85. Peacemakers Who Changed History: Part 1

You know her name, Bertha von Suttner. Actually, I'm guessing you don't. Almost nobody does. But here's what you probably do know the Nobel Peace Prize, one of the most recognized honors in the world, awarded every year since nineteen oh one to the person or organization judged to have done the most For peace between nations But here's what most people don't know. The Nobel Peace Prize exists because of a woman.

a novelist, an Austrian aristocrat, who had fallen into poverty, answered a newspaper ad, worked for its author for exactly eight days, ran away to get secretly married, and then spent the next thirty years writing letters to him about the importance of peace. The man was Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.

And the woman, Bertha von Suttner, is one of the most consequential peacemakers in history. You just haven't heard of her yet. Today we're going to meet five people who stepped into impossible situations and chose the harder path. Some of them succeeded, some of them only partially succeeded. All of them changed.

Welcome to Wiser World, a podcast for busy people who need a refresher on all things world. Here we explore different regions of the globe, giving you the facts and context you need to think historically about current events. I truly believe that the more we learn about the world, the more we embrace it. Humanity. I'm your host, Allie Roper.

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If you haven't listened to the previous two episodes of this peacemaking series yet, where we talk about peacemaking as productive discourse. and learn a bit about the history of peacemaking, I'd encourage you to go back and start there. It lays the foundation for everything we're doing today. But if you're jumping in here, don't worry, each story stands on its own. But before we meet our first peacemaker, I want to offer a frame for this whole episode.

You know, when we study war, we tend to study its outcomes. Who won, who lost, what territory changed hands, the battles get named, the generals get statuses, the victories get monuments, right? Peacemakers rarely get that treatment. Their work is slower, quieter, and harder to photograph, and crucially they don't always succeed. The peace they worked for doesn't always hold. The war they tried to prevent sometimes happens anyway.

So I want to suggest a different measure for the people we're about to meet. Not did they win, but did they change what was possible? Did they expand the moral imagination of their moment? Did they make it slightly more conceivable that human beings could choose something other than violence? And by that measure, every person in this episode is extraordinary to me. They're not perfect, and they didn't do their work alone. There are many unnamed people in the wings of these stories.

And I'm sure each of these people have their flaws and challenges. And you don't have to agree with them on every political stance they have to appreciate their work. I know I don't. They're human. The point I want to ask is, did they expand the moral imagination of their moment? And I believe that each of these people did.

We're gonna start with Bertha von Suttner, who I alluded to in the intro. Now, Bertha Kinsky was born in 1843 in Prague into an impoverished Austrian noble family. Her father, a military officer, died before she was born. Her mother was well connected but not wealthy, and Bertha grew up understanding that the world expected women of her class to secure themselves through marriage, and that the options for doing anything else were very limited.

She spent years as a governess and tutor, moving between aristocratic households, always slightly on the outside of the world she was meant to inhabit. She was brilliant, curious, restless, and deeply frustrated by the constraints placed on her. While she was a tutor, she fell in love with the son of one of her employers, Arthur von Settner.

In eighteen seventy six, she read a newspaper advertisement. A wealthy Swedish inventor living in Paris was looking for a secretary, someone who was, as the ad reportedly put it, intelligent and multilingual. She answered the ad and she got the job, and the inventor's name was Alfred Nobel. And Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite nine years earlier.

She worked for him for eight days. Eight days. And then she left. Arthur Von Suttner, the man she'd fallen in love with from her tutoring job, wrote and said he couldn't live without her. His family disapproved of the match, so the two of them ran away together and got secretly married. It is, depending on how you will look at it, either a great romance or a very inconvenient career decision. But here's what matters. Alfred Nobel and Bertha von Suttner stayed friends.

Something in those eight days had attached them, and they wrote to each other for years, decades. After eloping, she and Arthur settled in the Caucasus and supported themselves by writing articles. for Western newspapers about conditions in the region. And in time, Bertha became deeply involved in the European peace movement, reading, writing, organizing, speaking.

And she wrote to Nobel constantly about it, about the catastrophic cost of war, about the new military technologies, including, she pointed out, his own inventions that were making conflict more destructive than ever. about the moral responsibility of powerful people to use their influence for something better. Nobel was not a pacifist. He was a complicated man. He believed famously that his explosives might actually deter war.

By making it too terrible to start. He even said, quote, Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your peace congresses. On the day when two armies will be able to annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops on knowing that total devastation will be in store for them if they engage themselves in war. End of quote.

He and Bertha argued about this in letters for years, but she was persuasive. At one point Nobel wrote to her, inform me, convince me, and then I will do something great for the movement. In eighteen eighty eight, Alfred Nobel's brother died while he was in France, and the French newspapers reported his death but confused him with Alfred. And one paper is said to have headlined The Merchant of Death Is Dead.

It talked about how the inventor of dynamite and other explosives had become rich while killing more people faster than ever before. And while we don't really know what changed Alfred Nobel's mind, it is widely believed that this had a big impact on him. I mean, I could totally see why. If my sister died and her obituary in the paper was about me and it said horrible things about me, I think it would cause me to pause too.

In eighteen eighty nine, Bertha von Suttner had published a novel called Lay Down Your Arms. It was a war story told through the eyes of a woman who loses everything to it, her husband, her son, her sense of a comprehensible world. It was not subtle, it was not trying to be. It became one of the best selling novels in Europe. Leo Tolstoy compared its impact to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Translations spread across the continent, people read it and wept, people read it and changed their minds. And when Alfred Nobel died in eighteen ninety-six, his will included a prize. to be awarded annually to the person who had done the most for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, And for the holding and promotion of peace congresses, the Nobel Peace Prize. He did what he told Bertha he was going to do. He did something for her movement after all.

In nineteen oh five, Bertha von Suttner became the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize had existed in significant part because she had spent thirty years convincing its founder that peace was worth funding. In her speech, she said, quote, one of the eternal truths is that happiness is created and developed in peace. And one of the eternal rights is the individual's rights to live.

She also said one of my favorite lines ever. She said, after the verb to love, to help is the most beautiful verb in the world. She died in june twenty first, nineteen fourteen. Ten days later, Archduke France Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. And World War One, the war she had spent her entire life trying to prevent. The war she'd written about, organized against, lobbied against, argued against in letters, right?

began within weeks of her death. She didn't get to see it, and maybe that's a mercy, but the infrastructure she helped build, the peace movement, the international organizations, the prize that would go on to honor hundreds of peacemakers after her, that survived. That is still here. And we are still using it. Bertha von Suttner warned them they didn't listen, and yet she changed what was possible. And that, I think, is worth remembering.

Our second peacemaker is someone that you may recognize, may know. His name is Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela was born in nineteen eighteen in a small village in South Africa's Eastern Cape. He grew up hearing stories of his ancestors' courage during the wars of resistance.

and he dreamed of making his own contribution to that struggle. He studied law, joined the African National Congress, and co-founded its Youth League in 1944, which was a group of young people who looked at the older generation's cautious approach and said, it's not enough. So for years Mandela organized nonviolent resistance against apartheid, the system of racial segregation that denied black South Africans basic rights, land, education, political representation. He was arrested repeatedly.

But after police massacred unarmed black South Africans at Sharpville in nineteen sixty, Mandela's thinking changed. He later said something striking about this. He said, For Gandhi, nonviolence was a moral principle, but for him it was a tactic. And when a tactic stops working, you change it. And he co founded a militant group and led a sabotage campaign against the apartheid government. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. He was forty six years old at this point.

I'm actually almost finished with his autobiography right now. And he's very honest about this part of his past, this n this uh violent part of his past. And now here's where the story I think really begins because what happened over the next twenty seven years in prison is what turned Nelson Mandela from a freedom fighter into a peacemaker. He spent eighteen of those years on Robin Island, South Africa's version of Alcatraz.

He labored in a limestone quarry during the day where the glaring sun damaged his eyes. At night, he could see the twinkling lights of Cape Town in the distance. The damp conditions contributed to the tuberculosis he would later contract. the the government, the white government, never released photos of him during his captivity, hoping to diminish his reputation, but the opposite happened. His invisibility only added to his

mythical status. And inside prison, something else was happening. Mandela befriended many of his white captors, introducing them to visitors as my guard of honor. He urged younger political inmates to study their opponent's strength. rather than rush into confrontation. He studied, he reflected, he began to see the long game differently. He later said, quote, hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate. End of quote.

Mandela and his colleagues carefully cultivated relationships with prison guards. and gradually negotiated better conditions for themselves, small victories like more sugar rations, the end of manual labor, eventually a tennis court in the prison courtyard. It might sound trivial But Mandela was practicing something. He was learning that people who seem like your enemies can be moved and that patience and dignity can shift a dynamic.

even in a place, you know, designed to strip you of both. And by the mid nineteen eighties, the apartheid system was cracking. International sanctions were biting, international resistance was growing, and Mandela made a pretty remarkable decision, even though he had no formal authority to negotiate on behalf of the ANC.

He secretly sent a letter to South Africa's Minister of Justice proposing exploratory talks. The minister agreed, and over the next three years, Mandela was secretly driven from from prison to meet with government ministers at their private homes.

He didn't tell his own friends at first because he knew they might object. He later wrote, quote, there are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock and go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading people the right way. End of quote.

In nineteen eighty nine he was offered a secret meeting with the president himself. Prison officials realized they couldn't send him in prison clothes, so they called in a tailor for a suit, and when the day arrived, Mandela couldn't tie his necktie. He hadn't worn one in decades. and the prison commander stepped behind him and tied a perfect double Windsor knot. I just I ugh I just think about that image.

The man who represents the system that you're locked up in is tying your tie so you can go negotiate your freedom. That is what twenty-seven years of patience and relationship building had produced. And on February 11th, 1990, Mandela walked out of Victor Wurster prison. He was 71 years old.

He raised his fist, the crowd erupted. He did not call for retribution. He did not demand that those who had imprisoned him, who had built an maintained a system of profound injustice, pay for their freedom or with their lives, he negotiated with them. Now this is not naivete. Mandela understood power precisely. He knew that a transition that excluded or threatened the white minority would be unstable.

and that it could collapse into civil war or produce a regime that simply replaced one form of oppression with another. He had spent twenty-seven years thinking about this. The negotiations were painstaking, contentious, nearly fell apart more than once. Political violence claimed more than ten thousand lives over the next four years, almost all of them black South Africans. This was not a clean or easy process.

But Mandela kept going, and in April of nineteen ninety four, South Africa held its first fully democratic election. Every adult citizen, regardless of race, could vote. The line stretched for miles. People waited for hours. Some had waited their entire lives. And Nelson Mandela was elected president. At his inauguration, he invited three of his former jailers to sit in the front row as honored guests. Not because what they had done was a forgivable.

But he had forgiven them because he realized that hatred, carrying hatred forward would have poisoned the country that he was trying to build. And South Africa then established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a process by which those who had committed acts of violence could come forward, testify publicly, and in some cases receive amnesty in exchange for full disclosure. It was painful, it was imperfect.

But it was a deliberate choice to deal with the past in the open rather than bury it and to grieve together rather than divide it further. That model has been studied and adapted in post-conflict societies ever since. Rwanda, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, the idea that you can look directly at what happened, name it, and still choose to build something new together, that came in significant part from Mandela.

He died in 2013 at 95 years old. And he once said: courage is not the absence of fear, it is the triumph over it. And I think his story is very remarkable. His book is fantastic, um, called Long Walk to Freedom. Twenty-seven years in prison, and he came out choosing to build and not destroy. I think that's amazing. Hej, det är jag från Riksbyggen här. Ja, du vet, budgetar som ska hållas. Som ska planeras, energikostnader som sticker i höjden och allt däremellan.

All right, our third peacemaker is someone you might also recognize. So when Franklin Delanore Roosevelt died in nineteen forty five, April, Eleanor Roosevelt was sixty years old and she had spent decades in the complicated and constrained role of first lady. She had done extraordinary work in that role, advocating for civil rights for the poor.

For workers, for women, but always through her husband's political machinery. And after FDR died, President Truman appointed her as a US delegate to the newly formed United Nations. We talked about this in the last episode. Now some people thought it was a gesture, kind of a way of honoring the former first lady with a symbolic role, but Eleanor Roosevelt had other plans. She was assigned to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Which had been tasked with drafting what would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was considered a difficult, maybe impossible job. The commission included representatives from eighteen nations, and this was nineteen forty six. The Cold War was beginning, ideological divisions were hardening. and agreeing on anything felt unlikely, and yet Eleanor Roosevelt made it work. How?

Well, she had no formal power. She was a delegate, not a head of state. She couldn't compel anyone to agree with her. What she had was something else, an absolute refusal to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. And she had a gift for listening to what people actually needed and not what they said they wanted. a kind of patient, steely persistence that wore down resistance, not through force, but through her sheer moral clarity.

She worked for two years. She navigated arguments about whether rights were individual or collective, about whether economic rights were as fundamental as political ones. About whether religious and cultural traditions could coexist with universal standards. She brought together people who fundamentally disagreed about the nature of humanity and brought the common ground beneath their disagreements.

Now, on December 10th, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Forty eight nations voted in favor, none voted against. Eight abstained, mostly Soviet bloc nations who objected the declaration's emphasis on individual rights, but zero voted no. Now, the Declaration contains 30 articles, and it begins All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and right.

It goes on to enumerate what that means in practice, like the right to life, to freedom from torture, to a fair trial, to education, to work, to participate in government, the right to asylum, the right to marry and have a family, the right to freedom of thought and religion. Now these are not new ideas in isolation, but gathered together stated really plainly

You know, they agreed to they were agreed to by nations from every region of the world. That was something new, a global statement that meant that certain things belong to every human being simply by virtue of being human, not by accident of birth, not by the grace of a particular government, not contingent on good behavior or religious affiliation or ethnic identity. And Eleanor Roosevelt called it her most important task. And I think she was right.

The declaration is not a treaty, it's not legally binding in the way that a convention or a covenant is. Critics have pointed this out, often with a lot of frustration. And they're correct that its power is moral rather than legal. But moral power's not nothing. The Declaration has been incorporated into the constitutions of dozens of nations. It has been cited in court decisions around the world. It has given language to movements for rights that might otherwise

have had no common vocabulary. And it has given people a document to point to and say, this, this is what I am owed, this is what every human being is owed. You know, you agree to this. And Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962. And Adelaide Stevenson spoke at her memorial and called her the first lady of the world.

She had no army, no formal authority over anyone in that commission room, but she had a stubborn, unshakable belief that words on paper could protect real people. And I think that those 30 articles proved she was right.

Now let's go to Central America in the 1980s. And to understand what happened here, we gotta understand what was happening in the region. So during this period, Central America was devastated by civil war. Leftist guerrillas were fighting against the governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, which were backed by the United States. The Contras, also supported by the United States, were fighting an insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Honduras was caught in the middle as a base for US military forces. And on Costa Rica's other border, Panama faced the oppression of Manuel Noriega's military dictatorship. This was the Cold War playing out in people's backyards. The United States and the Soviet Union were using Central America as a proxy battlefield, funding opposite sides of conflicts that were killing tens of thousands of people.

Guatemala's Civil War alone would last 36 years, okay? El Salvador's government was backed by murderous death squads. The region was bleeding, for lack of a better way to say it. And right in the middle of all of it sat Costa Rica. A country that was different from its neighbors in one really remarkable way. Costa Rica did not have a military. Only a civilian police force.

It had abolished its army back in nineteen forty eight. Now in a region defined by armed conflict, Costa Rica had decided decades earlier that it simply would not have an army. And in nineteen eighty six a man named Oscar Arias became president of Costa Rica. He was forty six years old, pretty young.

An economist by training, and he had grown up in one of the country's most prominent families. He was not a revolutionary, he was not a guerrilla fighter, he was a democratic politician from a small, peaceful country that most of the world didn't think much about. But Arias looked at what was happening around him and decided that Costa Rica could not simply sit on the sidelines while its neighbors destroyed themselves.

He believed that the regional conflicts directly threatened Costa Rica's own stability, and that the only path forward was a peace plan designed by Central Americans for Central Americans without outside powers dictating the term. Now this put him directly at odds with the United States. The Reagan administration was funding the contrasts and they wanted to use Costa Rican territory as a base.

Arias refused. He also criticized the Sandinistas and Nicaragua for their lack of democracy. He was not picking a side, he was telling both sides and the superpowers behind them, that the killing had to stop. And in February of 1987, he proposed a regional peace plan that would set a date for ceasefires between governments and rebel forces. ensure amnesty for political prisoners, and schedule free and democratic elections in every country in the region.

The United States tried to alter the plan, RDS resisted, and on the morning of August 7, 1987, at 4 o'clock in the morning, five Central American presidents emerged from a hotel room in Guatemala City with a signed peace agreement. Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua had all agreed to it. Think about that for a second. The president of a tiny country with no army, a country whose main exports are coffee and bananas, had just brokered a peace deal across an entire region.

that the United States and the Soviet Union had been proxy through proxy tearing apart for years. Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize later that same year. And in his Nobel lecture, he said something that I think captures everything about why Costa Rica was able to do what it did. He said, quote, My country is a country of teachers It is therefore a country of peace and

We closed our army camps and our school children go with books under their arms, not with rifles on their shoulders. We believe in dialogue, in agreement, in reaching a consensus. We reject violence. End of quote. The peace didn't come overnight, the conflicts took years to fully wind down. Guatemala's civil war didn't officially end until nineteen ninety six.

But the Esquipulas Accords, as they came to be known, were the turning point. They changed what was possible in the region. After leaving office, Arias used his Nobel Prize money to establish the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress. He traveled the world advocating for demilitarization, and it worked in some places. Panama abolished its army in nineteen ninety-four. Haiti did the same in two thousand. A country of teachers.

No army, and a president who believed that the answer to war was not more weapons, but more democracy. And I think there's something really powerful in that, especially in a world where we so often assume that strength means military strength. Costa Rica's stories suggest that maybe the strongest thing a country can do is refuse to play that game altogether.

Now for our final peacemaker, we need to go to Liberia, a small country on the west coast of Africa with a history unlike almost any other country on the continent. In 1817, a group of American citizens established Liberia as a colony for formally enslaved people from the United States and helped relocate roughly 12,000 people to West Africa. In eighteen forty seven, that's thirty years later, the colony declared independence, making it the oldest republic in Africa.

But from the very beginning there was a deep divide. The settlers from America, known as Americo Liberians, dominated the government and the economy for over a century, while the indigenous population was largely shut out. This is yet again another example of a country founded by people escaping oppression, who then built their own system of inequality.

In nineteen eighty, a military coup brought a man named Samuel Doe to power, the first president of indigenous descent. Many hoped that things would improve. They didn't. Doe's regime became totalitarian and deeply corrupt. He purged rivals, favored his own ethnic group, and ruled through repression.

In late 1989, a man named Charles Taylor invaded Liberia from neighboring Ivory Coast with a rebel army aimed to overthrow Doe. What followed was the first Liberian Civil War, which lasted until 1997. Multiple factions emerged, each led by warlords fighting for territory and resources, child soldiers, some as young as eight, were forcibly recruited, drugged, forced to commit atrocities. Over 150,000 people were killed and roughly two-thirds of the population were displaced.

The war ended with an election in nineteen ninety seven and Charles Taylor, that's the man who came over from Ivory Coast, he won. Many Liberians voted for him out of fear. You know, kind of captured in this chilling slogan that spread throughout the country that he killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him. That tells you everything about where Liberia was at this point.

As president Taylor continued to rule through corruption and authoritarianism, and by nineteen ninety nine, Liberia was plunged into a second civil war. By two thousand and three, Taylor's government controlled less than a third of the country.

Altogether the two wars killed roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people, displaced over half the population, and devastated every institution in the country. All sides committed atrocities, torture, rape, sexual slavery, summary executions, rape was being used as a weapon of war, the country was collapsing.

And this is where Lema Bowie enters the picture. Now, Woey was a social worker and trauma counselor in her early thirties. She had spent years working with former child soldiers, helping them process what they had done. and what had been done to them. She was exhausted and she was also furious, and she had an idea.

What if the women of Liberia, Christian women, Muslim women, market women, professional women, women from every faction and background, what if they organized together and simply refuse to accept this anymore? Now this sounded simple, but it was not simple. Liberia in two thousand three was a country where women had almost no formal political power. Speaking out could get you killed.

You know, there were men with guns and they had made it clear that they were not interested in what women thought. But Wowie had noticed something. She'd noticed that the women, the mothers, the church women, the mosque women, the market sellers, They moved through the country in ways that men with political agendas did not. They crossed factional lines, they talked to each other, they had networks.

that the war had not entirely destroyed. So she began organizing. She recruited women from the Christian churches. She went to the mosques. She brought together women who, in the context of Liberia's religious and factional divis divisions, really had little reason to trust each other and she asked them to find what they had in common. What they had in common, it turned out, was that they were all exhausted and they were all losing their children and they were all done.

And the women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace began with small demonstrations. Women in white clothing, typically white t-shirt. gathering in a fish market in Monrovia. White because it's the color of peace. And the fish market because that's where women gathered, where they had economic power and presence. They sang, they prayed, they held signs, and they were noticed when peace talks finally began in Ghana in two thousand and three.

Negotiations between Taylor's government and the rebel factions. Bowie and her network of women showed up, and when the talk stalled, as they repeatedly did, as the men inside the negotiating room found reasons to delay and obstruct and walk away from the table, the women blockaded the door. They linked arms, they sat down in front of the exit. They formed a human chain around the building and told the negotiators, You are not leaving until you have reached

an agreement. You will sit in that room until you are done. When security personnel threatened to have them arrested, Bowie made a move that was either brilliantly calculated or just desperate, possibly both. She threatened to remove her clothing. Now, in Liberian culture, for an elder woman to strip in public before men was considered a profound curse. And the security personnel backed down.

The negotiations did not end that day, but they did end. And a comprehensive peace agreement was signed. Charles Taylor resigned and fled to Nigeria. He was later extradited to The Hague and was convicted of eleven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to fifty years in prison. And a woman was elected president of Liberia in 2005, the first elected female head of state in African history, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

She had been supported in part by the women's movement that Bowie had helped to build. In 2011, Leima Bowie was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize shared with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemeni activist. Tawakal Karman, in her Nobel lecture, Bowie said, It is time for women to stop being politically angry. I think about that line a lot.

She had no army, she had no political office, she had a network of women in white, a fish market, and the absolute refusal to be politically angry anymore without action, and she really did help end a war. I think that's remarkable. So there are our five peacemakers for this episode.

Five impossible situations, five choices, many choices, to step into the fire instead of away from it. We talked about Bertha von Suttner. She spent thirty years writing letters to the inventor of Dynamite about the importance of peace. And her persistence created the prize that bears his name. We talked about Nelson Mandela. He spent twenty seven years in prison and came out choosing to build rather than destroy.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who had no formal authority over anyone in that commission room, produced thirty articles that still really matter. Oscar Arias, who got Central America to end decades of civil war, and Lema Bowie, who organized women in white to blockade a door and helped end a war. So what do these people have in common? You know, I've been thinking about this.

I think that they all saw clearly. They weren't naive about the difficulty of what they were attempting. You know, Mandela understood the political calculus of reconciliation. Bowie understood the risk of what she was doing. Roosevelt understood exactly how fragile that commission consensus was. Clarity about difficulty is not the same thing as pessimism. They all found the common humanity in the person across the table, even when that person had done terrible things.

Even when the room was full of people with completely opposing ideologies and interests, they found something to work with, some thread of shared humanity that they could pull. And they were all in their own ways told it was impossible, that it wouldn't work, that they were too small or too powerless, too late, too idealistic. And they did it anyway. And I want to close with something that has stayed with me since I started working on this series.

Peacemaking is not passive. It is not the absence of action. It is one of the most demanding, creative, courageous forms of action that exists. It requires us to hold our own anger and grief and fear and still choose connection, to still choose the table over the battlefield, you know, still choose the folded document. Remember we talked about d diplomacy in the last episode. Over the sword.

And that is not weakness, that is arguably the hardest thing a human being can do. And the fact that human beings have done it again and again across every culture and every century. tells me something really important about who we are, about what we are capable of, about what's possible, when someone refuses to stop believing that violence is the only way.

Now, I have something I'm genuinely excited to tell you about. What Bowie and the women of Liberia did in 2003 was extraordinary on its own, but it was also part of a larger shift that has been building for years. In October of 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325, the first resolution to specifically address the impact of armed conflict on women. and to formally recognize that women needed to be at the table when peace was being made.

It acknowledged that women and girls are disproportionately impacted by violent conflict. and recognize the critical role that women already play in peace building efforts. The resolution came after years of lobbying by civil society groups and women's organizations who had watched conflict after conflict, Bosnia, Rwanda, West Africa, where women bore the heaviest costs.

And had the least say in how peace was built afterward. And the message was clear peace and security efforts are more sustainable when women are equal partners. So what happened in Liberia three years later was in many ways Resolution thirteen twenty five coming to life. Not because the UN enforced it, but because women on the ground took that principle and made it real with their own hands.

And the story of Lema Bowie, you know, women organizing across religious and factional lines, using their networks, their presence, their refusal to be moved. is not just a historical story. It's happening right now all over the world. Women are doing this work today in conflict zones, in post conflict communities, in negotiation rooms where they are often the only woman at the table. And I want you to hear from someone who is doing this work.

In an upcoming episode, hopefully in two or three weeks, I'll be airing an interview with one of the women who helped draft Resolution 1325 and is the founder of an organization whose entire mission is building women as peacemakers. Bringing women into the rooms where peace is being made.

giving them tools and training and support and documenting what happens when they're there. And that episode's coming soon. And I hope you'll join me and listen in. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Just click the plus button and then you know when new episodes drop.

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So thank you so much for sharing the podcast with your friends and family. And until next week, let's go make the world a little more peaceful. Hey, before we get back into it, I want to tell you about Quince, who is sponsoring today's episode.

As the weather warms up, I've been on a bit of a closet reset lately. I've been really thinking about quality over quantity, pieces that are well made, versatile, and that I actually reach for every day. And that's where Quince keeps coming in for me. Here's what I love about their whole model.

Quince uses premium materials, we're talking one hundred percent European linen, organic cotton, super soft denim, and their styles start around fifty dollars, which honestly sounds too good to be true, especially once you feel the fabric. They make beautiful leather bags from one hundred percent hand woven Italian leather that look way more expensive than they are. And here's the part that really matters to me. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen entirely.

So what you're paying for is actually the quality, not the brand markup. That's rare. And if you're trying to build a wardrobe of pieces that are beautiful, breathable, and actually worth buying, Quince is worth checking out. I am currently loving their 100% European linen patch pocket wide leg pants. They are light and breezy and perfect. And you know how I love their chore jackets, which now come in new colors, which I'm stoked about.

Refresh your spring wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash wiserworld for free shipping and three hundred and sixty-five day returns, now available in Canada too. Go to Q Uin C E dot com slash wiserworld for free shipping and three hundred and sixty-five day returns. Quince.com slash.