UNESCO’s original Culture of Peace document pointed out that promoting democratic participation and governance is important to replace the authoritarian power structures that support the culture of war and violence. Democracy and transparent and responsible governance are indispensable foundations for the realization of social sustainable development. Therefore they are of great importance for achieving and maintaining peace and security within and between different countries.

In South America, a lot of work is being done on forms of democratic participation in which citizens participate directly in the most important financial decisions of local government, such as ‘participatory budgeting’. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. PB began in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as an anti-poverty measure that helped reduce infant mortality by nearly 20%. Since then, PB has spread to more than 7,000 cities around the world and has been used to decide budgets of states, provinces, cities, housing authorities, schools and other institutions.

In the peace movement, voices are also often heard that emphasize participation in society and are critical of ‘representative democracy’, in which citizens elect representatives only once every four years and the majority decides who gets power. Little has changed at the national leve, but people have tried to make other institutions more democratic, for example through ‘sociocracy’. Sociocracy is distinguished by the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussions and decision-making by people with a shared goal or work process. The method uses a hierarchy of circles that correspond to units or departments of an organization, but it is a circular hierarchy: the links between each circle form feedback loops through the organization. This structure of connected circles making decisions through consent maintains the efficiency of a hierarchy while preserving the equality of the circles and their members. The Sociocratic Method was developed in the Netherlands by Gerard Endenburg and is based on the work of activists and educators Betty Cadbury and Kees Boeke.

Democracy is closely linked to peace, which is reflected in the interweaving of different domains of a culture of peace: Democratic participation simultaneously depends on and contributes to human rights, the free flow of information (transparency), women’s and men’s equality and international peace and security.

The Democratic Peace Theory states that democratic countries are less likely to go to war with each other than non-democratic countries. Proponents cite several reasons for the tendency of democratic states to keep the peace, including:

• The citizens of democracies usually have some say in legislative decisions to declare war.
• In democracies, the voting public holds their elected leaders responsible for human and financial war losses.
• If government leaders are held publicly accountable, they are likely to establish diplomatic institutions to resolve international tensions.
• By usually owning more wealth than other states, democracies avoid war to preserve their resources.

However, although there have been no recent wars between democratic states, democracies have participated in war. (For example, think of all the wars in Asia and the Middle East that the US has started). Another criticism is that other factors have probably led to a greater aversion to war between industrialized countries than just democracy, such as higher living standards, less poverty, employment, and more leisure and economic cooperation. In these circumstances, countries no longer need to dominate each other to survive.

The historian Harari says that wealth used to be mainly material wealth: wheat fields, gold mines, slaves, cattle. This encouraged war because it was relatively easy to capture material wealth through war. Today, wealth is increasingly based on knowledge. And you cannot conquer knowledge through war. “For example, you cannot capture the wealth of Silicon Valley through war, because there are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley – the wealth comes from the knowledge of the engineers and technicians. And so most wars today are confined to those parts of the world – like the Middle East – where wealth is old-fashioned material wealth, like oil fields.”

Economic prosperity therefore seems to be an important factor that maintains peace, especially now that there are fewer and fewer economic benefits to be gained from war. However, Harari notes, “It takes many wise people to make peace, but sometimes it is enough to have one fool to make war.” The balance is therefore fragile. That is why it is so important to invest in a culture of peace, to make the normalization and justification of violence a thing of the past.

Free flow of information

Closely linked to democracy is the free flow of information. This is necessary to replace the secrecy and manipulation of information that characterize the culture of war. When secrecy increases, it is justified in terms of ‘national security’ and ‘economic competitiveness’. It can also be used to hide incompetence, mistakes and illegality. Whatever the reason for government secrets and misinformation, it always frustrates the full democratic participation of the citizenry.

The effectiveness of “whistleblowers” – those who break the silence and reveal the truth – in breaking the barriers of secrecy and propaganda depends on the dissemination of the information they provide. Commercial media can refuse to publish this information and denounce those who do. However, we have entered an era of participatory communication systems such as the Internet, which enable direct exchange of information, knowledge and the development of people’s consciousness. As time goes on, we can expect this to become an increasingly powerful force for the transition to a Culture of Peace.