain the basis for our peacebuilding work. They find expression today in peacebuilding which focuses on including the most marginalised people, while influencing the most powerful; and in seeing peace as not just the absence of violence but as a transformation of relationships for the better, based on equity and justice.
Anniversaries are also about the future, and the context is sobering.
Violent conflict is now at the highest levels globally since the end of World War II. Civic space is tight in most contexts and tightening further; the institutions which the world has set up to manage conflict are under strain and attack.
We must remake arguments that we thought had been won. We must innovate and build new partnerships. That last point includes partnerships with people and organisations who don’t think they’re involved in peace and conflict issues at all, such as investors whose risk appetite means they avoid unstable places, leaving those places still further behind.
We must think, too, about peace and social cohesion as an issue in all societies, including the richest and most stable ones. In the years to come, I hope organisations such as Alert will play some part in strengthening connections between all societies on common challenges, and that this might offer new ways of thinking about global solidarity beyond an outdated donor/recipient model.
We must remake arguments that we thought had been won. We must innovate and build new partnerships.
I’d like, as we mark this anniversary at Alert, to recapture the sense of urgency which drove our founders 40 years ago. The world is lurching towards a conflict crisis with at least as much potential to impoverish our planet as the threat from climate change (to which it is of course deeply connected). This is a time for peace specialists and experts, for sure, but also time to rebuild a wider movement.
An institutional anniversary isn’t the same as a personal one: no-one working at Alert today was doing so 40 years ago. Instead it is a celebration of the common cause which has held people together over time.
The forms which that cause takes in the years to come may change, just as they have over Alert’s 40 years so far. But we will stay true to it – and work with many others to advance it further.
