It’s 2019, and I’m in the north of Uganda with a team from our international charity, In Place of War. It’s perhaps fitting that the soil was red with ferrous metals, a reminder that the ground under our feet had witnessed decades of brutal mechanized conflicts, from the coup launched by Idi Amin Dada in 1971, the civil war against Obote’s government in 1981 and the twenty-year-long fight between Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Kony and his top commanders. This latter conflict ravaged northern Uganda, southern Sudan and eastern Congo, making the region for a while one of the most dangerous places on earth. Tens of thousands have been left permanently traumatized and physically disabled, and 1.5 million people were driven from their pastoral existences into the squalor of refugee camps, where they lived for almost twenty years. This was a war the international community barely paid attention to because of the neighbouring crises in Darfur, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia and western Sudan – and one that has disrupted indigenous communities across the nation. Uganda has been at peace for a relatively short time, and when our charity first arrived over a decade ago, we were facing a reality where rural communities, devastated by war, were still finding landmines while they were planting the crops they needed to survive.

Speaking to the communities in Gulu and Kitgum, I encountered generations for whom war was a fact of life. Today, Uganda is at peace, but it’s a fragile peace held together by the collective sense that the nation has heard enough gunfire, and now wants to move forward and create a new narrative. This is the same reality we see in Colombia, Venezuela, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Syria, South Africa, Brazil and so many other places where the exhaustion of conflict is replaced by a collective need to rebuild and move on, together with a wish for some sense of justice. Estimates state that in the 3,500 years of recorded history, there have only been 270 years of peace. One could argue, therefore, that conflict is an essential part of human nature, and that its absence is an anomaly. But what is the reality of conflict and war in our society, and what are the chances that we will ever see a world at peace?

In this chapter are some of the conversations I’ve had with individuals who have shaped society’s return from conflict and, in some cases, been through it themselves. Dr Shirin Ebadi, former presidents Martti Ahtisaari and Lech Wałęsa, and Professor Jody Williams all received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work, ranging from negotiating peace deals to ending the use of weapons of mass destruction, and Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein acted as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights alongside being President of the UN Security Council. I also spoke to Ben Ferencz, one of the last living prosecutors from the Nuremberg trials, and Gulwali Passarlay who, as a refugee from conflict, has experienced modern warfare and the impact it has on communities.

Why do war and conflict exist in society?

Shirin Ebadi: War remains humanity’s most profitable trait and we see that many economic crises have been resolved through war. Many people lose their lives simply to enable the rich to become richer.

Martti Ahtisaari: Thinking on this question I start to wonder as to why we have not seen any such conflicts in my country (Finland). We have been at peace for over seventy years. We have been living in relative unanimity for many years. People feel that institutions work for them and that civil servants work for them. There is trust between people and institutions, and many enjoy more than 80 per cent support. In different parts of the world we see a raw and uncontrollable desire for power, where people create wars and conflicts. If you have enormous inequality, it easily creates conditions where violence is the only way out. We have enough statistical evidence to show that fair and just societies have less violence.

Lech Wałęsa: Conflicts exist where there are poorly developed regions. Where there is still a problem with basic needs. These developmental differences cause conflicts. In the old days, humanity struggled for the land, to make their country bigger, and so I call this epoch the Era of Land. Now in modern civilization, where we spend more money for intellectual things than for food and clothes, we become merchants to other nations. They are not interested in eliminating us. They need us to buy their goods, cars, computers etc. If we equal the development levels, the risk of conflicts will be much lower.

Bertie Ahern: Armed conflict is an anathema to how the world should work, but often it’s the result of unsurmountable issues that cannot be resolved by negotiations, or because people don’t put the effort into conciliation, arbitration or dialogue. We frequently see conflicts that occur as a result of governments or people that are afraid to move positions that are held due to historical differences, or bad policies. Some of our world’s most protracted and brutal armed conflicts are also the result of governments, in nations with vast mineral resources, giving contracts out to other countries or private companies, without consulting or involving people on the ground, or locally – the Niger Delta is a typical example of just such a conflict. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of conflict resolution or conciliation often don’t come into play until wars are in play, or until they have got to impossible positions, and that is, I think, the sad thing about so many conflicts.

What causes peace to break down?

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein: There is hardly an armed conflict today which doesn’t have its roots in the gross violation of human rights. How many conflicts can you think of which are a straightforward boundary dispute and nothing else, that have no relation to repressive measures or the rights agenda? There’s not one I can think of. All of them have their roots in the denial of basic rights, fundamental freedoms and the deprivation of those that rides on the back of their denial. Economists have a way of looking at these issues using a euphemistic lexicon. They talk of exclusion and inclusion in a way that’s so antiseptic that you don’t question it. The reality is that exclusion is often made up of deliberate racism, chauvinistic policies, bigotry and other ingredients that cannot be represented in a pseudo-benign fashion. When we talk of inclusive policies and inclusive economics, we need to confront whoever is excluding parts of society from the labour market and say, ‘You cannot do this.’

People have this misguided notion that exclusion is because changes in technology and investment patterns have caused people to fall off the employment cart, and that we must therefore get them back on. In many countries, these people were never on the employment cart. They were always excluded. Then there are the migrants, those fleeing conflict and climate change, the people affected by austerity. You see the same when you examine those who bear the brunt of disease burden in society – it’s always the same. Human rights are not taken as seriously as they should be. The interests of the elites dominate economies, and the structure, and security, of our countries are being protected for those elites at the cost of the interests of the rest.

Are conflict and violence a part of human nature?

Shirin Ebadi: Just as aggression and envy can be inherent in all human beings, the same can be said of violence and war. It is possible through education and training to harness these inherent sensations in human beings and prevent them. Unfortunately, in the schools of today, lessons of history tend to praise war rather than condemn it. Personally, I think it’s very important to change school curriculums if we want to change the status quo.

Martti Ahtisaari: If it was not a part of human nature, we would not have these conflicts in the first place. There are also, however, practical reasons for conflict. It may be that some people have lost their land or water through climate change or land-grabbing. I don’t think it makes it any more justifiable to draw arms in these situations, but it can explain why these occasions occur.

Ahtisaari’s view, that war is part of human nature, may seem controversial as we all believe we are ‘good’ people, but it’s easy to forget how complex and fragile the bonds that hold society together really are. We, like all other animals, are naturally prone to conflict and it takes the bonds we build as a society, and the culture we lay on top of that, to push back against those primal instincts. For society to remain peaceful, we cannot be blind to these basic human natures, nor so fragile that we cannot acknowledge that violent conflict can rarely be justified.

Can war or conflict ever be justified?

Jody Williams: I debate this a lot. As we sit here, a big point of contention is a potential military response to Syria’s supposed use of chemical weapons in the civil war. Can that be justified? Or has the US backed itself into a corner by stating that there is a red line that cannot be crossed and now that it has been crossed, are they left without a choice? If we look at the US and its military actions in the Middle East and North Africa – bombing Libya, drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, invasion of Iraq, involvement in the Iran–Iraq war, and so on – it’s hard to imagine how anyone from that region or with ties to that region could think of the US as anything other than an outright aggressor with no moral high ground. I suppose the biggest example of a justified war, and one that is always waved out there, is the Second World War, but have any wars been justified since that time? I’m not so sure.

Shirin Ebadi: Hitherto in my life, I have not come across an eventuality in which war can be justified, because war breeds violence. If you look at the history of the past twenty years, wherever there has been a war, it has never been followed by peace and tranquillity. For instance, look at Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.

Martti Ahtisaari: War can be justified when it is a defensive one. I am an eternally displaced person, luckily in my own country. I was two years of age when the Soviet Union attacked Finland, and we lost 11 per cent of our land, but we were never occupied. Four hundred thousand of us from Karjalohja where I come from, including my family and relatives, had to be resettled in the rest of Finland. That, I regard as our right. Many countries in our neighbourhood decided to do otherwise, but I’m very proud that we defended ourselves. In 1918, the first year of our independence, Finland had a civil war. We fought against each other. This may have been a reflection of our conflict with Russia, but there were also many complaints. Farmers did not have land and inequality was very high. We got out of that and became an inclusive society where everyone had a chance to participate in the political process. In ten years, those who lost the war were eventually in government. It was the Social Democrats who were pushing for egalitarian policies, but a long time ago every political party accepted. The whole of society felt it was good to give every child a fair opportunity, to give them good healthcare before and after they’re born, to give them a decent education wherever they live. Children do not ask to be born into poor families, so it should not matter whether they are or not – they have every right to those things.

Lech Wałęsa: Violence is always a bad choice. I always look for a peaceful method. But I understand that there can be situations in the world where, to stay alive, you need to kill someone else. We are responsible for that because we should help those who find themselves in those situations by creating a safe environment where they don’t have to make that choice.

How fragile is our global order?

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein: It’s amazing to think that it took upwards of 100 to 200 million deaths, the casualties of the First World War, Second World War and Spanish Influenza outbreak, to force us to think more like rational human beings, rather than self-interested nativists who only pursue the narrow at the expense of the broad. Progress is slow. Why is it that things that seem to be self-evident (equality, non-discrimination, anti-racism) take time to become the norm, and vast swathes of society still cling on to primitive ways of thinking? Why are we so incapable of learning the deeper lessons of our history? Cecil Lewis, an author I much admire, published a book in 1936, reflecting on his experiences of the First World War. In that book he refers to the invincibility of man’s stupidity. It’s very appropriate he doesn’t mention women – it’s men who are fundamentally stupid in this. Indeed, peace is very fragile.

What are the key causes of conflict and war?

Jody Williams: Different conflicts result from different elements of economics, politics and other social factors, or combinations thereof. Race and religion are used as tools to inflame a populace to support or engage in war. I don’t think that religion in and of itself causes war. War is pretty much always about money and power. The tools that are used to get the masses to engage in war can be race, religion, or anything that can make an enemy seem as ‘the other’ and ‘less’ than ‘we’ are; and therefore worthy of being killed in a war. Climate change, on the other hand, does affect population flows and does contribute to conflict. If we look at the situation in Sudan and Darfur, part of this situation is down to the ongoing desertification of the region, pushing nomadic groups further and further away from where they have been historically able to raise animals and into otherwise settled populations. Economics are also very important. Many of the massive demonstrations throughout Europe have been about economic stagnation and collapse. There are certainly the seeds being sown there of violent conflict.

What is the start of the peacebuilding and reconciliation process?

Martti Ahtisaari: Conflict always leaves a mark, regardless of whether it was an internal exercise or whether external forces were involved. It becomes very clear in many cases that it’s very, very difficult to start the reconciliation process. There are so many examples. In my country it was winner takes it all, but inclusive policies came, and thank God we’ve done well. There are still, however, people who remember what happened in their families, and there is not always the same forgiveness we have seen in South Africa. There are also examples such as Bosnia and Herzegovina where they have three distinct histories: the Croats, the Serbs and the Bosniaks. Even if you forgive, it still leaves bitterness because you cannot deal with the atrocities that have been committed.

As a peace mediator, the best I can achieve in many cases is to achieve a change of behaviour in society; to make sure people know that what’s happened in the past will never be repeated. To think that I could correct all the wrongdoing in a society – wrongdoings which are very often committed by both sides – is impossible. In Northern Ireland, for example, they are largely maintaining peace, but the reconciliation process has not gone through yet. If there is a conflict, one had better be prepared that it will take a long time to correct the problems it will create. The first step is to simplify the process as much as you can. If you think that you can solve all the past atrocities, it won’t happen. You have to bid for the future. This doesn’t satisfy everybody, and can sometimes make it even more complicated to find peace. People feel that everything should be agreed before they sign a ceasefire. I witnessed that type of discussion in Myanmar with The Elders’ Gro Harlem Brundtland and Jimmy Carter. Very often you need peace first to start a proper dialogue on all the grievances that exist in society, and you can never solve all of them.

When I got the Nobel Peace Prize, I said that we can solve every problem and conflict in the world. I don’t understand why situations as we have in Cyprus and Kashmir are still allowed to happen. I remember when I was negotiating in Kosovo, one visitor asked me why I was in a hurry as there were so many unsolved conflicts! I told him that he should never advise me or anyone else to have more frozen conflicts in the world – it’s a disgrace for the international community.

Bertie Ahern: Peacebuilding is a difficult task, and sometimes it’s a matter of timing. Often, war and violence are inevitable, and combatants, whether illegal groups, paramilitary or government, are not prepared to have dialogue – and it takes a long time before anyone even starts to look at a strategy for peace. There is a stage where people are beaten, when they become weary of conflict or when a hand of friendship is held out by people who try to see the bigger picture. Those are the glimmers of hope that I look for at a personal level in peacebuilding. I look for broad acceptance by the parties involved in the conflict that the status quo is untenable, and that some form of agreement is better in terms of everybody’s interests. If people don’t believe the status quo is untenable, and if they’re not prepared to move on, there’s very little you can do – and usually the conflict continues, indefinitely.

How can we create resilient peace?

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein: If I asked you to tell me the algorithm for the construction of peace, you wouldn’t be able to tell me – there isn’t one. After seventy years of peacebuilding, we still don’t have one and that is a central failing of peacebuilding as a craft. We have a war in Iraq, we go in and throw cement at the problem. We train officials, we put money into rebuilding physical infrastructure, administrative infrastructure, but we never think about how we’re going to cope with the narratives, the historical memory, the matters of identity. Who are the people? How do they view themselves? Why do they see that a common experience may be subject to different interpretations? If that’s the case in Iraq, Bosnia and so many countries, doesn’t that reveal a hole that we are utterly incapable of filling?

Look around the world today. You are seeing great passion, the tearing down of statues that represent the colonial experience of racism. It’s pent-up frustration that hasn’t been dealt with over time. It’s just amazing to see how stupid we can be as a society, how much we put our heads in the sand when we need proper and deep dialogue. Any part of our history that may send ambivalent signals where our narrative isn’t settled, we have to deal with it. You don’t turn a blind eye knowing it will create and keep the divisions of society in place. We’re immensely short-sighted when it comes to how we deal with the peace problem.

What is the relationship of culture and religion to conflict and peacebuilding?

Shirin Ebadi: Cross-cultural understanding is a part of the series of factors contributing to human dignity that, in turn, contribute to building peace. If I live in a society that is unable to tolerate my culture or religion, that will undermine my human dignity.

Lech Wałęsa: In our peace movement, religion was something that united us. I think that music, art, religion, culture are things that unite people, help them think and feel similarly. If the people are united, they can build whatever they want.

Are some acts unforgivable?

Marina Cantacuzino: Forgiveness is highly contested territory, as I have said, and again this is entirely personal. For some people forgiveness is conditional on remorse and apology. Others say apology or remorse might never be possible for multiple reasons and therefore if you wait for it and expect it you are simply putting the power in the wrong hands. Forgiveness, therefore, is an act of self-healing and empowerment. So, what is unforgivable for one person, may not be for the next.

Take Eva Kor, for example. It’s hard to imagine how she could ever forgive the Nazi doctors, particularly Dr Josef Mengele, who experimented on her in Auschwitz as a child. And yet she does and she is very clear about what forgiveness is for her. She says, ‘I forgive not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it. Forgiveness is really nothing more than an act of self-healing and self-empowerment. I call it a miracle medicine. It is free, it works and has no side effects.’ Actually, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida believed that the only wrongdoing that calls for forgiveness is that which is unforgivable. By this he meant wrongs that can never be understood, overlooked or undone and therefore cannot be fixed by restitution or reconciliation.

Can forgiveness take the place of revenge?

Marina Cantacuzino: Jude Whyte, whose mother was killed in Northern Ireland by an IRA bomb during the sectarian conflict, says: ‘You could say my revenge for the murder of my mother is my forgiveness because it has given me strength.’ That statement tells you that, yes, forgiveness can be used as a powerful form of revenge. Some perpetrators want to keep you trapped to them, forever burdened by the pain, and forgiveness cuts the ties. Take another example, Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son, Jesse, was one of twenty children murdered at the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. She has been on a long journey towards forgiveness and says: ‘Forgiveness felt like I was given a big pair of scissors to cut the tie and regain my personal power.’ Once you are able to forgive the person or people who have hurt you, they no longer have control over your state of mind. As the great Irish writer Oscar Wilde said rather flippantly but very accurately, ‘Forgive your enemies because nothing annoys them more.’

Lech Wałęsa: Forgiveness is a beautiful action, but to do so is not so easy. Sometimes people experience too much violence, lose families, houses and their health. It is really hard for them to forgive. The role of forgiveness is very important even if forgiveness means only to stop retaliation.

Forgiveness is hard and any of us that have ever had to forgive will know this first-hand. Even in our rather mundane lives, the act of forgiveness for relatively inconsequential wrongs can take months, sometimes years, of introspection. When we visited South Africa with our In Place of War team, we met a man who used to be a senior member of an extremely violent gang, and who had killed family members in the community he now supports. In an almost unbelievable act of generosity, the community have forgiven him, as they know that he is the best hope, through his work, of preventing their young people following the same path. Forgiveness does not have to be selfless, it does not have to be selfish, but it has to be real and sustainable.

How can we proactively apply peacebuilding techniques to societies that are becoming divided?

Bertie Ahern: Perhaps because I was involved in politics during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, I am a great believer in multilateralism. I have great regard and respect for the organizations that have been built up over generations and which are multilateral – the UNDP, for example. It’s extremely worrying that the groundwork of multilateralism is being damaged and undermined, particularly so over the last two years. It is more important than ever, therefore, that conflict resolution organizations work together and build systems of multilateral connection almost outside the government system. This isn’t ideal – it’s far better when governments are prepared to play a bigger role to help fund these issues. We have countries like Norway that do great work in this sense, but it’s harder than ever now because the hand of friendship is no longer being held out by all countries in an effort to resolve issues.

Will we see a world free from conflict?

Jody Williams: If people really care, then this could definitely be achieved within the lives of our children or possibly our grandchildren. It is possible! People have to stand up and say no to being cannon fodder for a few sitting in their capitals who send them to war for more power, money, resource and more.

Martti Ahtisaari: To answer this, I look at my part of the world. With the support of the population, inclusive policies and egalitarian policies, you can create an environment which gives opportunities for everyone and hence very little conflict. If you look at the percentage of the population in prison in countries such as the United States you see what happens when you don’t have egalitarian policies and you can’t move from one social class to another, and if education and opportunities are poor. In many cases you see families with multiple generations of poor education and opportunity, and these individuals can easily become targets for criminal gangs, drug gangs and others. One economist recently stated, ‘If you want to live the American dream, go to Sweden.’ Many argue that this is due to the homogeneity of the Nordic countries, but this is not true. Sweden today is a less homogeneous society than the UK. There are also many old attitudes present in the world that are preventing progress. We have to send a very clear message to today’s Russia, for example, that the Cold War is over. The West is no longer attempting to threaten them militarily, NATO doesn’t even have the capacity to do that. It should be the least of Russia’s worries. They could use that money to improve the rule of law, and the rest of the unilateral values in their society such as education. We should be much more capable of cooperating to end the conflicts we have.

Ben Ferencz: The answer to your question is very clearly no, but I don’t want you to walk away with that answer, because it is deceptive. We are moving in the direction of peace – we will never have perfection and we shouldn’t expect it. The fact that confined spots here and there are rotten should not misguide us into forgetting that we can make progress, we are making progress, and we have to continue to make progress. The progress we have made so far is inadequate, and the crimes that are being committed are outrageous. There’s nothing you can do instantaneously to reverse what has been glorified for centuries. We have, for centuries, glorified the killing of people with whom you cannot reach an agreement – we don’t yet have the answers to prevent that.

What are your greatest worries for the next generation?

Lech Wałęsa: My greatest worry is populism; we have to fight the demagogues and so-called leaders who do whatever they want without consequence. I worry what will happen if populists gain power on a massive scale; they can destroy society. We need to find an answer, a new structure for the world that is beautiful – but to do that, we must be organized and united.

What would be your message to the generation after ours to build a peaceful world?

Martti Ahtisaari: I would urge the next generation to learn from our mistakes. What worries me sometimes is that we haven’t learned very much from history. We should study why we have landed into certain situations, as it would be totally possible to avoid making the same mistakes again. It’s sad to see how much the populist movements get supported in today’s Europe. It’s a totally unintellectual debate we see that leads people to make those choices. I have learned in my life that it’s important to know the facts. You have to be able to analyse a situation and understand what is really behind it. Populism has no room for this approach. The younger generation are much brighter than mine, and I have hope for them in the future.

Lech Wałęsa: Our generation destroyed old roles, opened the borders in Europe, united Europe, and we opened a new era for your generation. New eras need new structures, new ways of thinking, and you have to rebuild everything for a new era. You have to understand that developments in technology brought us to a point where our weapons can destroy the whole world, so the only way forward for the future is to build peace and unite nations.

Ben Ferencz: After the war, we captured in Berlin records where the Nazi commanders at the front had been proudly reporting to their headquarters how many Jews, Gypsies and other opponents they had murdered. They never used the term ‘murdered’, but ‘eliminated’. I consolidated those reports (I did it on a little adding machine) and when I realized that a million people had been killed, I flew with that evidence down from Berlin to Nuremberg with my boss, and said, ‘You’ve got to put on a new trial.’ He said, ‘We can’t; there’s lawyers already assigned, we can’t authorize new trials.’ He said, ‘Can you do it in addition to your other work?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So he appointed me and I became the Chief Prosecutor to the largest murder trial in human history. I was twenty-seven years old. For fifty years I then tried to work in getting a permanent international court set up, and we finally did it. The International Criminal Court now exists at The Hague.

When the ICC got to their first trial, a modern case, the Chief Prosecutor called me up and said, ‘Ben, we’d like you to do the closing statement for the prosecution.’ And I said, ‘Of course I will.’ And so, aged ninety-two, I went and made the closing statement for the prosecution. I’m now in my ninety-eighth year, so that is simply to give you some feeling of the time it takes to go forward, and I’m still working on this – seven days a week, fifteen hours every day, trying to continue this work of creating a more rational humane world. We have basically got to change the hearts and minds of people, particularly the young people. Young people are the court of public opinion; they are the people who will say, ‘Hell no, we won’t go.’ The world is much more dangerous than it has been. We have the capacity from cyberspace now to cut off the electrical grid on planet earth. We don’t have to invent such ridiculous terms as ‘collateral damage’ as though it was just a passing wind. Today’s weapons can kill everybody, or wipe out our whole city by just cutting off utilities without a sound. This is the world we’re looking at. We have to have effective mechanisms to settle disputes, no matter what they are, without war. War should be treated with the contempt it deserves, and not glorified. War is hell. I was there; I’ve seen it, experienced it and lived it.

Our governments aren’t fighting to end war – we still have diplomats who are quibbling and competing over who can build the most effective weapon to kill the most people. In my ninety-eighth year, it’s not my problem. But for the younger people, wake up, speak up, stop it! To the young people of today, I give them three pieces of advice: one, never give up. Two, never give up. Three, never give up. And that’s the best advice I can give, and I am hopeful as I view the progress which has been significant over the years with the creation of the courts and the awakening of the human conscience. We are making good progress, but we have a long way still to go and it’s getting more dangerous every day. We mustn’t be blinded by the problems and thereby ignore the progress. The progress we have seen since the Second World War is very significant. We do have courts, we are teaching international criminal law in universities all around the world, we do have various declarations of human rights which are not honoured in full but nevertheless have had an impact.

Shirin Ebadi: Those seeking peace in their society must remember that what you wish for yourself, you should wish for others, and that what harms you also harms others. That would be my message for the next generation, or for any individuals who wish to create peace in their society.

There is nothing new about human displacement from war. The very word refugee can be traced back to the French réfugié, a description given to the Protestants who fled France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) – a law that granted religious liberty and civil rights to the Protestants (Huguenots) for over a century. In the years that followed, it is estimated that close to 500,000 French Protestants left France. The cultural confusion of those who migrate because they want to, for say, a new job, versus those who are displaced due to conflict or famine, has created yet another form of discriminatory language and labelling, another easy group for us to otherize and blame for our social ills. It is not necessarily that we have a refugee crisis, but rather a crisis in our understanding of those who flee for their lives.

What is the scale of our global migration and refugee movement?

Alexander Betts: Today, we have around 260 million international migrants in the world, up from about 70 million in 1970. Interestingly, the proportion of the world’s total population that is migrating has been relatively constant, at around 3 per cent since the 1970s. So, the proportion of the world’s population migrating has not changed dramatically. What has been increasing, though, is the number of people displaced by conflict or persecution. We have around 60 million people displaced around the world today, more than at any time since the Second World War, and more than 22 million of these people are refugees who have fled across a border. The difficulty is that the legal definition of a refugee (created in the aftermath of the Second World War) was a person fleeing persecution. This was an era in which most people were fleeing from East to West during the early Cold War – they were individuals being targeted by the state. Today, though, the primary reason for people fleeing is that they have come from fragile states, some of which are in conflict and have wars. Others are just chronically weak states that can’t provide for the basic needs of their people; societies like Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is where you get into the grey area of people fleeing for reasons of survival but without necessarily fitting neatly into the legal definition of a refugee.

Catherine Woollard: From 2014 to 2015, we saw a quadrupling of the number of people arriving into Europe, with around 1 million people arriving in 2015. That provoked an extraordinary political crisis in Europe, even though those numbers were very manageable for the continent. Only 17 per cent of those forcibly displaced are in Europe, and that includes Turkey – which is the world’s largest refugee-hosting country. Thirty per cent of those forcibly displaced are in Africa and we see major refugee-hosting countries like Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, places far poorer than the European continent. We’ve seen a disproportionate focus on Europe and a reaction that doesn’t really represent the real situation of displacement.

George Rupp: There are over 65 million uprooted people in the world today. Around two-thirds of them are internally displaced, which means that they are still within their own countries of origin. Some 20 million have crossed international borders and therefore are technically, in UN terminology, refugees. But all of them have experienced similar problems, have been uprooted from their homes, and are having to figure out how to support themselves and their families and find security.

I’m ever conscious of the consequences of labelling a group, so I asked Professor Rupp whether it was fair to refer to the current state and volumes of refugee movements as a problem.

I think it’s perfectly fine to call it a problem. It is a problem. It is also a movement, but not one that is altogether voluntary. The scale in statistical terms is that there are over 65 million uprooted people in the world today.

What are the obligations of countries towards refugees?

Catherine Woollard: The Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 protocol state the obligations on asylum, and protection of people who have fled due to persecution. Within Europe, obligations are codified in European asylum law – the Common European Asylum System – which sets the standards that member states (and associated non-member states) must adhere to in terms of standards of reception, what people are entitled to and what happens when they arrive, the right to make asylum claims and so on. It also includes the right to a fair asylum procedure. There are also rights to family reunion.

How can we improve the situation for our refugees?

Gulwali Passarlay: Helping refugees isn’t rocket science; you just need compassion in the political world. You have 65 million refugees and displaced people in our world, roughly the same as the UK population. What people need to understand is that the majority of these people are either in the same country, or near the region they left. The majority of countries taking refugees are not in the Western world – they are places like Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and Kenya. One in ten people at most from this group end up in Europe. But guess what – we only call it a crisis when it gets to Europe. We only call it a crisis when trucks are delayed or holidays are delayed. The global community has not taken its responsibilities towards refugees seriously; we’re not helping countries host refugees and provide education and healthcare. Countries pledge to give money, and that money never materializes.

Citizens are, in general, very compassionate. I travel across Britain doing talks at schools, at universities. People are very compassionate, people want to show solidarity, to foster, to welcome strangers into their home. It’s just the government who are lacking. At the moment we have a hostile environment where everyone who comes to our country is seen like a suspect, as a liar, as a criminal. With refugees, they are guilty until proven innocent. It is not the other way around. We’re not innocent until proven guilty. The system is very dehumanizing – it’s inhumane, it’s immoral, it treats you not as a human, it makes you feel subhuman. We need to take our fair share; we’re not doing enough. And the refugee crisis is not going to go away. We ought to take responsibility, and I think it’s our moral duty. It’s our legal obligation to do something about this crisis.

François Crépeau: Change will take time, maybe the passing of at least a generation, but we must work with those who carry today the voice of migrants. In recent times, film directors and novelists have been telling us about mobility and diversity. The whole stream of science fiction is about this. Star Trek is all about mobility and diversity, going where no man has gone before, encountering new species and understanding them. Novels like Brick Lane by Monica Ali, or, more recently, documentary films like Human Flows by Ai Weiwei, show the way forward. Artists are much more forward-looking in the migration debate than politicians: they already sense and predict what the challenges of tomorrow are going to be, just like Guernica by Picasso forecasted the Second World War.

Lawyers, human rights institutions and churches have been working with migrants for decades and have pushed their voice into the courts, but very few migrants go to court, protest, contest or demonstrate in the streets. They fear being detected, detained and deported. Migrants have suffered too much to risk their whole migration project crumble by sticking their neck out. Their preferred strategy is to duck any blow that endangers the migration project and move on to another place or another job.

Protesting, contesting, demonstrating means risking being detected as undocumented or a troublemaker, as well as taking time and energy out of the immediate goal of sending back money to the family or creating a future for oneself and one’s children. Migrant workers with a precarious status are at the very bottom of the pit in terms of social capital: they have little social connections, they have no family network, they do not speak the language. They are in the same ecological niche as the industrial workers of the nineteenth century, the indentured labour of the colonial era, or slaves of former eras. Unions have often historically been hostile to migrants, seeing them as competition for their members. Some unions now understand that migrant labour is an untapped pool of future members, for example in the agricultural sector. But unions are facing a deregulated labour market and a de-unionizing political atmosphere, where collective bargaining is seen as a swear word.

Do we need a world without borders?

Alexander Betts: Today, the rich privileged elite live in a world which is effectively borderless, yet people from poorer societies have huge restrictions and boundaries on their travel. Inequality is a defining characteristic of contemporary borders. In an ideal world, we would allow all people to participate freely in global circulation – but, politically, that’s not realistic or sustainable in today’s world. The rise of populist nationalism has caused a reassertion of ‘sovereignty’ and borders, and we’ve seen a backlash against migrants and refugees. A more realistic medium-term objective has to be to create a world of what I call ‘sustainable migration’, one in which we are able to support the rights of refugees, and people with human-rights-based claims to move, and then ensure that migration is managed in a way that can benefit all, migrants themselves, receiving societies and sending societies. The challenge of today and the immediate future is not to create a borderless world. It’s to create a world of sustainable migration which is more inclusive of those who currently risk being left behind, whether citizens, refugees or migrants.

Catherine Woollard: We need to find a way to manage our borders in a way that respects human rights and allows those entitled to protection to cross. We are in a situation now where people’s rights under international law are sometimes not respected, so people who need protection cannot move, and this leads to huge amounts of suffering. Europe is trying to export its migration panic and hence impose an unrealistic and damaging model of border control, whereas borders in reality are far more fluid and permeable. This anachronistic view of migration is having horrendous humanitarian consequences for the 66 million forcibly displaced people around the world, and Europe’s move backwards towards treating the movement of people as a threat may have knock-on effects in other regions, and put people at further risk.

George Rupp: A borderless world would be feasible only if we treated people as individuals who are respected by the whole human community. This notion of atomistic individuals who can each one relate to a universal human community is often expressed in various iterations of modern Western individualism. But the unbridled individualism now evident in much of the West and especially in the United States fails to recognize that communities are also indispensable, that we are all members of communities, and that the capacity to embrace differences can be cultivated within communities. This goal of inclusive communities is admittedly also idealistic, but it is a more achievable goal than a borderless world. We need a richer culture that embraces the texture of human communities, and builds on it, rather than simply rejecting it.

There is a sense that war can never be justified. But as we know when we look back at history, while a fair society would perhaps not need war, society is not fair and circumstances emerge that are so painful, and so unjust, conflict seems unavoidable. We must be careful not to become desensitized to the brutality of war either. As Ben Ferencz told me during our interview, it’s important to understand how unhelpful it is to glorify the act of war, notwithstanding our rightful celebration of the acts of bravery that occur within war.

War and conflict do not exist as natural phenomena apart from us. More than being instinctual, they are choices we actively make as a species against our own kind, largely driven by cultural, economic, political and social factors along with unbridled examples of self-interest, which not only have been created by us, but which could be largely avoided. As Bertie Ahern told me, armed conflict is indeed anathema to how the world should work, but it is something that often results out of issues that cannot be resolved by negotiation, or simply because parties have not put enough effort into conciliation and dialogue. Having experienced this first-hand through the conflict that played out in Ireland, Bertie is well placed to comment on this, and I was struck by the sadness he felt about the fact that the mechanisms of peacebuilding and conflict resolution often only come into play once wars are already underway. Research also shows how averse we as humans are to inflicting violence on our own kind and this is perhaps why, as Jody Williams explained, the tools used to get the masses to engage in war rest on creating differences to otherize the ‘enemy’ – to break the bonds of humanity, we must first deny it as existing in those who we want to conquer.

In today’s world, we need to understand conflict more than ever. As Lech Wałęsa described it, we live in a world with growing populism where demagogues are gaining power on a massive scale. History has shown how easy it is for these groups to destroy society, and that is precisely why we need to find new structures to organize and unite us. We create a utopian vision of peace as being something in the future, an oasis visible on the horizon of the fog of conflict, but it is perhaps our own philosophy that means we cannot comprehend peace as existing in the present. We tend to define the value of morality in terms of evils that have been perpetrated and the value of tolerance by the hatred that has been levied. These modes of thinking are remnants of a history defined by war, conflict and its glorification – a mode of human development perhaps to be called ‘adolescence’. In almost every way, however, humanity is now ready to progress from adolescence into adulthood. We have the technology, knowledge and infrastructure to genuinely create an egalitarian world, rich in opportunity and free of many of the scourges that have ravaged us for centuries.

Ben Ferencz investigated Nazi war crimes after the Second World War and was Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials. More than most, he understands the causes and consequence of war. It was clear from my conversation with him that we need to find mechanisms to settle disputes, whatever they are, without war. He passionately spoke about our need to stop glorifying war, for it is hell. When I met Ben he was ninety-eight, and he acknowledged that it is no longer his fight, but for the young people of today’s world there can be no greater call to action than to wake up, speak up and stop this love affair with war. Plato mused that ‘only the dead have seen the end of war’, but it will perhaps be the greatest victory of mankind to claim that vision for the living.

Biographies

Bertie Ahern retired as Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) in 2008, the first person in over sixty years to have been elected to that office on three successive occasions. He was instrumental in the negotiation of the historic Good Friday Agreement, a framework for power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

Martti Ahtisaari is a politician, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and United Nations diplomat. He was the tenth president of Finland from 1994 to 2000 and is noted for his work on international peace.

Professor Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is the Perry World House Professor of the Practice of Law and Human Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the UN’s sixth High Commissioner for Human Rights and has served as the President of the UN Security Council.

Professor Alexander Betts is a British political scientist. He is the Leopold Muller Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, a William Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, and Associate Head of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Oxford.

Marina Cantacuzino is an award-winning British journalist and founder of The Forgiveness Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring forgiveness and justice through stories.

Professor François Crépeau is a Canadian lawyer and Director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a professor at McGill University. His previous roles include time as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian political activist, lawyer and human rights activist. She is the founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre in Iran. In 2003 she was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her activism, making her the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to receive one.

Ben Ferencz is an American lawyer. He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after the Second World War and the Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at one of the twelve military trials held at Nuremberg.

Gulwali Passarlay is an Afghan refugee, author, TEDx speaker, and a Politics major at the University of Manchester. He is the co-founder of My Bright Kite, which aims to empower young refugees, and a Global Youth Ambassador for Theirworld.

Professor George Rupp is an American theologian. He has held the positions of President of Rice University, Columbia University, and the International Rescue Committee. He has written numerous articles and published six books.

Lech Wałęsa is a statesman, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former President of Poland. He was the first democratically elected president of the country and has received hundreds of honours, including over forty honorary degrees.

Jody Williams is an American political activist. In 1997 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on banning anti-personnel landmines. In addition, she has received fifteen honorary degrees and has been named by Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.

Catherine Woollard is Director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, an alliance of 106 NGOs across forty European countries, whose mission is to protect and advance the rights of refugees, asylum-seekers and other forcibly displaced persons.