Akira Kawasaki (Peace Boat)

Presentation Title
“Civilian Conflict Prevention: From GPPAC to the Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War”

The Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) is an international network of non-government organizations (NGOs) working for global conflict prevention. It was established in 2003 in response to the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 2001 report on the Prevention of Armed Conflict. The activities of the GPPAC have been carried out both in the Northeast Asian region and the international community. In the Northeast Asian region, it called for the demolition of the Cold War structure that still remains in the region, a turn away from the ongoing nuclear proliferation and arms race, and the creation of a Regional Mechanism for Peace as seen in Europe.

In the international community, the GPPAC proposed to the United Nations and the global society that civil society should be allowed to participate in meetings of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission and that the prevention of conflicts by peaceful means should be mainstreamed.

The GPPAC appreciate the significance of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution in an international context and came up with a concept of using Article 9 to prevent international conflicts. This idea led to the launch of the Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War, and the Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War will be organized as part of the campaign in May, 2008.

Concepts such as “conflict prevention,” “human security,” and “responsibility to protect” have recently been attracting the world's attention. Under such a circumstance, the civic movement to spread Article 9 to the world differentiates itself from the theories on conflict management based on military power, and it paves the way to the development of a theory on peaceful conflict prevention mainly by civil society. ?