The Hague Peace Projects was founded in 2014 by four human rights professionals who were worried by a quick succession of new conflicts that were emerging globally: Syria, Yemen, Central African Republic, Ukraine, and Libya. At the same time, many unsolved conflicts continued to take the lives of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo, and many other places.

Having worked intensively with refugees and human rights defenders who had come to the Netherlands from conflict areas, we recognized them as powerful catalysts for positive change, and a rich source of knowledge and new perspectives on our own views and attitudes.

However, there was no infrastructure for these activists who had become victims of conflict and oppression to continue their work for peace, justice, and human rights. Rarely did they get involved in the established human rights and development efforts. Considering this omission as an enormous waste of wisdom and experience, we decided that a new organisation needed to be created in order to provide them the opportunity to continue their work from within their diaspora communities.

As a result, our organization has attracted hundreds of activists and volunteers to spend their energy on resolving conflicts and defending human rights worldwide. Over the years, we have seen our organisation complete many peace projects driven by a great diversity of communities.

Our journey and pursuit of peace and human rights has taught us to recognise different cultures and embrace new perspectives. It has lead us to evolve as an organisation that represents a diversity of standpoints to form the basis of peace and humanity.

We live in a world where millions of people are experiencing war, violence, and oppression on a daily basis. There are more than 100 wars in the world at this current time, some of which are not wars at all but massacres and genocides.

Wars are not natural occurrences. They are not random, but a symptom with a back story. They are the least desirable outcome of a dispute or conflict that was never resolved. Any legitimate attempt towards peace requires a concerted effort to understand and accept their back story, and work towards addressing their root causes instead of stopping all thought at their symptoms.

To know the root cause of conflicts one must be willing to listen and talk. To focus solely on its symptoms requires a deaf ear to the truth and the dismissal of deviant narratives that flow from the process of truth finding.

Alas, symptom management is the predominant and preferred method of ‘achieving’ peace by the West. This entails a selective frame to consistently and conveniently disregard its own role in the birth and persistence of any conflict. Instead, it redirects any argument about the cause towards the resulting symptoms and the creation of new scapegoats and enemies to be defeated.

Such a process serves only to justify the ‘need for war’ and the deadly misconception that war is the saviour of peace. Because, war is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a society. It is the end of all norms and of all human security and rights.

The destruction and pain it creates is unimaginable. The grief for lost loved ones, the (inter)generational traumas, the rupture of the entire social fabric of a society, the continued mistrust between communities, poverty, corruption, and crime in post-conflict societies is the result of war, not peace.

Yet, while those elected to serve our best interests invest so readily in war with their budgets in the trillions, civil peace initiatives like ours receive nothing.

People who have personally experienced war say ‘never again’ to remind us of its inhumanity and cruelty – lest we forget. People tell and share their stories – lest we deny. Today alas, the West are choosing for war. They are invested in it and have abandoned understanding. The truth has, once again, been replaced with a story of fear and war.

As such, we must contend with a top-down narrative which cares little for the truth and whose amplification relies heavily on our own political, economic, and cultural biases. As has been said so often: the first victim in any war is the truth. This makes the most important ‘weapon’ for peace builders the truth itself.

Any real interest in discovering this requires that you listen and talk with a genuine intent to reflect on new information, while being exposed to different perspectives. The alternative path to conflict and war is our most inhumane investment to not understand or accept the wisdom of more stories other than just our own.

The current war fever in the West is only possible with massive propaganda. For the most part, propaganda in the sense of selective exposure and framing of information such that alternative facts and narratives are marginalized to become structurally underrepresented in an ideological mainstream. Sometimes, where journalism has been replaced by ideology and interests, it’s just outright lies and misinformation.

It is our goal, through the process of dialogue, to uncover and share truths that require representation. Without mass exposures to said truths, critical information will never form the basis of public opinion and civil and political decisions will not be just or well-informed.

Nor will conflicts ever be properly understood or resolved without the full disclosure and sufficient exposure to all pertinent information and perspectives.

The failure of mainstream media to do this has never been so clear in light of today’s ‘coverage’ of the genocide in Gaza. This is illustrative of a perpetual cultural framing and self fulfilling reward mechanism of interests and biases that has always been denied, just never so obviously. Whether it’s our institutionalized accounts of WW2, Vietnam, Iraq, or Gaza (etc., etc.), it all alludes to the same blind spot, that of war having something to do with justice and the dehumanization of an enemy to hide the conflict’s root causes.

A sustained effort is required by society itself to ensure their own leaders make the right decisions. For this to happen, sufficient access and exposure to accurate information is essential. Without it, we will never benefit from a clear analysis of world events and a true understanding of the nature of politics, economics, media, and culture.

Vital to any good decision and an understanding of the complexity of perspectives, is an active and informed engagement of all citizens in a dialogue across all sections of society: rich and poor, old and young, native and newcomer. The Hague Peace projects is a concerted effort to encourage, engage in, and share this dialogue such that a well-informed and inclusive civil society may grow and learn to properly advance towards peace.

It is our hope that through our collective efforts, real, non-violent, political, social, and environmental transformation can be achieved.