Edwin Ginn, who established the World Peace Foundation in 1910, believed that the
"natural, peaceful development of the human race" could be enhanced by extended
investigation and organized thought. He recognized the continuing importance of research
into the ways and means of achieving, and then ensuring, world peace. Our troubled times
require the kinds of deliberate but proactive study that Edwin Ginn envisaged for his
Foundation.
Since 1993, the Foundation has examined the causes and cures of intrastate conflict. The
peace of the world in this decade has been disturbed primarily by outbreaks of vicious
ethnic, religious, linguistic, and intercommunal antagonism within divided countries. The
episodes of brutal ethnic cleansing that have convulsed Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo are but
the best known and most devastating of a rash of such attempts to better rivals across the
globe. Few places are immune from some variant of this internecine warfare, whether the
immediate battles are over religion, language, appearance, or color differences.
Thus, the Foundation is active in and studies the problems of Cyprus, the Sudan and Sri
Lanka, and has worked in and studied the prospects for democracy in Burma and Haiti. It
has sponsored research on the role of non-governmental organizations in preventing
conflict in ethnically divided societies. It is engaged in feasibility studies regarding
the reduction of conflict in Africa by the creation of African crisis response forces. It
has analyzed the use of preventive diplomacy in resolving ethnic and other intercommunal
conflicts. Its work on truth commissions demonstrates how that method of post-conflict
justice seeking can help prevent future internal conflicts.
Intercommunal conflict often becomes civil war and, in some cases, leads to collapsed
states. The Foundation is actively researching the causes of state failure, and how best
to reinvigorate and manage the resuscitation of wounded states.
Contributing to widespread killings in intercommunal conflicts, civil wars, and imploding
states is the easy availability of small arms and other light weapons. For this reason,
the Foundation is engaged in a long-term examination of the small arms problem, and how
its licit and illicit trade should be addressed.
Part of the task of the Foundation is to resolve conflicts as well as to study them. The
Foundation's work in Cyprus, Burma, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and all of Africa has resolution of
conflict as its goal. It has sponsored a detailed study of negotiating the end of deadly
conflict within and between states. It is also engaged in a long-term examination of the
successes and failures of African leadership.
NOW ONLINE
Information from the World
Peace Foundation Archives is now available online. The collection comprises materials
generated or accumulated by the World Peace Foundation between 1899 and 1993. It includes,
books, pamphlets, maps, correspondence, and minutes and agenda. The collection is largely
organized by subject, with most of the material dating from 1912 to 1941. The materials
provide a window on international and ethnic tensions in the years between the two World
Wars, particularly with regard to Japanese-American relations. They also showcase the
activities of the peace movement from 1912-1993 and its attempts to inform and educate the
public about the philosophy of pacifism. Additional material of note covers Labor
relations in the 1920s and 1930s, Women's Peace Movements in various countries in the
1920s and 1930s, and the operation of the New England Intercollegiate Model League of
Nations in the same period.
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