Ideas - Can the fierce wars of today end in peace?

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

If intractable conflicts in the 90s could end in peace agreements, is there hope for the ongoing wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and beyond? What can we learn from the successes and failures of the past about how to create a more peaceful world? And what solutions are obstructed by lack of will? Nahlah Ayed and guests explore what peacemaking and rebuilding mean for us today, and try to chart a course for the future. *This is the last episode in our five-part series, Inventing Peace. +

Every writer has a beginning. For Arundati Roy, it was her mother. In Mother Mary comes to me, the Booker Prize-winning author of the God of Small Things offers an intimate and inspiring account of how she became the person and writer she is, shaped by her complex relationship to the mother she describes as, My Shelter and My Storm. This is not just a memoir. It is a love story, a reckoning, and a journey into the making of one of the world's most celebrated voices.

Mother Mary comes to me by Arundati Roy. Now, wherever books are sold. This ad is brought to you by Simon and Schuster, Canada. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And welcome to the final episode in our series, Inventing Peace. These panels were recorded in the summer of 2025. They've explored the history and legacy of several landmark peace agreements of the 1990s. Now we look at the current moment. Episode 5 is about inventing peace in the 21st century.

Peace is not the absence of war. It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. Those aspirational words come from the 17th century philosopher Spinoza. But four centuries on, that kind of peace seems elusive. The peace agreements of the 1990s seem a great distance away when you consider the new reality. Disinformation, autonomous drones, maritime cyber and economic battles, a crumbling world order, and climate change. It's daunting to think of inventing peace amid all this complexity. but our three panelists at the 2025 Stratford Festival took on the challenge.

First, Beverly Jacobs. She's an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor. She's versed in both international and Haudenoshone Law. When I asked her to tell me what had shaped the meaning of peace for her, her reply was direct. I was raised with traditional knowledge and it was all about peace, but it was also the impacts of colonization impacted that where the peace is difficult to find. Next, Cesar Jaramilo.

He is the executive director of SANE Policy Institute Security Alternatives for a New Era. I asked him for a moment that shaped how he thinks about peace. There was a moment already well into my professional career in 2018. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a colonist for the Washington Post was murdered in Istanbul at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul

he was doing a routine paperwork matter getting some paperwork to get married to his fiance who was waiting outside with instructions to alert authority if he was questioned or detained what they didn't know was that he was murdered and dismembered at the time we thought

okay Canada and other states that are army in Saudi Arabia must There was already a very strong case for stopping arms to Saudi Arabia. And with this, we thought many, many people following the case, these states are going to definitely stop because this is absolutely inexcusable. And then one by one, Canada, the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, and others confirmed that they will continue to arm Saudi Arabia. And that made me question a lot about the rules, the context in which they operate, and the

priorities that states afford to human rights in rhetoric versus in. practice. Cesar Jaramilo. Payam Akavan is an international human rights lawyer. He served as legal advisor to the prosecutor's office of the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. With the UN, he's investigated atrocities on four continents. I will begin with a poem from the Persian mystic Sadie, which is at the port.

of the UN General Assembly, and the poem says, human beings are members of a whole, created in essence of one soul. If one part is afflicted with pain, the other parts uneasy will remain. And I was reading this poem in New York City on September 10, 2001, reflecting on the world's indifference to the Taliban atrocities and mass starvation in Afghanistan. in Afghanistan. And the next day, of course, my two-year-old child with his mom and my parents were on their way

to the World Trade Center. And I'd moved to New York after 10 years of serving with the UN in war zone, saying, I've had enough of atrocities. I want to have a comfortable life practicing law in New York. And that moment taught me that our inextricable interdependence may have been, an distant ideal when Sadie wrote that poem. But today it is an inescapable reality. And the problem with world peace is not that we're not idealistic enough,

but that political leaders and publics that follow them are not realistic enough to understand that there is only one indivisible whole and we're all going to survive or perish together. Thank you for sharing that. We'll come back to the strands that you've each raised in this conversation. But before we do that, I want to get at your philosophies of peace. Maybe dig a little bit deeper on that. Again, Beverly, starting with you.

Peace, of course, is foundational to Haudnishoni law. It's even the origin story of the Haldnishoni Confederacy. Can you tell us about the story that you grew up with, about the great peacemaker who brought the warring groups together? Yeah. I have something, too, that I brought. that will help. So we've always had Wampum Belt. I call it sort of a device, a mnemonic tool that's helped us to remember our history.

This is the Haudenoshone Confederacy. It's called the Hayawatha Belt. And it represents the journey of the peacemaker. And that's actually through our traditional territories. The Seneca's, Seneca Nation, the Mohawk Nation on this side. Kiyuga, so that's the Kuyga lands. In the center is on a doga territory, and then beside and in between is Oneida territory. We were at war with each other as nations long before colonization.

So this is the women's nomination belt that's called. So the peacemaker was a messenger of the creator. One of the first messages to the peacemaker was that he had to go to this woman first. she was I guess a representative of the clan mothers she was designated as the first clan mother and told that the roles and responsibilities of the women was to establish peace and our roles and responsibilities to be mothers is the same as our mother the earth to be nurturers caregivers life givers and so that's that was the first step to peace and The male leadership was responsible to listen to the women because they were the decision makers and the caregivers of our children. That's a short version.

Thank you so much for bringing those and for giving us that foundation. When you look around at the state of the world, it's a big question I'm about to ask you, what do you take from that idea that women are responsible to establish peace that makes you think is applicable, to this world that we live in today?

Patriarchy has had a huge impact on our matriarchal societies. And it seems that's taken over the world, those values of patriarchy and not thinking and feeling our relationship to the natural world, which is an instinct that women have. It was also about our children. It was about thinking about our children at least seven generations ahead.

Because in our language, when we do our opening, when we do our Thanksgiving address, and we give thanks to the natural world and to our mother, the earth, that we're also looking at the faces of our children that we haven't seen yet that are still coming. That's a huge responsibility that we leave a peaceful place, a loving place for them in the future.

Thank you very much. Cesar, you grew up, you were born and raised in Colombia and came to Canada as a refugee during the war, the civil war was still going on. How did that conflict shape your view of war and peace? A brief anecdote, somebody from my family was kidnapped many years ago by the FARC guerrillas. And you're put in a very difficult position because they're asking for ransom money. And for a period there, the government made it illegal to pay ransom money because he will strengthen the armed group. Guerrillas, perpetrators of the kidnapping are awaiting.

And there's also criminal activity. And when you're carrying lots of cash with you, it's very dangerous, especially in a country like Colombia, where neither the authorities nor the bad guys are on your side. And I imagine that this and much worse versions of this are seen around the world all the time. But I'm a strong believer, and through my professional work, I've become even a strong believer in norms in the ability of us as a society, as human beings, as Canadians, as a species to figure out how do we solve these problems. And one conclusion I've come to, and I believe this with conviction, and you hear the word intractable thrown out there, thorny, complex, you know, unsolvable, etc. you would be surprised. There is a credible, reasonable solution to most of the world's problems. It's out there.

It's been written. It's been debated. And the reason that we're not seeing those solutions implemented is not because they don't exist. It's other reasons. They have fallen on deaf ears or there isn't the sufficient political leadership or political will or funding, but it's not the lack of solutions. Take what's happening in Gaza now, you know, intractable. You know, how do you deal with something like Gaza, okay? The suffering of civilians, we have laws called international humanitarian law that are like 70 years old, the Geneva Convention.

So we have a, there is a framework through which to address that. But what about Israel? What about Israel's legitimate security interests? We have a solution for that, too. It's called the right of self-defense. But how do IHL and the right of self-defense relate to each of. other. We have very clear answers for that, too, for the climate issue and for other issues, similarly, their answers, that are not being implemented. It's heartening to hear that, but it's also

confounding, because if the solutions exist, I guess the next question, which I won't ask you now, because I want to hear from Paiam, is how do we get those solutions implemented on the ground? So there is no absence of practical solutions, as Cesar said. I've been in the United Nations. I've been in more than one academic political conference where these issues are discussed and brilliant experts and pundits come up with their own solutions, but where there is bad faith, where there is cynicism, where there is lack of empathy,

you will experience that paralysis because everything is abandoned in pursuit of very narrow short-term interests. And of course the public is part of that equation as well. So on the one hand, we've created a society of unprecedented prosperity and possibilities of a 97-year-old father who was brought up without electricity, without running water, who lost half of his brothers and sisters to dysentery in cholera. And today he speaks to his grandchildren on Zoom. That is the world that we live in.

It's a world of immense possibilities. But we're also sinking more and more into anxiety and depression, and we see the unraveling of the political system. And getting back to what Bev said about feminine ideals, I like to think our problems are not ideological. There are questions of mental health. We have psychologically unhinged political leaders who are reflections of a psychologically unhinged consumerist society. So we need as much as it's not fashionable in academic expert circles to turn back to fundamental questions of culture, motivation, What does it mean to live in community with others? What does it mean to live in harmony with nature?

Is our educational system bringing out those human virtues and qualities, which today are not just desirable, but they're a question of our collective survival on the planet? That, to me, is the answer. It's really great that you raise the public part of this, because, of course, the power lies in the hands of, as you say, sometimes people who are unhinged, and we have no way to exert any power on them particularly.

But I think there is a part for the public to play. And so, Bev, in your PhD thesis on the Great Law of Peace and International Law, you wrote, the territory that the great law covers is Mother Earth, and there are no territorial boundaries or limitations as to where the great law ends. Can you riff on that and talk about what this great law requires, of all of us, all humans. The tree of peace was planted in on a dog of territory. So that was the last step of peacemaking.

And so a hole was dug. And there was water flowing under the hole. The principle was that we would throw all of our weapons of war into the water. Not just physical weapons of war, but mentally emotionally, spiritually, anything negative that would cause your mind to think of war or to be at war. So throwing all of those into that water

and letting it go. So this last part was called extending the rafter so that anyone who followed the principles of the great law through the white roots of peace. So there were roots. that came from the tree. And so if you followed the roots to the tree and you sat and you paid attention

and you followed the principles of the great law, you would be at peace. And that was the intention of the peacemaker through the teachings and the leadership spiritually. We always say that Creator wants us to be loving, kind, compassionate. people. That we live that way, we think that way. Everything we do is about peace and about

our relationships with each other in a good way. So that was the intention and that's how peace was brought amongst all five nations. So again, that, you know, that last piece, the last teaching, I guess, principal was that extending the rafters so anyone could find. There way. Thank you for explaining that because I'd like to use that notion of extending the rafters, you know, and use that to look at the world that we're in today. But you also raise a really important question, and that is the difficulty for people to throw down the weapons, not just the actual weapons, but the weapons, the lines that are in our minds, this idea of decommissioning the mind. And so Paiam, sorry, Cesar and then Pai,

I am, could you describe in your experience how much harder it is to decommission the mind than it is to just throw weapons down? It's hard. And I think that, I mean, looking at the Colombian example, but extrapolating to other examples and how divided societies are today, including the United States, including other societies that are virtually down the middle, almost seeming like two different countries. And in the Colombian case, the concept of peace and the nature of peace and the ways in which peace was going to be negotiated became paradoxically a very divisive issue. And people were like almost adversarial against the other half of the country. So even all these years after the peace process, people still hold on to those grudges and adversarial spirit. But even when communities are able to decommission the mind, I think we need to also be pragmatic and recognize that. that's part of it, but also there are bigger forces at play. And I go to the United Nations quite a bit in New York, in Geneva, in Vienna, elsewhere,

and there may be otherwise, you know, perfect conditions for peace. But if the powers that be at the United Nations Security Council, you know, have other concerns, it's simply not possible. Has it always been thus, or are we in an era where this is even more the case than ever? I think it's increasingly difficult. And I tend to be an optimist, but you go these days to United Nations, and it's increasingly difficult to live with the level of optimism. And to be quite frank, you live disappointed. You're like, oh, these are the decision makers, and these are the decisions that are being made on our behalf.

I mean, these are like objectively not conducive to peace. We're doing exactly the same mistakes that led to undesirable outcomes in the past, and we're expecting different outcomes. comes this time around. How so? Why? And it's very perplexing. So this is a time where, you know, remaining optimist really is becoming a challenge. Yeah. Jumping to Paiam, when you're thinking about this idea of decommissioning the mind, you raised this idea of, you know, the provocateurs, the pyromaniacs, I think you called them, or the political entrepreneurs who might have a role to play in helping or hindering the decommission, or decommission. missioning of the mind. Is that a phenomena that's gotten worse in recent times? Are those people

more powerful than they were in the past? What's the difference between now and in the 20th century? I think we live in a paradoxical age where on the one hand, the course of human history, unmistakably, is pushing us towards ever greater interdependence. And the idea of what Deschardin called the planetization of humankind. is a reality today. It's not a distant ideal. So we have, on the one hand, the so-called global village, but on the other hand, we see this retrenchment of divisive ideologies. And I think that there is a relationship between the two.

The divisive ideologies are not only morally repugnant, but they're anachronistic and unrealistic. because whether you're misogynist, white supremacist, a tech billionaire, and all of these ideas which fail to embrace the wholeness and indivisibility of humankind, will eventually end up on the trash heap of history. But the question is at what cost? And that is the big question. If we look at the history of international law of world peace,

and I speak here about mainstream international law, and it's important to note the contributions of indigenous peoples and others who have alternate conceptions. But in 1890, the first peace conference was held in the Hague after the unprecedented destructiveness of the Napoleonic Wars. The League of Nations was created after the unprecedented destructiveness of the First World War and the United Nations after the unprecedented horrors

of the Second World War and the Holocaust. and now we live in a world which was scarcely imaginable when the UN Charter was adopted, never mind the 19th century. The question is will we once again have to learn the hard way that we need profound structural and ideological changes ensuring that our mind is congruent with the reality of interdependence or can we as societies, as people of goodwill, through an act of collective vision and political will, achieve this inevitable transition peacefully in a considered and deliberate way?

And if I may just end on one note, I think climate change is the game changer. You can ignore a war or genocide in some corner of the world because it doesn't affect you and maybe you're indifferent. but you cannot mess with Mother Earth. And if I may just end with an experience I've had working with indigenous peoples in the South Pacific, such as the island of Tuvalu, which is an independent country, member of the United Nations, which in one generation will disappear because of rising sea levels. I have learned more from some of my friends in Tuvalu than I have in all the elite universities that I've been educated in.

And one of it is summarized by the words of the Attorney General of Vanuatu, who said, if you respect nature, nature will respect you. This time, we're not up against each other. We're up against the earth. And in a contest with the earth, we will definitely lose. So sooner or later, the pain will become enough. And I'm saying this optimistically, where perhaps new generations of leaders and informed publics will realize that all of of these divisive ideologies, geopolitical struggles are not just morally repugnant, but utterly

foolish when we must urgently unify in the name of our collective survival. Beverly, you wanted to add a thought. Yes, definitely. Or two or three. I've studied international law. I've studied our indigenous Haudenoshone law. Grew up with it. It's in me. So my ancestors, so there's many of my teachers, of my mentors, elders, people like John Mohawk and Leon Shenandoah and Jake Thomas, who have been delivering this message for hundreds of years. So long before the UN ever existed, and the UN is a colonial system. It's a colonial, Eurocentric legal system. It's not built on any indigenous legal orders. It was built because of war.

And I have an ancestor, his name was Descahy, who went to the League of Nations in the 1920s to deliver a message. And that message was about, they didn't call it climate change then. They called it It was a message. It was a prophecy saying that if we don't pay attention to what's happening in the natural world

with natural law, none of us will be here as human beings. It didn't matter what color you are. We're all the same as humans. And so with the shifts and the changes that are happening, we're living in the prophecy. We're living in it. And if we don't shift the way that we have that relationship with her,

none of us are going to be here. So that's part of that big message that came a long time ago. And even though it was about statehood, it was about statehood, it was about nationhood. But it was, we don't separate that. We don't separate nationhood from natural law. It's all the same because it doesn't matter what relationship we have. it's about our responsibility to the natural law. But I wonder, Bev, given that you are so versed in international and Haudnishone law,

if you agree that what Paiam is saying, that we have to get to this point of utter pain to deal with either, you know, the mother of all peace settlements or negotiations with the earth itself, or in, you know, these large conflicts that we're witnessing today. Is that what it's going to take to find? I think that's what it's going to take. I mean, there's already big messages out there from the natural world in different places in the world of what natural law is doing.

And I always relate it back to motherhood. Our mothers get mad. Like, we get mad, right? We get upset. We get mad. Like, when you think about our mother, the earth is going to snap. I say, that's enough. That's enough of how you act.

She's doing that. She's giving us messages already. So even though we're talking about peace, that is our mother. who is trying to be at peace. Law Professor Beverly Jacobs. She also practices law in her home community of six nations of the Grand River Territory and is an Indigenous human rights monitor

with the Mohawk Institute Survivor Secretariat. You're listening to a panel about inventing peace in the 21st century, recorded in July 2025 at the Stratford Festival. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Every writer has a beginning. For Arundati Roy, it was her mother. In Mother Mary comes to me,

the Booker Prize-winning author of the God of Small Things offers an intimate and inspiring account of how she became the person and writer she is, shaped by her complex relationship to the mother she describes as, My Shelter and My Storm. This is not just a memoir. story, a reckoning, and a journey into the making of one of the world's most celebrated voices. Mother Mary comes to me by Arundati Roy. Available now wherever books are sold. This ad is brought to you

by Simon & Schuster Canada. Itchy rash won't go away. Is it an allergic reaction? A bug bite? Wait, what if it's Oh my God There's no substitute for a family doctor They have the expertise to provide the care you need See why CCFP family doctors are the experts At cfpc.ca.ca.ca slash no substitute Cesar Jaramilo leads the non-partisan Institute, Sane

Their research aims to inform policy and action quote, to foster a more peaceful, cooperative, and sustainable international order. Yet he says we're entering a whole new era of violent conflict with autonomous weapon systems that are going to redraw the map and are going to change dramatically the assumptions and paradigms about warfare, about the way conflict is conducted, and about the threshold for going to conflict. If leaders feel we're not risking humans, we're risking machines, we're risking systems, it may be easier to slide into war.

But there are many, many unanswered legal, ethical, political, religious questions about crossing that threshold in which autonomous systems literally make decisions about taking a life or not without human intervention. If that sounds like dystopian science fiction, a version of it is already here. The war in Ukraine is being fought right now primarily with drones. I mean, lots of civilian casualties as well and military casualties. But it's being fought with drones. And this is all uncharted territory for which the international community has no solid answers about accountability. Ukraine came up again in the next part of our panel.

As I asked Cesar Jaramilo to tell us what he's learned as an analyst and negotiator. Not just what it takes for successful negotiations, but also what has made others fail or why it has been so difficult, for example, to reach an end to the conflict in Ukraine or in Gaza. Or Iran. Sudan hardly ever makes headlines. And the system is riddled with double standards. And the international community objectively cares more about some conflicts than about the others. But about bringing them to an end, I think there is this notion that most conflicts end at the negotiating table. This is not a matter of opinion.

I mean, it's been studied. They end at the negotiating table. And many conflicts reach a point where thousands of people are dying by the day and the frontline hardly changes. So we're like, okay, how do we, how to, how to, how to win that? And I think part of a key part of the effective negotiations is being willing to make concessions, you know, negotiations by definition involve give and take, involved compromises. And many parties today come to the conflict expecting the other party to assume

all the fault, all the commitments and all the changes, and not be ready to make a single concession. Can you anchor that in an example? Absolutely. Take the war in Ukraine. Of course, there is no question, at least in the way I see it, that the Russian invasion was illegal, highly destructive, and devastating for Ukrainians, for civilians, for international law, for international system. At the same time, and because two things can be true at the same time, one can also say that NATO's expansion towards Russia has been unirritant in their relations. But if you say that, people say, wait, are you justifying the illegal invasion? You're like, no, but we have to also recognize that NATO has been irritating. You know, it has expanded

after saying it wouldn't. You know, it has grown militarily closer and closer and closer and closer to the border of Russia and any major power would react if their adversary, if an adversarial military nuclear alliance was getting closer to your borders. But unless the parties, you know, say the NATO side of which Canada is a member, are willing to even concede, concede that they may have been part of the context, not a justification for Russia's actions, but part of the context under which this happens, You know, that's a beginning to stop seeing this in a very black or white. Putin is the devil and we're all good guys and NATO does nothing bad.

That's a very simplistic and oversimplified intentionally, I might have oversimplified narrative. You know, everyone I can do a little bit. We've talked about this concept of everyday peace where it's a peace being made on the ground among the people before we get to the more thorny issue of getting leaders to agree. just ordinary people negotiating peace with each other day by day and how societies come back together after conflict. And so Paiam, I'll go to you first. What have you learned from Bosnia and Rwanda about what everyday peace,

what makes it possible for people to learn to trust each other again in conflict? Now, I think about the famous saying that all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. So one of the things I've learned is that diabolical elites who have a vested interest in inciting hatred, conflict and war cannot operate without followers. And just as there are very small elites that drive entire nations down the road to hell, it can equally be very small elites that could provide a different direction to

humankind. And at the end of the day, getting back to negotiated solutions as opposed to what I really have faith in are seismic shifts in collective conscience. I think those are the truly revolutionary moments in history. We can have peace agreements here and there. Perhaps it's because two parties have been so exhausted by fighting each other that they have no solution. Perhaps if we're really lucky, we have two very visionary leaders who decide to take a political risk, negotiate a peace agreement.

But all of this is rather superficial in terms of the more profound changes that society is going through. Getting back to the question of technological transformation, but also cultural transformation, the industrial revolution occurred perhaps over 200 years in Europe. The technological revolution is maybe 30 years old. I was still typewriting my essays in university. And today we see this remarkable transformation. So I don't think we appreciate how profoundly the world is changing because we're in the middle of it. And part of the confusion and turbulence is what has given rise to all these nativist ideologies of going back to an imaginary past where we all knew who we were,

this cataclysm of infantile regression, you know, making the non-existent past great again, I think is really a kind of. kind of collective psychosis that society is going through because we are confused, we're intimidated, and it's more important than ever to understand that this vision thing that I was referring to is going to occur, for the most part, I think, from the bottom up. And it's going to occur in future generations that are, I think, with increasing severity, going to reject violently, if necessary, what previous generations have bequeath to them. which are now causing more and more pain and suffering. That I think is ultimately why we will have a very different space in the very near future.

Bev, I was curious, as you were talking earlier, about the Hounishone great law of peace, about this idea of a procedure of consensus. How would we apply it to try to solve something like Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan? This is what we call Gus Wenta, or the two-row-way. Wampum belt. This belt was created to establish peace here in North America with Haudenoshone peoples, with my ancestors. So Gus Wenta means river of life. So you think of this as a river, and that these are vessels. In our canoe, we held our laws, so all of our teachings, the great

law, the Thanksgiving address, our ceremonies, our language, everything that makes us who we are. And on the other side, this other row is the ship. It holds their laws, their customs, their beliefs, everything that makes them. And the very first one was done in 1613 with the Dutch. And so this first relationship, because we were at war with each other, also with the British, with the French, and with the United States. So this was our first peace agreement. And so in this relationship with each other, you can see the white lines in between represent three principles, peace, trust, and friendship. So this relationship being, and I'm going to pick on British because that's Canadian law today, the intention of these principles was not only to establish peace,

but that we would live together with these principles and not interfering in each other's way of life. And that all of those teachings, because they learned about our laws, they learned about just the bare minimum, but we taught them how to live and survive in these territories, on these lands. And so it was our responsibility to each other to have peace.

So when you're in a relationship, you have to know what those principles are in order to give and receive, right? So peace, trust, and friendship. Cesar, you wanted to add something inspired by that. Yes, thank you on the theme of solutions and to thank Bev for reminding us of those principles and those relationships. I just want to highlight the role of what has been called the military-industrial complex or, or the arms industry, just because you folks have no idea of what a beast this has become, the military industrial complex, you know, and just like, you know, a company like Apple has to place certain number of billions of dollars year after year, after year of iPhones in the market,

or they go broke and the shareholders go angry. The arms industry, just the NATO country, has to place in the market. more than $1.3 trillion in arms year after year, after year, after year. It's not $1.3 trillion and growing trillion dollars as a won off this year, and then NATO has its weapons. These weapons remain and another $1.3 trillion, and another and another and another and another and another year after year. And this is highly destabilizing. This is highly destabilizing. and just from a very common sense analysis, the likelihood that this excessive accumulation of weapons

is going to lead to more conflict, you know, it's like, yeah, it will, and the likelihood that they're going to be used in increases. And then we hear this, this not only are we overarmed, there's this renewed push for greater armament. And now, you know, it used to be that NATO, for example, including countries like Canada, which is a member, aspire to spending 2%, which our prime minister confirmed earlier

not that long ago that we will reach this year. But now they're talking about 5% of GDP. So it's not just the impact of those weapons, but it's also the opportunity cost because by definition, every dollar or euro spent in weapons is a euro or dollar not spent on so many on met social needs,

on so many things that will actually predictably contribute to security. You say the money could be put to better use, and we all know. We can all think of different ways of doing that. But what is a peace industrial complex look like? Well, the peace industrial complex, first of all, broadens the definition of security. You know, how much money goes to security,

but what counts as security, if we identify, you know, a peace industrial complex, the nature of future threats, you will very quickly come to the realization that is not more infantry, that is not necessarily going to be more efficient at facing future threats.

You need to look at the Arctic. You need to look at climate change. You need to look at cyber threats. You need a lot of things that tanks and guns are not necessarily, or the traditional militarized way of looking at problems is not going to cut it. You need creativity and you need to recognize that the nature itself of the threats and climate is just a big one will change. So it's not all about more guns.

This is such an unwieldy topic, as you can tell. There's so much to cover. But one concept I really want to get at is this idea of how every peace agreement, as you said correctly, Cesar, is a compromise. And particularly, there's that tension between justice and peace. And so I'd like to ask each of you how you wrestle with that tension. And when you look at this context, with all the complexities we've talked about, how can we encourage warring parties to figure out, out that balance between peace without abandoning the delivery of justice. Paya.

Very often the people sitting at the negotiating table are themselves responsible, not just for war, but for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And the challenge then is how do you achieve an end to a conflict, which was instigated in the first place by the ethnic entrepreneur? as in the case of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia that we've discussed earlier. But what we need to understand is that wars and genocides in particular are not expressions of spontaneous combustion,

that there is a tremendous amount of preparation and organization and resources that go into conflict, from incitement to hatred, demonization of the other group, to invoking the resources of the bureaucracy, the armed forces. So it takes a lot of effort to start war and violence and exploitation and what have you. So when the same people are gathered around the negotiating table, typically you are going to have peace if there is no other alternative, if the exhaustion and destruction has reached a level

where even cynical leaders have no option. Really, you think peace is inevitable if you bring people together to talk? No, I don't. That's the point that I'm making here, that unless you have people of goodwill, you have visionary leaders of which there are far too few in the world today, you are left at the mercy of very cynical leaders who think of nothing except their own political survival, their own economic fortunes, and what have you. and that is where you need, I think, two ingredients.

One is a public, which is aware, which is educated. The dumbing down of culture is essential to the rise of authoritarianism. So I think that having a public, which is aware, aware not just intellectually, but which has the right moral compass, which has a sense of empathy, a sense of justice is one ingredient. The other is institutions such as the United Nations, which are there exactly to try and ensure that international law and the common interest is pursued where political leaders have failed.

Every war is a failure. Every act of crimes against humanity or genocide is a political failure. And that is why we created these institutions in 1945, in the ruins of the Second World War, and sadly they're not functioning today. Beverly, is it inevitable to find peace, that justice must be diminished? diminished or compromised, in your opinion?

Well, I guess it's whose justice you're talking about? Because when I think about justice, I think about peace. Because as indigenous peoples, we have survived an undeclared war against our people. And that hasn't stopped. We're still in a conflict. You may not see it physically. But when you have missing and murdered indigenous women and girls that's at a critical level, when you're still dealing with the impacts of residential school, which is genocide and a crime against humanity,

when we're still fighting for our lands and the little bit of land that we have left, and when we are still struggling, dealing with those impacts of crimes against humanity, when it comes to justice, for me, it means transformational change, like a total shift of systems, of governments, of the way people think about war, but thinking about peace and implementing it, like talking about the great law. We were at war with each other. We were at war with each other, but we learned about peace and it. And it took education. It took an understanding of the relationship that we have as human beings to the natural world. And so to me, they're actually, they mean the same to me. So when we have justice, we'll have peace. We always are at peace with ourselves because that's what we're taught.

But when we have to make that shift into making decisions and difficult decisions about how we deal with other human beings, that's the problem. And when we're dealing with other human beings who are racist, who don't care, when we're dealing with people who don't have an understanding of, even of the land and the territory, to me, that's like basic education. To me, that's the shift in creating peace. Much like the pursuit of peace is not black and white and should not be seen as black and white. I think peace itself is also not black and white.

It's not like perfect peace with justice on the one hand and no peace at all on the other. And I think there's there's the good, the better, the ideal, the perfect. And it can be a continuum. So for instance, in situations like Ukraine and Gaza, I think, you know, a ceasefire is not full. peace but needs to be a priority. For instance, just because people are dying every single day in very high numbers and creating long-term

humanitarian suffering. So stopping the fighting, like a negative peace. Stopping the fighting. And then, of course, I understand the notion that that doesn't mean full peace and that a ceasefire is not tantamount to the full realization of peace with justice, etc. But

when people are dying in such numbers, a ceasefire must become a priority and the old don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Like we need a ceasefire urgently just to stop the bloodshed. And parallel to that, let's have a conversation, you know, about what a more fulsome piece would entail and what justice and accountability provisions need to come after or parallel, et cetera, but the bloodshed itself needs to stop.

And secondly, I've heard a couple of references that I just want to, on the record, agree with to the profound lack of leadership, leadership for good in today's world. And I think one of the tragedies of our time is that dishonorable individuals and dishonorable electoral methods are a winning playbook. They're a winning combination. You know, if you follow a certain playbook, which is quite dishonorable and rife with lies stoking fears of the other, you win.

So how do you get away from that? That's the question of our time, I think. One of the big questions of our time. And speaking of time, we're just about out of time, but I do want to ask this question. It's something, Bev, you raised at the very beginning. You've written, as you said, about how the rafters of a Hauden Shoney Longhouse are extended to make room for an expanded family

and how extending the rafters has become a political concept in Haudenoshone law to add to the great law of peace while retaining its essential original structure. So I'm wondering if all three of you can kind of hold that picture in your mind, this idea of extending the rafters. What is one way that you would each extend the rafters to accommodate what peacemaking means in the 21st century? It's about education. Yeah, it's about understanding the reasons why there's war, understanding the parties that's involved, understanding the land that's territory, which is usually what war is about, and the resources that they're, that they want. So to me, and again, I always come back. Like, this is, this is our responsibility as women and

teaching those uneducated leaders about the teachings of the great law, because that is what established peace. Like, it's a practical teaching. It's a practical process that, you know, the great law is in its entirety, when it's recited for seven days, 10 days that you understand, that whole concept of how peace was established through each of those nations. And so if you educate people about the processes of that peace and where we establish that peaceful relationship in those five different nations, then that gets an example.

Yeah. Yeah. Cesar, please. Thank you. I will echo that a lot of my faith is in the public. I think an educated public is a lot harder to endorse positions that are not going to be beneficial for their own future, to elect leaders that are going to take them in a direction that's not where they want to go, or to believe promises that are just not aligned with reality. I think there's a great gap right now between rhetoric and reality when it comes to political leaders.

I mean, they're quite good at saying the right. things. I mean, that's not the problem. The lofty rhetoric, the aspirational rhetoric is not the problem. It's the actual practice. And I think for an informed public to scrutinize that gap between the rhetoric and the practice, education is key. And Paiam, thank you. And Paiam, I want you to address the same question, but I want you to keep in mind, if you don't mind, your role representing Bangladesh at the Hague recently. I think there is a more profound question here about the type of education and awareness that we need. Because it's one thing to understand that violence is bad, that we should all treat each other with humanity. But these are not

ultimately intellectual concepts. They are felt spiritual experiences. Empathy is not an intellectual abstraction. It's about being able to feel the pain of other people. We've created a society which has emptied itself of this mystical, spiritual dimension of our being. And as unfashionable as it may seem in the academy, we need to rediscover the power of love, of compassion, of authentic, profound connections with each other. And this is actually a revolutionary and radical idea. And it's not presented in impenetrable, obtuse language,

which would get you tenure at a university. But that is exactly the kind of conversation that we need. But we need to have that conversation knowing that the tide of history is on the side of those that see the inextricable interdependence of humankind. And I think that we will, in the coming years, witness both a great deal of chaos, but also very profound changes

the likes of which we may not have really been able to imagine. Getting back to the case of Bangladesh, which today has several thousand climate migrants being displaced daily, beginning to see that the threshold of pain is going to be met sooner or later, beyond which, in the name of national security, in the name of economic development, in the name of self-interest, world leaders will have to profoundly change their calculations. Reacting to the laws of nature and the tide of history.

That was International Human Rights Lawyer Payam Akevan. He, along with lawyer Beverly Jacobs and policy analyst and negotiator Cesar Jaramilo, featured on this ideas panel exploring how to invent peace in the 21st century. It was recorded in July at the 2025. Stratford Festival, and it's the final episode in our series called Inventing Peace. Visit cbc.ca.ca slash ideas to find the rest of our series, or look for CBC Ideas on your podcast app. Thank you to all the panelists in this series, and to the entire team at the Stratford Festival, including Julie Miles, James Hyatt, Gregory McLaughlin, Renata Hanson, and Harper

Charlton. Ideas at Stratford is produced by Pauline Holdsworth Technical Assistance from Sam McNulty Editing by Lisa Godfrey Senior producer Nicola Luxchich Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas and I'm Nala Ayyed For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.

Thank you.