WASHINGTON (CNS) — A retired Notre Dame professor, John Paul Lederach, will travel to Japan in May to pick up the Niwano Peace Prize, given to those who have contributed significantly to interreligious cooperation and furthering the cause of world peace.
Lederach was named the 36th recipient of the prize in February.
Over his career, Lederach has provided consultation to help warring factions in Somalia, Northern Ireland, Colombia, the Basque region of Spain, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Nepal and throughout Africa. He has also helped develop hundreds of training programs in conflict transformation, mediation and international peacebuilding in 35 countries around the world.
Lederach has led a highly mobile life, not only in his peace work but also in his professional career. He helped establish a peace institute at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, was one of the first people brought in to staff the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at Notre Dame in Indiana, and is currently a senior fellow at San Francisco-based Humanity United, a foundation dedicated to bringing new approaches to global problems that have long been considered intractable. And his cellphone has an area code from the Mountain Time Zone.
“Conflict is a growth industry,” Lederach laughed ruefully during a telephone interview from San Francisco with Catholic News Service.
Only fairly recently has the academic world caught up, he said. “There were not a lot of programs back then,” he added. But Lederach’s undergraduate degree focused on peace studies, which led him to help create the peace institute located at his alma mater, which then led to his Notre Dame experience.
He recalled his first peacebuilding work in the 1980s in Central America, “particularly in the Nicaraguan Contra-Sandinista war period of the Eighties, where I was part of a conciliation team.”
Lederach said the best way to describe his work is that of a “practitioner-scholar in the field of peacebuilding.” He added, “It seems like an extraordinary gift to be able to follow your deepest sense of vocation ... and to find ways that translate that into work that is deeply meaningful in the same direction.”
It’s not the work of a secretary of state or of special envoys meeting with prime ministers and rebel leaders, but a more intimate dialogue among the people more directly affected by violent political upheaval.
The Japan-based Niwano Peace Foundation, which gives the honor, and the prize itself are named for Nikkyo Niwano, founder and first president of a lay Buddhist organization called Rissho Kosei-kai. For Niwano, peace was not merely an absence of conflict among nations, but a dynamic harmony in the inner lives of people as well as in communities, nations and the world.
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