From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The more we trust the 'gold' within ourselves, the more we are able to see it in others. Due to our negativity bias, it's easy to focus on the flaws or defenses in others. However, the more we train ourselves to see the goodness in others, the more we can recognize it.
A resilient position means that you are not always on the brink of war. The cost of war is so great that being on the brink is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. We have to make leaders and societies pay more attention to the costs of conflict.
As war ravaged Liberia, I realized it is women who bear the greatest burden in prolonged conflicts. We began organizing Christian and Muslim women to demonstrate together, launching protests and a sex strike to help oust Charles Taylor.
Beyond the atrocities of mass murder and rape, ISIS also set out to systematically destroy the Yazidi community by ensuring that we did not have the resources to survive in our homeland. They poisoned wells, burned farms, took out electrical grids, and destroyed schools, homes, temples, and hospitals.
I want every mother in the world, from Baghdad to New York to be able to guarantee the same strength and health to her child; to give that child the tools to control their happiness and health, and to have the power to live well.
I still believe that nuclear is the greatest risk we face as a society today.
Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.
I also worry greatly about how our world is now, with so many people and few resources to sustain them… with countries who are threatening each other with atomic weapons…. Weapons which can never be used because they would destroy the earth.
All conflicts are different with their particular history and reasons. I think that inequality within societies and between regions has become a key cause for conflict, exacerbated by rapid information dissemination, as people are (now) more aware of inequalities...
Beyond the atrocities of mass murder and rape, ISIS also set out to systematically destroy the Yazidi community by ensuring that we did not have the resources to survive in our homeland. They poisoned wells, burned farms, took out electrical grids, and destroyed schools, homes, temples, and hospitals.
The fundamental starting point is to acknowledge that outside actors can rarely create peace, local ownership in resolving the conflicts is vital. You cannot import peace, it is created within society.
I don't think it was inevitable until the point where the tanks started rolling-in. It was unstoppable at that point… But 20 years ago, would we have realised this was going to happen? My sense would be absolutely not.