Global Civil Society Movement Expands Role in Resolving and Preventing Global Conflicts Nonviolently

It is a central premise of the Third Force Network that civil society has been weakened by major power shifts that have occurred during the past 100 years among the three major forces that shape human affairs and welfare. Two of these forces, the nation-state - the first force, and the market economy - the second force, grew up along side the third force - emerging civil society and the ordinary people who comprise it, as well as the nongovernmental organizations who work on their behalf outside of government and the marketplace.

During the 20th century, the first and second forces in the U.S. and Western Europe came to dominate civil society by undermining democracy and compromising the livelihoods of working people, particularly in the U.S. and Western Europe. This domination has jeopardized human welfare throughout the world by increasing global poverty and insecurity, and unleashing widespread violence, warfare and terrorism.

It is argued in the Third Force Network White Paper that if it were possible to quantify all the causal factors, the predatory economic and political activities of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East over the past 100 years might well account for 90% of the causes of terrorist attacks against them, including 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7. These predatory activities interfered with the development of civil society and the secularization of government and educational institutions in the region. They also infuriated successive generations of indigenous populations throughout the Middle East by preventing them from acquiring political and civil rights, and fully exercising their right to develop sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies. A quantitative analysis, were one possible, might well also show that the remaining 10% of the causes of "jihads" and terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies can be attributed to the adoption by radical Islamists of an Islamic veneer. This veneer has been used to voice and legitimize their grievances against the U.S. and its allies, justify the use of force against "soft targets" to terrorize their enemies, raise money and recruit operatives.

Military retaliation by the U.S. government and its allies for recent terrorist attacks has proven to be a counterproductive failure by swelling the ranks of terrorist networks, increasing terrorist attacks around the world, and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. With the U.S. federal government now under the control of a single political party and the party's backers in the "military-industrial complex", only global civil society constituents, activists, nongovernmental organizations and their non-aligned nation-state allies have the will, the know-how and the resources to stop global terrorism nonviolently by eradicating its economic and political causes. A major step forward in this direction was taken by the global civil society movement this summer.

In response to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan's 2001 iniitative, 900 international civil society leaders from 118 countries belonging to the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict met at UN Headquarters in New York on July 19, 2005 to join the UN Department of Political Affairs in launching an international network and movement to prevent armed conflict.

Sponsors include NGOs and nation-states: Cordaid, Novib (Oxfam Netherlands), World Vision, The Austrian Development Agency, the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Heinrich Bšll Foundation, the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Commission for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (NCDO), the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).

A list of participants, the Global Action Agenda for the Prevention of Violent Conflict and donation opportunities are available on the Partnership's website.

Among the participants was John Marks, president of the Search for Common Ground, one of the largest NGOs in the world providing grassroots services in conflict prevention and conflict resolution in 13 countries on four continents, including the Middle East. Marks is a former foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State who came to oppose the Vietnam war after serving in USAIDs rural pacification program in Vietnam. He subsequently founded the Washington, D.C.-based organization in 1982 and the Brussels-based European Centre for Common Ground in 1995.

Marks co-authored a best-selling book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, and The Search for the Manchurian Candidate in which he voiced his opposition to foreign policies that involve "covert manipulation and intervention". According to his article "From Diplomat to Dissident: A State Department Odyssey", these formative experiences battling against the Vietnam War from inside the system, and the abuses of U.S. intelligence agencies, convinced him of the need to build a new nongovernmental system of conflict resolution.

Advisors and directors of the Search for Common Ground include Jessica Tuchman Matthews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Match Iraq Policy to Reality", an analysis critical of the Bush administration's Iraq policy published in the Washington Post in September 2004; Robert Borosage, Co-Director, Campaign for America's Future; Ted Howard, Board Chair and Director, The Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland; and Abdul Aziz Said Director, Peace & Conflict Resolution Division; Director, Center for Global Peace, and M.S. Farsi Professor of Islamic Peace, The American University.

Even in the face of the continued intransigeance of the Bush administration and future neoconservative successors, the agenda of the newly-established Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and the on-going work of well-established organizational members like the Search for Common Ground have the potential to dramatically shift power back to civil society away from the nation-states and economic interest that combined forces during the 20th century to dominate it.

This potential stems from the declining financial resources available to the U.S. federal government to fund its military operations abroad and protect the security of its homeland while rebuilding devastated areas of the country like New Orleans and surrounding regions. The growing U.S. federal debt, increasing dependence on continuous loans from foreign countries like China, continued trade imbalances and soaring oil and gas prices now threaten the solvency of publicly supported institutions and private sector enterprises alike.

In contrast, global civil society consituents and activists who are among the Internet's 900,000,000 users have an unlimited and as yet untapped potential to develop and fund their own "foreign policies", peace plans and development programs. They can "elect" their own respresentatives to implement these plans via the tens of thousands of global civil society organizations, NGOs and their nonaligned nation-state allies that have proven track records of intervening autonomously on the ground singly or in cooperation with nonaligned multilateral forces they create to stop violence and terrorism, and eradicate their economic and political causes. The individual investment decisions and financial contributions of civil society constituents and activists will collectively create a global power shift and transfer of resources to civil society organizations (CSOs) and NGOs of such a magnitude as to dwarf the power and expenditures of individual nation-states or blocs - including the U.S. and its allies in its "global war on terrorism".

In the process, these contributions will free CSOs and NGOs of their dependency on funding from nation-state governments, many of whom use them to implement domestic and foreign policy objectives that compromise rather than strengthen civil society, the rule of law, and human security. As the donor page of the Search for Common Grounds indicates, they must constantly turn down requests to assist in conflicts because of a lack of resources to respond. The majority of their funding, like that of most NGOs, currently comes from government and international institutions.

The Third Force Network urges civil society constituents and activists to identify and directly fund NGOs whose leadership and staff share their values, goals and sense of urgency about the state of the world, and whose organizations are actively engaged in ground operations in regions where they are ending violence and terrorist conflicts, and building sustainable livelihoods and democratic communities that provide inalienable political and civil rights to all.