Dunedin Abrahamic Interfaith Group

E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga hau e wha, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

It gives me great pleasure to deliver this 2026 Peace Lecture. I'd like to say a special thanks to Greg Hughson, Mike Tonks, the Dunedin Abrahamic Interfaith Group and Otago Tertiary Chaplaincy for their kind invitation to give me this opportunity. I’d also like to say a special thanks to my family. For all their love and support over the years. I would not be half the person without their care and concern.

I had initially pondered focusing on global turbulence, power politics the subversion of the international rules-based order, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, right-wing politics, inequality and climate change. These challenges however seem overwhelming and generate political paralysis. So, I decided to make this talk more personal, to reflect on some of what I have learned over the years about peacemaking and what it means to be a Pacifist in an age of global turbulence.

My basic thesis is that when times are bleak and we feel overwhelmed and paralysed, this is the moment for inner reflection and a sharp focus on building and rebuilding peaceful relationships and peaceful communities as an antidote to zero sum power politics. In particular we need to work on ways of making all our relationships harmonious so that the communities within which we live move and have our being are just, peaceful and sustainable. This is the moment for building peace from the bottom up, to insulate and protect ourselves from narcisstic sociopaths pursuing national and global domination. Our task as people of faith is to work for the peaceable “kingdom” wherever we find ourselves.

I am just four days away from my 80^th birthday. According to Oliver Burkeman, who wrote Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, that means I have lived roughly 4,000 weeks. Coincidentally, the United Nations turns 80 this year, too. This means that our modern international order has also existed for 4,000 weeks.

4,000 weeks sounds a whole lot shorter than 80 years, so I want to reflect on a few of my 4,000 weeks to give you some sense of some of the people who have made a difference in my life, the impact of different work environments and the positive and negative dynamics that have driven my work, fuelled my passion for peace, and given my life its shape and meaning.

Looking back over these 4000 weeks, the three core values that have anchored my life and work are “Love, Courage, and Hope.” Towards the end of his life, my father—a man who suffered greatly for his moral convictions—was asked by my daughter what the keys were to a long, meaningful life. Without hesitation, he answered: “Love, Courage, and Hope.” Tonight, I want to explore how these three qualities are not merely personal ideals, but essential, disruptive values for building more compassionate politics and peaceable communities—critical to building peace from the bottom up in an increasingly turbulent world.

Early Life

Like everyone, I'm a vulnerable human being, although lucky to have been born at the end of the Second World War. I'm a post-war baby boomer who benefitted enormously from a strong and resilient welfare state. We had excellent medical care, free education, and zero unemployment. Our generation’s worldview was shaped by our parents who had endured the Great Depression and the Second World War. They knew what poverty and violence did to people and wanted to ensure that my generation did not have to experience their privations. I was however born into a family that set me apart from the mainstream.

My father was a Methodist Minister and a conscientious objector to the Second World War. The Conscientious Objector (CO) Tribunal refused to acknowledge his religious objections because the Methodist Conference in 1941 had decided the Second World War was just and should be supported. This led him to spend four years in detention, from 1942–1946. This was a very hard time for my mother and my sister who were staying in the Methodist Parsonage (I come from a long line of Methodist Ministers) in Hamilton East. In 1942, my mother's favourite brother Owen, who had volunteered for the war, was killed serving in Libya. My mother’s grief was compounded by unforeseen hostility. Some members of the congregation used my uncle's death as a reason to attack my mother for being married to a 'coward' and a 'shirker.' This broke her, and she had a severe nervous breakdown as she tried to balance her love for Owen, who died fighting the war, and her love for a husband who suffered and was stigmatised for opposing it.

At the end of the war, my father, mother and sister were sent to Opotiki to minister to the small Methodist community there. When the Opotiki Returned Servicemen’s Association found out that a Conscientious Objector was leading the Methodist church, they organised a boycott instructing all the shops in town not to sell anything to the Clements family. The boycott lasted three months and our family was only saved by a decorated NZ air force pilot (Michael Forbes) who owned a farm and orchard. He delivered food to the parsonage, saying that he didn't fight the war abroad to preserve bigotry at home. Other conscientious objectors throughout NZ suffered considerable stigma after the war for their beliefs. So too returned servicemen and women had to grapple with post traumatic stress as well.

I was born in September 1946 and, although I can't remember these events directly I learned about them later. I was especially inspired by the way my father responded to collective hostility. He sought out the very men who had shunned him and actively initiated conversations with members of the RSA. Over time he earned enough trust that the RSA invited him to speak at their ANZAC Day ceremonies. Thus from an early age, I learned the peaceful value of engagement, dialogue, and reaching out to the hostile others in peacebuilding. The cost of dissent, then and now, is always high and requires considerable courage, especially when nations are at war. My father's imprisonment and the opprobrium it generated helped me realise the personal costs of being a peacemaker.

At the age of 13, I had decided that I was a Christian and a Pacifist, and was much helped in my spiritual journey by a wonderful Methodist Minister, Bob Thornley. He believed in a social gospel and was very willing to engage in conversation with me about theology, politics and social change. My values were laid down in endless conversations at home, church and also at school, where many of my teachers were both Second World War veterans and socialists. They and my Labour parents meant that I started thinking of myself as a socialist as well as a Christian Pacifist. One other person who taught me a lot was Ormond Burton, a much-decorated First World War veteran and a militant Christian pacifist. (Also a Methodist Minister). We had a lively correspondence about Christian pacifism and the creation of a more just and peaceful world. All of these conversations were critical to my development as a young peacebuilder. I was greatly encouraged when people I respected took me seriously and gave me that most precious gift of all, their time. It does take a village to produce principled people, and peacebuilders need to understand the value of building strong, positive relationships capable of responding to a broken world.

Nuclear Weapons

My big learning about nuclear weapons occurred when I was fifteen. On 9 July 1962, from New Zealand I witnessed the way the sky changed during a high-altitude US nuclear test called “Starfish Prime”. The bomb, launched from Johnston Atoll south-west of the Hawaiian Islands, exploded 250 miles (400 kilometres) above the ground, producing a yield of 1.4 megatons of TNT. It knocked out communication systems all around the Pacific. The aurora it generated could be seen from New Zealand and many other islands in the south-west Pacific Ocean.

The flash and the aurora turned the sky red and yellow, and I still remember the feeling of tremendous dread it stirred in me. The fact that the bomb had such a profound effect on the electromagnetic nature of the atmosphere once again underlined how cavalier nuclear bomb makers were about playing with nature!

This experience unsettled many New Zealanders, as we were uncertain what the short-, medium- and long-term effects of such an explosion would be on weather patterns, radiation and all the electromagnetic fields so critical to life and well-being. I was shocked that scientists were continuing to devise more and more diabolical ways of testing such weapons, and I was appalled at the increasing megatonnage and power of each bomb. It was insane that the scientific establishments of the US, USSR, UK, China and France were dedicated to the production of bigger and bigger bombs with higher and higher levels of lethality.

This moment had such an impact on me that it fuelled a lifelong passion for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. I joined the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, along with thousands of others, played an active role in all the diverse campaigns for a Nuclear Weapon Free New Zealand. We have been blessed with progressive leaders such as Norm Kirk, and David Lange both of whom articulated an independent non-nuclear policy for NZ. Kirk dispatched a NZ frigate to the Mururoa French testing site and Lange ushered in our New Zealand Nuclear Free Legislation. These leaders proved that a small country can say no and survive it.

The current situation for arms control and disarmament is very bleak. The five acknowledged nuclear powers — and the four more who never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty—are expanding their arsenals. Modernising them and making them more precise, more usable, more thinkable. They are quietly abandoning the one idea that kept us alive through the Cold War: that “nuclear war can never be won, and must never be fought.” None of this seems like it is within our control. That is the reality of power politics. The one bright spot is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which New Zealand has signed and ratified. The challenge is to bring nuclear weapon states into conversation with prohibitionists.

And here is what sixty years of this fight has taught me: the importance of resilience and persistence. Hope is not an optimistic prediction that things will get better—hope is a decision. A decision to keep working on the assumption that they will. I have spent a lifetime opposing nuclear weapons and finding ripe moments for incremental change. I don’t expect to see abolition in the near future, but we have to maintain our witness against the evil of all weapons of mass destruction. In the absence of any real movement on arms control and disarmament, we must focus on generating stable peace from the ground up, so that when the political will to abolish nuclear weapons finally arrives, the groundwork is done. Eliminating nuclear weapons is a multi-generational project — and a multi-generational project asks something specific of each generation: to hope and work for nuclear abolition even though we may not live long enough to celebrate the eradication of these weapons.

Vietnam

Parallel with protests on nuclear questions was the emergence of the Vietnam War. This was a totally unnecessary war that dominated my political consciousness through much of my adolescence. Being a student in Wellington in the 1960s, I spent a decade protesting this senseless war. We had teach-ins, vigils, and demonstrations that ran the length of my undergraduate and graduate years. At its peak, more than 35,000 of us turned out against Field Marshal Ky, Spiro Agnew and Lyndon Johnson visiting NZ while the war was still killing people in their name. There were large protests all around the world. 3,000 New Zealand troops were rotated to Vietnam in service of a failed domino theory—which argued that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand would fall like dominoes. Vietnam was an imperial war dressed up as containment. While we always felt that the rationale for the war was tenuous, two photographs: Napalm Girl and Saigon Execution completely shook the world. These photographs personified the brutality and dehumanisation of war and drove those who were formerly apathetic to join the protests on the streets. Never again could anyone claim not to know what was being done in our name.

Those two photographs were deeply etched in my memory and have stayed with me for sixty years as a constant reminder that wars like Vietnam should never happen again. And they have taught me that when logical arguments fail — and they will fail — what a single image or progressive documentary can do and what a thousand speeches cannot.

Working for Human Rights and Civil Liberties

The post-war liberal order—now sadly in tatters—was built on F D Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech and expression, of worship, from want, and from fear. In the mid-1960s, the fight to make those freedoms real was global. I was moved by the US Civil Rights Movement, especially the Freedom Riders, who paid dearly to register Black voters against Jim Crow. I remember crying the first time I played Pete Seeger's We Shall Overcome. That same demand — for what should already have been theirs — ran straight into New Zealand's own reckoning: Maori claims for Te Reo and Te Tiriti.

That passion made me an active member of Amnesty International and, eventually, Chair of the Canterbury Council for Civil Liberties. In 1981, as part of the protest against apartheid, a colleague and I took a case to the High Court to keep the Springboks rugby team out of the country under the Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Act. It made me a target. My name, my address and my phone number got posted on the ChCh Old Boys rugby club room, with an open invitation to members to 'vent their spleen' on me if games were cancelled. When the Waikato game was called off, our phone rang. My seven-year-old daughter picked it up. The voice on the other end told her that someone was going to burn our house down that night — payback for her father's politics.

She was seven. Political violence or threats of violence are not an abstraction to me. It has a cost, and it is very often innocent children who bear that cost. This was the first of many threats against our family and it broke something in how I understood my own country. I had believed New Zealand stood for fairness, justice and the right to protest. In 1981, I watched a good number of my compatriots choose violence instead — and, for a while, I wanted to leave New Zealand. I didn't leave. The fight for civil and political rights doesn't end when you lose your nerve for a week, or lose a case in the courtroom. It is never-ending. And it is more urgent now than at any point since — because what we are watching, in country after country, are democracies sliding back toward the very authoritarianism our parents' generation fought a war to defeat. The anti apartheid movement ran parallel with a wider consciousness of the necessity to confront racism in Aotearoa -NZ. This helped generate a revival and expansion of Te Reo and respect for Te Tiriti as a prerequisite for right relations between Maori and Pakeha.

Lessons from the Field: Power With Others, Not Power Over Others

The Quaker United Nations Office

In 1982 my wife and I were both appointed to direct the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland where I had to unlearn almost everything I thought I knew about political change. The Quaker United Nations Offices in Geneva, New York and Vienna exist to promote peace, disarmament, sustainable development, support for refugees and human rights. The QUNOs were also focal points for collaborative problem solving and support for third-party interventions in a range of violent conflicts, e.g. the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Nigeria and Biafra, and the Sri Lankan Civil War. I had to unlearn my protest politics. My tools until then had been marches, petitions, mobilising thousands in opposition to political opponents. In Geneva, the task was the opposite. I had to build relationships and enter the diplomatic networks that had been painstakingly developed by my predecessors since the Second World War. My objective in Geneva was to help people in the UN Secretariat and government delegations to analyse problems, and work with them quietly, to come up with evidence-based solutions.

We worked from a modest house with one asset that mattered more than any budget—a solid reputation built by Quakers before us.. The aim was not to provide solutions for all the issues confronting the UN but to help unpick the knots and sticking points that prevented progress in the UN. I inherited an organisation that had built up trust over decades and had an unquestionable reputation for impartiality and confidentiality. When I showed my Quaker business card, doors that stayed closed to many others would open. During the chemical weapons negotiations, for example, when delegations were deadlocked over how to regulate dual-use precursors, I flew in two of the field's leading experts, Professors Nicholas Sims and Julian Perry Robinson to Geneva, and put them in a room with the diplomats who needed to hear from them about how to regulate dual-use chemical precursors for the weapons — not as advocates, but as translators between what the science required and what the politics could bear. We did similar things in the areas of human rights, development and peacebuilding. These were halcyon days for me. I was taught a completely new way of doing politics. Our methods involved arranging safe spaces for dialogue between antagonists; inclusive conversations for marginalised delegations; and a radical adherence to relationships and focusing on collaborative problem solving rather than the demonisation of those who didn't share our views. Sometimes we brought together delegations representing countries that had committed gross violations of human rights. Our role was not to blame and condemn; our role was to see what they might do to move themselves and others from violence to peace. The work was compassionate problem-solving politics. It was based on the Quaker principle of seeing each person as a holy place, deserving respect and reverence.

In all of this work I was extremely fortunate to be shaped by the people who built the field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding from nothing. I'd like to acknowledge titans like Johan Galtung, Elise Boulding, Kenneth Boulding, John Burton and Adam Curle. They were truly formidable scholars, practitioners, and wonderful organisers and networkers. They became close friends and mentors of mine. It was Adam who taught me how to prepare for negotiations with angry and fearsome people.

Geneva became a place of personal political paradigm shift and confirmed my desire to be a peace researcher rather than a sociologist. The major learning from Geneva was to focus on and understand the power of small transforming circles. As Margaret Mead put it: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Geneva taught me that there are two kinds of power. One is power over others—the kind that built every nuclear arsenal I have spent my life opposing. The other is power with others: patient, unglamorous, and, in the long run, the only kind that has ever actually ended a war. I have spent the rest of my career choosing the second.

ANU’s Peace Research Centre and Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University

At the Australian National University, I headed the Peace Research Centre where we developed regional security policy directly for Australia's DFAT. I worked closely with Gareth Evans on cooperative peace in the region and UN reform. I focused on nuclear non-proliferation and regional conflict prevention. The major learning here was about the price of proximity to power. We had direct access to a policy department which gave us real influence, but it came at a cost—we had to work to governmental priorities rather than our own. Access and independence, I learned, trade against each other.

After Australia, I was appointed to direct the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Washington D.C. This was a hybrid programme that combined both theory and practice. We had a separate conflict clinic to teach advanced negotiation and conflict resolution skills to students. I learned many lessons when we and others were assigned to help resolve the civil war in Georgia and Abkhazia. The first learning had to do with the hazards of selecting key negotiators from both sides. We had a good team of negotiators from Georgia, but despite going to Abkhazia to select key actors for their team, we ended up bringing the Governor of the Abkhaz Central Bank, who turned out to be a counterfeiter of Russian currency, and the Chief Prosecutor, who turned out to be a big wheel in the Russian mafia. The Georgians refused to negotiate with these people. For a week we ended up shuttling between delegations that would only occupy the same building at mealtimes.

This failure taught me that peacebuilding in violent conflicts often means working with people who are compromised and have considerable blood on their hands. It’s not our role to be judgemental; our role is to ascertain whether there is any desire for reconciliation and the restoration of broken relationships. How to engage with people who have blood on their hands but remain critical to ending the violence is an important challenge for peacemakers. Peacebuilders work with human rights violators to get agreements and hope that other institutions like the International Criminal Court will address the questions of political responsibility and accountability.

International Alert, London

My next assignment was Secretary General of International Alert in London—a civil society organisation with real reach into the foreign ministries of Europe. We had worked hard to get conflict prevention taken seriously by diplomats who preferred to talk about conflict only after it had already happened and required management. The challenge was how to do this. Our answer was to focus on early warning systems and the design of interventions that combined development, humanitarian assistance and conflict prevention processes in a single package. This became what is known today as conflict-sensitive development strategies. We worked that way in Burundi, West Africa, the Caucasus, Nepal and the Philippines.

One memorable moment from those years happened at the Tanzanian-Burundian border. With no diplomats or officials to assist them, our women's peacebuilding team had spent years working with and rebuilding trust between Hutu and Tutsi women in Burundi. One day, a group of Tutsi refugee women in Tanzania asked them if they could return to their old village which they hadn't seen in years, in a country where crossing the wrong way, at the wrong moment, could still get you killed. There was no ceasefire document that could tell them it was safe. So the Burundian women made their own guarantee of safe passage. The Tutsi women would sing the first verse of a farming song both communities knew. If it was safe, the Hutu women waiting across the border would sing back the second verse.

At dawn, in the mist, the Tutsi women gathered at the border and sang. And from the other side, the second verse came back. Trust was built and each other’s security was guaranteed. These small acts of peacebuilding are critical to building ripe conditions for reconciliation.

Creating spaces where women who had once been friends, then enemies, could rediscover what still united them—shared memory, a common song—and enough trust for encounter, conversation, and eventually reconciliation was very special. These Burundian women trusted the sound of other women’s voices more than they trusted the men who had been shooting at and killing them. I have watched a great many peace processes since but few have moved me more deeply than women from different sides of a conflict singing together for security and peace.

The most important learning from my five years with Alert was to ensure that local communities, those who are most affected by the conflict, led and determined programme agendas. This involved developing partnerships that were empowering, egalitarian and post-colonial. When I first arrived at Alert I asked one of my most effective team leaders what theories guided his programming. I was chastened to be told that theory was of no concern to him. He said: ‘My challenge is to bring awkward and difficult people, from awkward and difficult situations, to safe spaces for awkward and difficult conversations.’ Everything I built at Alert was focused on trying to live up to that sentence.

9/11 happened while I was at Alert. As we watched the twin towers falling an Algerian colleague said “now they know what we have experienced” I was appalled by the harshness of this comment as we watched the tragedy unfold but for colleagues from former colonies there was some Schadenfreude in their reactions. The war against terror and the wars that followed however were based on a globalisation of fear – a pathology that resulted in never ending wars in the Middle East, right wing populism, and xenophobia

University of Queensland and the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago

I left International Alert to establish the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland. There, our work focused on political hybridity, for example, working alongside local Melanesian chiefs and political leaders, using customary and traditional institutions rather than colonial implants to advance development, prevent violent conflict and heal broken relationships across the Solomons, Vanuatu, Bougainville and Fiji.

My later work at Otago began the way the best things do: with two people who had a vision of a Peace and Conflict Centre for Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2006, Dorothy Brown and Chris Barfoot set out to raise funds for and build New Zealand's first centre for peace and conflict resolution. I worked closely with them as they invested their own funds and formed the Aotearoa Peace and Conflict Studies Trust. The University of Otago matched their funds through the Leading Thinkers programme. I was appointed as the Foundation Director and first Chair of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies with the task to turn their vision into a peace research centre of genuine international standing. For 8 years I tried my best to be worthy of what Dorothy and Chris had envisioned.

At our peak we had 21 PhD students from 19 countries. I am immensely proud to see that what I built has produced exceptional peacemakers who are now scattered across the world doing important work. Since I left, the Centre has focused on the bicultural partnership, and indigenous approaches to peacebuilding rooted in Moriori, Parihaka and other Maori peace traditions. That is exactly as it should be. A centre that only ever reflected its founder would have failed—because the work belongs to the people who inherit it, not its founders. What matters most is that every student who passes through the Centre becomes another actor for peace and justice.

The Toda Peace Institute

When I left Otago, the Toda Peace Institute, a think tank in Tokyo, asked me to be their new Director to rebuild their entire peace and conflict programme from the ground up. I developed five new programmes during my tenure there.

One of the programmes I focused on tackled the difficult challenge of reconciliation in Northeast Asia. This gave me a chance to utilise problem-solving techniques as we worked with Japanese, Chinese and Korean colleagues to address the painful colonial and war history that remains unfinished business a century later. This resulted in a book Identity, Trust and Reconciliation in East Asia. Trauma is inherited by successive generations. Unaddressed and unresolved negative memories kept the three nations circling each other with wariness even to this day. Opening up “difficult” conversations between former adversaries is critical to building stable peace in a region.

The 4 other programmes focus on Social media and polarisation; climate change and conflict in Oceania; Global challenges to democracy; and — my life long struggle for arms control and the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction.

I am, in other words, still fighting the fight I started as a child. My concerns as a thirteen-year-old are still my concerns now, in my four-thousandth week. Some causes you don't finish. You just keep handing them forward.

The Lessons of “Love, Courage and Hope”: My Father’s Answer

I told you at the start of my speech that my dying father said Love, Courage and Hope were critical to a good life. All my working and personal life turns out, in hindsight, to have been an argument for exactly those three things. A life aimed at building peace requires these three things, especially when summits fail, ceasefires collapse and the powerful show no sign of changing course. All of my experience suggests that we will never develop peaceful relationships unless peacebuilders (which includes all of us) personally embody these characteristics and work for peace from the bottom up. As Maya Angelou said: ‘Before you die, do something wonderful for humanity.’ In order to do something wonderful for humanity we need to unclench the fist (or fists) around our hearts, ie give up the anger and grievances that impede our development as peaceful human beings. Peacebuilding begins with each one of us and it has to begin from where we are. If we are interested in working for peace we need to identify individuals and groups that are connectors in the community. These actors are critical to peace work. We always need more connectors than dividers in conflict as well as peace zones.

Here are some local connectors. Religious communities are normally connectors; groups like Amnesty International, Oxfam, Unicef the United Nations are connectors. The Baxter Trust, the Peace Foundation and groups such as the Dunedin Abrahamic Interfaith Group are connectors. Women are connectors. Those who sing in choirs are connectors. Those who dance together are connectors. Building peaceful communities means focussing on and identifying compassionate actors who believe in the welfare of others as much as their own.

Our political leaders focus on power and control; we must focus on relationships and community. Women know better than men that their security lies in the quality of their relationships with others especially with those who might wish to harm us. My peace learnings confirm this and have directed me to pay more attention to where I am and what is likely to generate peaceful relations in my own place in order to build virtuous rather than vicious circles from the bottom up. These values are critical for a good life. These three values are essential if you want to lead a meaningful life or wish to be of any use to those who are weak, poor, oppressed or subject to violence.

(i) Love

Love is absolutely critical to the good life. It is extremely difficult to raise a well-integrated human being who has never been loved unconditionally. I would not have been the person I am without the experience of being loved by my family and friends, cared for by mentors and engaged by people who took me seriously. Peacebuilding is an act and manifestation of inner peacefulness, that only someone who has been loved can offer others. Those who have known only broken love, or none at all, are far more inclined to answer conflict with anger, aggression and hostility than those who have been loved well.

Love is an animating emotion. Whether it's love of another person or a vocation, love of art or music, politics or even a pet, love will drive us in all sorts of different and wonderful ways. It figures in most world religions. It has both egoistic and altruistic qualities. Love is passion, deep friendship, loyalty, trust and commitment, compassion and care. It is the glue that holds family, friends and community together.

If we lose our capacity to love, the world will be an even sorrier place than it is today. It is love of self and others that gives us enlightened and caring communities. Remove love, and all sorts of other important things, like trust, friendship and relationship, become quite problematic. If we wish to be fully human, therefore, we need to be loved, to know how to love, and from these acts of love to build trusting relationships. It is from love and in love that we ensure our own well-being. Emmanuel Levinas said, safety and security are enhanced by guaranteeing the welfare of others. To do this requires focusing on and attending to the faces of those who are our neighbours and those who might wish to harm us.

Levinas’ method for resisting narcissism and engendering “positive othering” is based on an engagement with what he calls the Face of the Other. This is an important dimension of enhancing relational capacity. The Face to Levinas is both the Face that appears to us and the Face that does not appear to us, the invisible Face. Levinas argues that. focusing on the Face, especially the Face of those who suffer, or are in pain, or the Faces of the subordinate, the imprisoned or the marginalised we establish our human obligations and responsibilities and capacity to challenge stereotyping and totalisation.

All of this requires a capacity to love. A life without love would render work meaningless, and we would never be able to flourish as human beings. Love is not an optional extra, therefore; it lies at the heart of what it is to be fully human. Love and the relationships that flow from it are an imperative for peace, as basic as food, water and shelter.. As the Dalai Lama stressed, “World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is the manifestation of human compassion.”

(ii) Courage

Courage means being true to yourself and vulnerable to others. Being true to yourself is harder than you think, since we are all hard-wired to belong, to bond, and to go along with our peer groups. This is true when life is precarious: confronting it honestly takes a kind of nerve most of us would rather not summon. Courage means confronting that inner fear, pain and danger with optimism. The first is moral courage, the second is physical courage.

My father knew about moral courage as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. At a time when most of the country thought men like him were cowards, his decision to object to all war required considerable courage. It takes courage to stand up against popular opinion and more courage to stand up for those who are weak, marginal and voiceless. I should also add that those who chose to fight also needed courage to deal with the prospect of death.

At a more basic level, though, we all need courage just to live. Life is precarious and uncertain. We are confronted by risk and uncertainty every day of our lives. We need courage to be, in the face of everything that might cause despair. Those who are confronted with life-threatening illnesses need courage to confront, endure and overcome them. I can testify to this personally. I have metastatic prostate cancer. It's terminal. What I can tell you is that the love of others is exactly what generates the courage that enables me to affirm and live a full life until my last breath. We are all mortals. This awareness should soften us and ensure that we treat each other tenderly and lovingly as we face our common destiny. Courage is therefore critical to living a good life and to most political and social transformation. It takes love to be courageous, and it takes courage to love and be in transformative relationships with others.

(iii) Hope

Hope is a bit more difficult to define than either courage or love. It involves a belief that good outcomes are more likely than bad, and that even in adversity, events will eventually turn out for the best.

It is a much more positive concept than optimism, however, because it demands both imagining positive futures and doing something to realise them.

Hope involves choices and actions. The Bible says that without a vision the people perish. Without some degree of hopefulness, ordinary living would be problematic and the world would be nasty, solitary, brutish and short.

Hope is reality-based optimism aimed at achieving particular goals or states of being. I hope for a world that is sustainable, just and peaceful. I hope for a world where there is no discrimination on grounds of culture, gender or ethnicity. I hope and work for a world where everyone can realise their full potential. As Buddhist leader, Daisaku Ikeda once described “the power of hope as not a fragile wish but .. an active, unbreakable force that renews the world each day, fuels human potential, and serves as the ultimate wellspring of courage to overcome any obstacle.”

So I think my dear father was right. Love generates the compassion that makes good politics and a thriving community possible. Courage turns moral conviction into action, and hope gives you resilience and power to persist.

Acting lovingly and courageously will generate virtuous rather than vicious dynamics, and enable us to live each day in a spirit of hopefulness. Building loving community, and the peaceable kingdom, is the end of all our endeavours. When love shapes our relationships, courage guides our decisions, and hope inspires our vision, we become better equipped to face the challenges of our time. Each of us has the ability to make a positive difference, no matter how small our actions may seem.

In the end, global turbulence does not define our future. Our response to it does. If we choose love over hatred, courage over fear, and hope over despair, we help build a more compassionate, resilient world. Peace is a never-ending process. It will not happen by itself. Please choose it anyway, wherever you are, whatever it costs. In my own bumbling way, I have tried to do this in my work and personal life.

In a similar vein, I would like to end with my old friend John Paul Lederach’s pocket mantra:

Reach out to those you fear
Touch the heart of complexity
Imagine beyond what is seen
Risk vulnerability one step at a time

That is my hope for every one of us here tonight: that we leave not with despair, but with work to do.