‘The Missing Peace’, Memoir From Former U.S. Diplomat Dennis Ross, Optioned By Sunset Lane Media
#Books #DavidBeaubaire #DennisRoss #SunsetLaneMedia #TheMissingPeace

https://deadline.com/2025/07/missing-peace-dennis-ross-book-movie-1236474428/

"Aboriginal languages have a word for every form of conflict you can imagine, but no word for invade, conquer or subjugate."

When we first started planning #TheMissingPeace, one of the people I knew I had to talk to early on was the brilliant Kombu-merri and Wakka Wakka philosopher and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Dr Mary Graham.

Mary's gently-spoken genius never ceases to expand my mind, and people still talk with awe about her session at the Green Institute's 2017 conference, Everything Is Connected. And the conversation I had with her some months ago, including the comment above, didn't disappoint.

She cautioned me that, unlike the Western binary view of violence/nonviolence, Aboriginal law and lore acknowledge the reality of violence in our world and seek ways to manage it. This is, I believe, very much in line with the deep philosophy of #nonviolence, and a challenge to how our violent systems of power seek to misrepresent it as somehow a naive belief that we can end all violence.

I love how Mary teases out the difference between violence and conflict. "We have to allow for conflict," she told me. "But you can only allow for it if you're not going around attacking each other."

The genius of Aboriginal relational culture, as Mary articulates it, is that it institutionalises conflict in order to avoid violence.

The insanity of Western modernity is that it institutionalises violence (the state and its monopoly on violence, war and policing, the military industrial complex, adversarialism in law and politics) in a way which makes us truly terrible at managing conflict.

Nowhere is a clearer example of this than the State of Israel. As a Jewish Green desperately seeking peace, I've struggled with how to talk about the horrors of the last year, seeking a path through hate and rightful righteous anger towards peace-making. But this is so easy for me to say: Israel is a state that, born out of extreme trauma, institutionalised violence from its earliest days. And that makes its political culture incredibly bad at managing conflict. It is a hammer which can only see nails. It's the obsession with violence, as perpetrated against us Jews for millennia, and the belief that only violent strength can create safety for us, which has led the oppressed to so swiftly become the oppressor.

This is also why I've been particularly worried about the language bandied around over the last year about decolonising being inherently violent. The ends are determined by the means. What you practice is what you get good at. A violent path leads to a violent future.

Our next Missing #Peace conversation is so incredibly important, and so timely.

Please join me, in three weeks, on November 6 at 8pm AEDT, to talk about Decolonising and Nonviolence: relationality, entanglement and complexity, with Dr Mary Graham, Professor Yin Paradies, and Nidala Barker.

This is an event not to be missed. #decolonisation #democracy

Register here:
https://www.greeninstitute.org.au/events/decolonising-and-nonviolence/

Reminder: if you’re interested in / curious about / sceptical of #nonviolence #peace #NonviolentResistance, please join us for this webinar next week, featuring three extraordinary women leaders in the space.

Vesna Cerroni was a leader of #Otpor, the student nonviolent movement that overthrew Milosevic. Dr Felicity Gray is Global Policy Director for Nonviolent Peace Force #NVPF, and has worked in Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar. And Sunday Stephen is a colleague of hers from Sudan.

This is an event not to be missed. The second in our series #TheMissingPeace

https://www.greeninstitute.org.au/events/the-power-of-nonviolence-experiences-in-war-and-revolution/