- by Mary Liston Liepold
“I have never known peace,” says the founder of Voice of Women, Afghanistan’s Suraya Pakzad. “All my life there has been war. And do you know how important food becomes when you’re really hungry? That’s how important peace is to me.”
On November 11 of this year, Peace X Peace inaugurated its Women, Power and Peace Awards with a gala event at Washington, DC’s elegant, 100-year-old Carnegie Institution. The four honorees exemplify the Peace X Peace ideal of person to person connections that multiply peaceful change. We …

by Mary Liston Liepold
Peace studies pioneer Johan Galtung defines peace as nonviolence plus creativity. Yes, we eschew violence. But it’s what we do, what we make, that builds the peace. And perhaps the best of what we make as humans is our art.
Yet art, like peace, is often defined by what it’s not. Is it creativity primarily for its own sake, the play of the spirit, as opposed to the gainful activity that western and northern cultures, at least, prioritize as serious, adult, even virtuous? In these cultures, grand public …

- by Mary Liston Liepold

“The best option for development in Africa is peace education,” Professor Karega Mutahi, Permanent Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Education, told colleagues from seven African nations in Mombasa on September 14 of this year. On September 16, the last day of a three-day peace education conference sponsored by the Kenyan Education Ministry and the Association for Development Education in Africa (ADEA), ministers from Kenya, Angola, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo issued a joint communiqué agreeing to add “a dimension …

- by Mary Liston Liepold
During World War II, many thousands of women were forced to serve the Japanese army as sexual slaves. The majority were from Korea, and many came from China and Japan, but women from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands, Australia, Indonesia, New Guinea, Burma, and other nations were also interned and abused in the hideously mis-named “comfort stations.”
Since the facts began to emerge from the hush of history in 1988, the survivors and their supporters have led a growing global …