The following are additional resources on peacebuilding and integral security which correspond to our two-page election brief, "Rethinking Security in a Pandemic: No Justice, No Peace." Find our entire series on Faithful Voting and Global Issues here.
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The UN World Food Program is leading the way toward addressing threats to global food security through U.S. Policy. Another principal non-military threat to security is the climate crisis. Like climate change, war prosecuted in pursuit of national security creates new security threats at home and abroad, such as mass migration.
U.S. Representative Ro Khanna and Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry address the need to to rethink national security in the face of the pandemic, funding “Masks, Not Missiles.”
The United Nations offers a different model: Human Security. The model seeks to avoid violence and increase resilience. One way to pursue this is through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Learn about action you take this week for the 5th anniversary of their adoption. The SDGs exist as part of the UN’s overarching Sustaining Peace Agenda, which UN Secretary General António Guterres outlined in a 2018 report.
Some of our ecumenical partners have shared their wisdom on rethinking security, as well: the Friends seek Shared Security.
To learn more about what makes for peace, the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Report from the Institute for Economics and Peace can be on their Vision of Humanity resource website. They also offer a whole online Positive Peace Academy.
Read about Erica Chenoweth and María J. Stephan’s groundbreaking research on the efficacy of nonviolent social movements, Why Civil Disobedience Works.
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The idea that peace results from pursuing social justice is biblical, and was outlined in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in the very first papal encyclical in what is today the canon of Catholic Social Teaching: Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.
Pope St. John XXIII brought Catholic Social Teaching into the Nuclear Age with his encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth).
Pope St. Paul VI connected integral human development to peace in his encyclical, Popularum Progressio, and in a World Day of Peace message in 1972, told us, “If you want peace, work for justice.”
Pope St. John Paul II built on Leo XIII’s vision of just peace on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, in Centesimus Annus.
Learn more about the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative and Eli McCarthy’s work on the Just Peace Ethic.
Act:
You can watch Pope Francis’ address to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, September 21, calling for a new economic system in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, on UN Web TV. You can find the schedule of addresses here.
Sustaining peace starts at home. Learn more about the candidates’ domestic agendas, the elections, and voting for the common good from NETWORK, the Catholic Social Justice Lobby.
Join Nonviolent Peaceforce in their campaign to get U.S. Government support for Unarmed Civilian Protection.