UNGA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security Delivered by Rafi Chowdhury, International Peace Bureau
Chairperson, distinguished delegates,
I present this statement on behalf of 175 civil society representatives and a coalition of organizations from around the world. We urge all member states to activate the UN General Assembly mechanism of Special Sessions on Disarmament without further procrastination, as per the recommendations of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres in Action 26(a) of the Pact for the Future.
14 October 2024 – In collaboration with the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security, PeaceMOMO, and the dedicated efforts of an international working group of scholars and peace leaders from across the Indo-Pacific, the U.S., and Europe, we are proud to share the Common Security Report in the Indo-Pacific Region.
Over the past year, the authors have analyzed key crises in the region and developed diplomatic alternatives aimed at fostering greater peace, justice, and prosperity. This report serves as a vital resource to guide nations, regional organizations, and international institutions in addressing the nuclear and climate threats that challenge global security.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to the authors and organizations behind this essential report, “Common Security in the Indo-Pacific Region.” Their work—through articles, travel, and advocacy—has significantly contributed to the global agenda for peace.
The webinar explored NATO’s expanding influence in the Asia-Pacific through political and military partnerships, as highlighted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who emphasized shared security threats between the region and Europe. Despite their recent involvement, countries like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand have historically had little connection to NATO’s traditional security agenda. The event featured discussions on NATO’s presence in the Western Pacific, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, and neighboring countries, alongside alternative security approaches presented by Anu Chenoy. Speakers included Cora Fabros (IPB), Anu Chenoy (Asia Europe Peoples Forum), Francis Daehoon Lee (PEACEMOMO), Annette Brownlie (Independent and Peaceful Australia Network), Djoanna Janier (Stop the War Coalition Philippines), Theresa Arriola, (Our Common Wealth)moderated by Gene Gesiste Jr. and Michelle Clemente.
Watch the full live streamed:
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The International Peace Bureau (IPB) participated in the Action Days and the Summit of the Future held in New York from September 20 to 23. During this pivotal event, we engaged in various activities and organized two significant events, one of which was an official offsite side event featured on the Action Days calendar.
Our official offsite side event “Reversing the Doomsday Clock: Nuclear Disarmament and the Need for a Fourth Special Session on Disarmament” aimed to advocate for a nuclear-weapon-free world and stronger disarmament commitments, calling for the convening of a Fourth Special Session on Disarmament (SSOD-IV). It took place in the beautiful and warmly welcoming Church of the Covenant on the afternoon of Saturday, September 21.
The event was co-sponsored by the Republic of Kiribati, International Peace Bureau (IPB), SCRAP Weapons (SOAS University of London), Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), Parliament of the World’s Religions, Agora Mexico and was supported by many other partners like Reverse the Trend (RTT), Justice for All, Agora Mexico, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung NY (RLSNY), the Episcopal Church, NGO Committee on Human Rights to the UN, NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace, and Security, and Committee of Religious NGOs to the UN.
This gathering aimed to unite diverse stakeholders, including member states, civil society representatives, and experts in disarmament, to address the urgent need for a Fourth Special Session on Disarmament (SSOD-IV). As the UN Secretary-General stated, the Summit of the Future and its accompanying Pact for the Future offer a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for member states and multistakeholders to come together and drive substantial global action.
You can sign the call and find the original call in Spanish here.
This September 21, we join in and commemorate the International Day of Peace, which was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1981.
On this day, which holds great significance for humanity, we call on the governments of our continent:
To put an end to the arms race and military spending. Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador are the countries with the highest military spending in Latin America. We need money for life— to build schools, hospitals, and meet other urgent needs, not for death.
To end police violence, which continues in many of our countries where there is no real oversight of police actions, impunity prevails, and there are no genuine efforts to ensure police training and actions are in accordance with respect for human rights.
To stop military exercises with the U.S. Southern Command, as well as military and police training for Latin American troops at the School of the Americas, now renamed WHINSEC, or at any other U.S. military academy where violence and war are still promoted as ways to resolve conflicts.
To close and withdraw all U.S. and NATO military bases in Latin America, including U.S. military bases imposed in Guantánamo, Cuba; Soto Cano in Honduras; the bases in Colombia; NAMRU-6 in Peru; in the Malvinas Islands, controlled by the United Kingdom in Argentina; and others. Out of Latin America! Return home, we want peace.
To demand that the U.S., NATO, and all countries end the arms race and war. It is time for the U.S. and NATO, in particular, to end the wars and stop sending weapons to Israel, Ukraine, and other places. It is time for them to act responsibly and make efforts to achieve peace negotiations between Palestine and Israel, and between Russia and Ukraine.
Finally, we call on our governments to lead efforts to advance global disarmament, diplomacy, respect for the self-determination of peoples, the end of unilateral sanctions, and to work toward building a world of peace, solidarity, and social justice.
Let the guns fall silent, end all wars, we want peace!
A new joint publication by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) is designed to provide parliamentarians around the world with a toolkit for prioritizing human security and common security as opposed to militarized state security.
With every passing month, our world becomes more violent and dangerous. After a decline in the 1990s and early 2000s, the number of conflicts around the world has been growing – and no region has been left untouched. These conflicts often involve multiple parties and are increasingly fuelled by transnational criminal activity. Some have been going on for decades and some remain unaddressed by the international community. Their cost is immense, however, and it is usually civilians who pay the heaviest price.
The future hardly looks encouraging. Disinformation, social media and artificial intelligence (AI) are spreading hate, division and mistrust. AI-powered weapons are making it easier than ever to kill, while cyberattacks on critical infrastructure are also taking their toll. Meanwhile, nuclear disarmament has come to a grinding halt and global tensions are distracting our leaders from the urgent – and sometimes existential – challenges that face us: climate change, pandemics, hunger and much, much more. We need multilateral collaboration to address and fix these challenges. But conflicts take us in the opposite direction.
Two alternative approaches offer new possibilities to get us all back on track. The first is human security, which is about engaging with and representing people, and implies contextualized and tailored legislation rooted in several dimensions relating to the well-being of the individual. The second is common security, which takes the principles of human security to a larger scale and enshrines the idea that dialogue, multilateralism and collaboration are key to any attempt to solve a problem.
IPB attended the first week of this year’s NPT Preparatory Committee in Geneva. From July 22nd to the 26th, the International Peace Bureau hosted two side events, and further participated in two thought-provoking roundtable discussions created by our partners.
Our first event, occurring on Monday, was oriented on the vitality of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones (NWFZs). Our speakers covered a variety of pressing issues, from the legal loopholes existing in many NFWZ treaties to how civil society organizations could collaborate to remedy them. The panel featured Reiner Braun, former Executive Director of IPB; Alain Ponce Blancas, Research and Communication Officer of Agency Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL); Enobot Agboraw, Executive Secretary of African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE); Enkhsaikhan Jargalsaikhan, Chairman of Blue Banner and Board Member of IPB, and Leonardo Bandarra from the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO). At the end of their remarks, a Q&A session ensued, capping off what was a strong start to the week.
Our second event took place the day after in collaboration with METO, and was centered on the prospect of denuclearization in the most volatile region in the world: the Middle East. Just like our event prior, our panel featured a stacked roster of experts, including, Sharon Dolev, Founder and Executive Director of METO and Council Member of IPB; Tariq Rauf, Former Head of Verification & Security Policy, Alt Head of NPT Delegation; Emad Kiyaei, Director of METO; Emily Molinari, IPB Deputy Executive Director; and Sean Conner, Executive Director of IPB Executive Director. The experts touched on key elements that will be integral for securing a future peace in the Middle East, such as the fulfillment of the Arab Peace Initiative and the necessity of a multilateral disarmament across the land. Perhaps most importantly, the hour-long discussion ended on an optimistic note, with the general consensus being that hope is required, even during the bleakest moments, in order to truthfully vie for peace.
The rest of the week presented several duly appreciated opportunities for IPB to learn about other organizations’ goals through their own events. On Wednesday, for instance, the team had the pleasure to partake in an open discussion led by SCRAP Weapons and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) on how civil society organizations can effectively advocate for a Fourth Special Session on Disarmament. Conversations on disarmament and security continued as METO invited guests to their own roundtable, which was a relevant extension of our joint side event on Tuesday. The room was filled with brilliant discourse on the vitality of increasing communication within civil society and the potential of a renewed Arab Peace Initiative. And then on Friday, members of IPB’s staff finished off our participation in the NPT PrepCom after attending side events held by the delegations of the Philippines, Finland, and Germany.
Overall, the continuation of activism and diplomacy through the annual PrepCom serves as a critical foundation upon which real progress can be built from. IPB remains hopeful about the future, and looks forward to the day when nuclear weapons become relics of the past, as they should be.
Written by: Angelo Cardona, coordinator of Latin America and Representative of the International Peace Bureau (IPB) to the United Nations, Co-founder and President at the Ibero-American Alliance for Peace, and ambassador of Colombia to the Youth Assembly.
In July 2024, the United Nations convened its High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) in New York. The HLPF happens at a pivotal moment when we are witnessing the surge of new conflicts and threats, such as the potential scalation of conflicts that could lead to nuclear confrontation, which would endanger human survival, and the perils of climate change affecting countries worldwide.
On July 17th, IPB was proud to host a roundtable discussion that focused on challenging NATO’s hegemonic world order. The panel featured prominent peace activists Joseph Gerson, Reiner Braun, Anu Chenoy, and Walden Bello — all of whom took a deep dive into today’s geopolitics and explained in detail NATO’s culpability in rising escalations.
The four speakers each delivered their introductory remarks. Their speeches touched base on several pressing topics, from NATO’s increased presence in the Asia Pacific region to the fate of the military alliance under a potential Trump presidency. Each expert presented their own nuanced views of these situations and many more, all the while emphasizing the general discussion’s theme of NATO’s rapid expansionism and its inevitable consequences in the process.
The roundtable ended with a Q&A session and key takeaways delivered by each panelist. A consensus surrounded the indispensability of youth participation in peace advocacy work. Without young activists willing to carry on the torch, it was agreed that much of the world would have their crises unresolved. The recorded panel can be seen here:
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June 20, 2024 – New York – The International Peace Bureau (IPB) had the privilege of honoring Alfredo Lubang, a prominent advocate for peace and disarmament from the Philippines, with the Seán MacBride Peace Award. Fred is also the first recipient of this award from the Philippines. This award was given in recognition of his unwavering work and commitment toward peace, disarmament, common security, and non-violence, especially in the face of ongoing wars. Without him, the Philippines would not be the only country that has ratified nearly all humanitarian disarmament treaties today.
Earlier in the awarding ceremony, we hosted an intergenerational panel discussion on the Current State of Disarmament and Civil Society, Visions, and Aspirations. This discussion featured Alfredo Lubang; Binalakshmi Nepram, IPB Board Member and Founder of the Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples, Gender Justice, and Peace; and Gene Gesite Jr., Youth Vision Moderator. The panel highlighted the efforts and commitments of civil society in advocating for disarmament. Fred emphasized the urgent need for more advocates and elaborated on both regional and international efforts to strengthen and spread this critical work. He also called on the younger generation to utilize their skills and talents to take part in promoting disarmament, peace, and common security.
This award celebrates all the people who have struggled and become voices of the suffering they have experienced. I am fortunate to have reached the age of disarmament conference which is half of century. This is not just a project; we need more people willing to dedicate their lives to disarmament. It’s about living that experience. I still vividly remember the first death I witnessed during military and armed group conflicts, and the cries of my classmates when it happened. These lived experiences, shared by me and my colleagues, should guide us, as we understand how to solve these problems simply.
The issues we would like to bring in and strategies we put in could be actually successful. But the way global civil society and advcote framed as a new way of again taking advantage of other..But when you look the capacities and look at the people who would like to offer their lives for disarmament, they should be given an opportunity to lead Global Campaigns.. It’s really now about the people who live in conflict areas and excluded groups should be leading the way. We may have left the wars or left your communities but if you lived in conflic areas, the wars would never leave you. To solve this conflict we should have that eyes of lived experience.
For humanitarian disarmament to succeed, we must move beyond a human-centric perspective and embrace a decolonial approach. We must stop exploiting the vulnerabilities of others, whether due to lack of funds or being a small NGO not speaking English like others. There are many ways to achieve our goals, and now is our opportunity to show the world that there are alternatives. I encourage the younger generation to take up this challenge. I will continue to be here for many more years. Thank you. Shukran. I am humbled in this opportunity. Again, this is not about me but having the opportunity that my voice is also someone’s voice.
During the ceremony, Sean Conner, IPB Executive Director, provided an overview of Seán MacBride’s legacy, emphasizing his lifelong dedication to peace and disarmament. He highlighted MacBride’s impactful work with the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and how it relates to Alfredo’s work. This was followed by a congratulatory message from Tak Mashiko, Programme Officer at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, who has been a long-time friend and collaborator of Fred in disarmament. Tak highlighted Fred’s hard work and dedication in promoting disarmament both in the Philippines and globally.
Binalakshmi also emphasized Alfredo’s inspiring legacy and lifelong commitment to peace and disarmament. She expressed gratitude to Alfredo and his wife Mitzi Austero, who is also a Program Manager, Nonviolence International Southeast Asia, for their tireless efforts to advance policies and agreements related to disarmament. The event concluded with remarks and appreciations from Emily Rubino, IPB Board Member, and Joseph Gerson, former IPB Vice-President and current President of Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security. They acknowledged all the participants who attended and celebrated Fred’s legacy in disarmament, peace, and common security.
Together with Alfredo Lubang and all other peace and disarmament advocates, we continue to reimagine a world without wars.
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York, especially Ms. Mariana Fernandez, RLS-NY Project Manager, for providing the space and making this event possible. We also appreciate the unwavering efforts of the Manipur Gun Survivor Women for their gift to Fred and No War Factory as our patron sponsor. The entire event would not have been possible without the overall coordination and nomination by Bina, our IPB Board Member, and the behind-the-scenes assistance of Gene, Ate Mitsky, and Emily Rubino. Thank you to everyone who participated in this event, including SCRAP Weapon partners, esteemed experts in disarmament, and all those who celebrated with us at this momentous event. Thank you very much.
The whole event can be watched on our IPB YouTube channel
The whole event can be watched on our IPB YouTube channel:
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