Go to content Go to navigation Go to search

Conference Notebook

May 06, 2008

Council on Foundations
Philanthropy and 'Quiet Diplomacy'

What role can foundations play in helping to protect people from nuclear warfare, genocide, and other conflict? Speakers discussed that question at a session here entitled, “Philanthropy and Conflict: Quiet Diplomacy, Public Advocacy.”

Grant makers can help build coalitions of activists to call for the creation of new tools to deter violence, said William Pace, executive director of the World Federalist Movement, in New York. He described how grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Ford Foundations, among others, had helped his organization build grass-roots and political support to open the International Criminal Court, an institution based in the Hague that prosecutes people for genocide and crimes against humanity.

“The reality used to be that if you killed one or two people, you were almost always brought to justice, but if you killed 1,000 or 100,000 people, you almost never were,” he said. “Now we’ve replaced the culture of impunity with a new paradigm.”

John Lewis, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said his decades-long efforts to engage in discussions with North Korean officials have relied heavily on the support of grant makers.

He described an “explosion” of efforts to engage in unofficial discussions by nongovernmental groups hoping to improve relations between the United States and countries such as Iran and North Korea.

Foundations can also build political and public support for new approaches to ensuring security, said Don Steinberg, a vice president at the International Crisis Group, which is based in Brussels.

Mr. Steinberg described how world leaders had agreed in 2005, for the first time, that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens from mass violence and that international organizations must take action if governments are failing to live up to that responsibility.

The MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Institute, Ford, and other grant makers had recently helped create a center in New York to promote concrete policies that would enable governments to protect citizens.

Mr. Steinberg said he’d been heartened by the quick response of international organizations to recent post-election violence in Kenya.

“Would we have had a Rwandan-style genocide in Kenya?” he said. “Fortunately, we’ll never know and that’s because the international community did buy into the notion that we are responsible for preventing a genocide. And I, for one, am delighted to live with that uncertainty.”

— Caroline Preston

Tuesday May 6, 2008 | Permalink

	Post a comment:
Your name		Remember
Your e-mail address
Post this comment
		Textile Help
	Your e-mail address is required, but it will not be posted.

Previous: 'Flipping the Funnel' With New Online Tools
Next: After a Disaster: Advice for Grant Makers

---

Copyright © 2008 The Chronicle of Philanthropy