“Why did you choose life?” Ali Abu Awwad pauses when the question is asked. There is no simple answer.
Mr. Awwad is Palestinian, and when his brother was killed by an Israeli soldier, it plunged him into darkness.
“I was struggling,” he says. “I wondered, Shall I take revenge? I mean, I was trained with a Kalashnikov [rifle] when I was 15 years old. I know how to use one. But who has the right on Earth to take a life? Will it bring back my brother? Will it bring my people freedom?”
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During Peace Week, Geneva plays host to people from around the world who aren’t just hoping for peace, but actually creating it. Their stories point to what’s possible.
Then one day, Mr. Awwad’s mother brought home families she knew had also lost someone. “That was the first time I saw a Jewish person cry in front of my eyes,” Mr. Awwad says. “Because I grew up with this feeling that Jews have no tears. And now I realized that we have a very hard mutual mission, to get out of the darkness.”
Last week, Mr. Awwad was in Switzerland for Geneva Peace Week 2024, a yearly event sponsored in part by the Swiss government and coordinated with the United Nations. He has founded Taghyeer, a Palestinian nonviolent movement that works to establish an independent Palestinian society based on dignity and security for all.
At a moment of global violence from Ukraine to the Middle East and with threats facing Taiwan, such a peace conference can seem to be fighting against the tide. But the view from Geneva was different. Away from the headlines, peace builders are constructing a platform of creative thinking and practical actions, bit by bit installing hope into the structure of international relations.
“I’m supposed to be the last person on earth who will speak about peace,” says Mr. Awwad. “I’m supposed to be the first one to hate Jews. But I know very well, as long as this hate lasts, we will just keep paying the price of our own lives and our own rights.”
To make the leap from stories of success to broader transformation, societies themselves need to prioritize peace. And that means better leadership, participants said. But stories like Mr. Awwad’s are proof that peace can work.
“With many governments opting for using more violent than nonviolent means to resolve problems, it feels like the space for dialogue about peace is getting smaller,” says Sarah Noble, curator of Geneva PeaceTalks, another yearly event that features stories of peace building. “But there are people who are working on peace, to keep that candle burning. In our own tiny way, we’re just trying to create more of a stage for messages of peace to get out.”
At her events, Ms. Noble is careful to recruit storytellers who are not just dreaming about peace but actually changing behavior. “It’s not positive thinking,” she says. “It’s actually people who are making a difference.”
Among those in Geneva last week was Maruee Pahuja. “There is this undercurrent of empathetic sadness in the world,” says Ms. Pahuja, of the Caux Initiatives for Change Foundation.
She has turned to the creative arts to address the mental heaviness. “The opposite of depression is joy,” she adds. “We created spaces for individuals and communities being affected by conflict to turn their feelings of hate and hurt to healing. That cracks hearts open. It’s how communities are built.”
Ms. Pahuja uses art to help people, as she puts it, “rediscover hope.”
“Arts can allow us to bear witness to human dignity and creativity, even in the face of destructiveness and hopelessness,” she adds. “My hope is to reignite the creative spark and spirit existing in each one of us, and use that force towards building inner peace, rippling outwards into communities, globally and beyond.”
Arizza Ann Nocum’s battle is with disinformation, and she finds there are many weapons to use.
“We need a different kind of education, one that builds critical and moral leadership, where philosophy is as important as math and where values are as important as language,” says Ms. Nocum of the Kofi Annan Foundation, which honors the legacy of the former United Nations secretary-general.
At the core of the war against disinformation, she believes, is empathy. “You have your bullets, you have your bombs. But for many young people, it feels sometimes that our only weapon is hope. But sometimes that’s enough.”
What is missing is leadership, says Mary Robinson, the first woman president of Ireland and a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights. “Leadership for peace has never been more urgent, but never, I’m sad to say, so lacking,” she says. “Why are we seeing such a failure of leadership?”
What the world needs is “long-view leadership,” she says, and she sees women leaders as key.
“I have come to believe that the heart of the problem is that the world has been run predominantly by male leaders,” she adds. “It’s not that women are better than men. The truth is that the world needs the balance of differing perspectives of leadership and power.”
At a time of uncertainty, many thinkers are not wringing their hands but moving forward. And Peace Week was about giving them a voice. Says Andrea Aeby, counselor for peace and security at the Swiss mission to the United Nations in Geneva: “Basically, it is a call to action.”