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 that listening is just as important as talking. It has helped us to recognise different cultures and perspectives and has led 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, including 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 this back story, and work towards addressing their root causes instead of stopping thought at their symptoms.

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

Alas, symptom management is the method for ‘achieving’ peace by the West. A selective frame is required to consistently and conveniently disregards any own role in the birth and persistence of global conflicts, and redirect arguments away from their root cause towards the resulting symptoms through the creation of scapegoats and enemies to be blamed and defeated instead.

Such a process requires a deaf ear to the truth, and serves 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 billions, civil peace initiatives receive nothing.

People who have personally experienced war say ‘never again’ to remind us of its inhumanity and cruelty – lest we forget. People talk and share their stories – lest we deny. Today, the West are choosing for war. They are invested in it and have abandoned understanding.

Once again, the truth is being replaced with a story of fear and hate. As such, we must contend with top-down narratives whose amplification relies heavily on reinforcing our own cultural, political, and economic 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 truths requires that you listen and talk with a genuine intent to reflect on new information, while being exposed to different perspectives. The alternative of war is our most inhumane investment to never understand nor accept the wisdom of more stories other than just our own.

The current warmongering in the West is only possible with massive propaganda. The selective exposure and framing of information through corporate media such that alternative facts and narratives are marginalized and structurally underrepresented in an ideological mainstream.

It is our goal, through the process of dialogue, to uncover and share truths that require representation. Without mass exposures to all facts, 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 public exposure to all pertinent information and perspectives. The failure of mainstream corporate media to do this has never been so clear in light of today’s ‘coverage’ of the genocide in Gaza. This is a prime example of ideological framing and the self-fulfilling reward mechanisms of interests and biases that have always been denied, just never so obviously.

A sustained effort is required by society itself to ensure their 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 healthy democracy is the active and informed engagement of all citizens in a dialogue across all sections of society: rich and poor, old and young, native and newcomer.
We endeavour to encourage and share this dialogue and the information that flows from it, such that a well-informed and inclusive civil society may grow and learn to properly advance towards peace.

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

The media you know is not what you think it is.

We call the bulk of what comes our way ‘mainstream’, but corporate is a better description. Practically all of our daily news is provided by local monopolies owned by a handful of corporations.

By and large, Western media and its journalism reproduce a narrative version of the truth that reinforces the political, cultural, and economic biases of itself and its market place. That is not the job of journalism. Instead, it is a systemic failure to impart a balanced representation of facts in order to discern an accurate picture of the truth.

Though you may have suspected as much from its reporting on past conflicts, today there is no more blatant example of this than the coverage of Gaza, a fully documented genocide still waiting for the West’s humanity and willingness to share facts.

Here, we see deviant narratives are marginalized through lack of exposure and manipulation, and we are rewarded with a false frame of the truth for trusting what corporations and governments say to be true.

Gaza presents a live dashboard of the quality of Western journalism for us. When exposed to the enormity of its news and live coverage it is easy to gain a complete and horrifying overview of the genocide, and equally clear to see the collective inability of Western media to accurately pass this information on to its populations.

The daily omissions of crucial news and editorial strategies to sell a narrative in favour of facts, sound a clear and loud alarm bell for the quality of journalism and the consequent effect it has on democracy’s ability to think for itself.

The truth scares narratives that do not comply.

When initiatives to share truth and facts are attacked by the media we entrust to present it, the moment has arrived for us all to embolden our resolve to search for it ourselves.

Alas, this moment arrived long ago, if it was ever not with us. Though Gaza is most illustrative of the world’s largest propaganda machine by the public unveiling of its hypocrisy and complicity through overwhelming and accessible evidence, the story of Gaza is but one in a long line of exploitative conflicts that have been spun for our acceptance.

Each time, the driving narrative stems from cultural institutions with their uniform and rigid power structures serving the interests of capitalism, imperialism, and war. Positions on international conflicts reveal a pervasive colonial attitude whose crimes are sold as wars to protect against a framed evil of convenience. Its explanation for everything: the enemy.

As it stands, our ‘trusted’ media institutions continue to deflect genuine attempts at presenting critical facts with divisive counter narratives to trivialise or ostracise those who pursue them.

The societal impact of this information diet is colossal and encourages positions that are only tenable without a full disclosure of facts and the promotion of counter-narratives to encourage you not to search for them.

We are consequently presented with a story which is framed to serve the capital interests of our cultural institutions and their investors – and too rarely exposed to genuine attempts at truth and context with the aim of serving the interests of the people and peace.

Tomorrow’s world.

By any objective measure, we see a culture today that has failed in its promises of freedom and democracy to deliver an unequal world unto its youngest generation that thrives on their exploitation.

A world which has sold their social and economic rights to the highest bidders, increasingly empowering a class hierarchy to chase their false gods of greed and the servitude of workers to provide it.

With every aspect of societal responsibility in crisis, from affordable life to a liveable planet, our champions of the counter-narrative have nothing left to validate their role outside the offer of war. And with the world’s largest propaganda machine at their disposal, they are likely to succeed once again in taking us down a war path of capital exploitation under the guise of freedom and progress.

And such are the cycles of violence and crises that haunt Western history, while furnishing its lessons with a vocabulary of civilization and saviourism. To avoid past mistakes there is as much un-learning as learning to be done.

Humanity is losing the war on information.

Our collective ability to adequately reflect on the events and mechanisms that influence our behaviour and lives, steadily diminishes with bad information.

The quality journalism that does emerge from the fringes of capitalism sees its communal impact all but nullified by our lack of exposure to it, notwithstanding the commercial and ideological interests it may be sieved through.

There remains one tradition that may yet inform and enable us to advance towards a new culture of peace beyond the ethos of imperialism and its divisive narrative.

A tradition through the ages, of talking and listening to reach a consensus – a tradition much fairer than the blunt majoritarianism we call democracy today.

Our task ahead is to improve the information diet of a culture. One that, once again, sees its values and emotions engineered to return to a cycle of war.

With the stakes and real-life repercussions higher each time, we now look to stop a steady Nazification of Europe and America and the pursuit of power in the name of new and old normalized abstractions to dehumanize.

We endeavour to uncover and share the world’s stories because our media has lost its diversity and ability to present different points of view.

And the consequences are disastrous.