Ben Franklin’s Brainchild Tries To Invent Ways To Create Peace

The federal government spends billions preparing for war. But one government agency, the U.S. Institute of Peace, spends its tiny budget pursuing peace.

Seven floors up in an ordinary Washington, D.C., office building, scholars in America’s “peace academy” train diplomats, conduct research and show governments around the world ways to put war behind them. The advice varies from government to government, but the goal is always the same: build peace.

The idea for a peace academy was conceived by Benjamin Franklin in the late 18th century, when he saw the young nation spending money on the science of war but spending almost nothing on the science of peace. It took until 1984 for Franklin’s idea to catch on. In that year, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation to create the institute.

“The institute is a complement to the military academies, which train for war fighting,” said institute President Richard Solomon, a former assistant secretary of state. “We were set up to wrestle with ways to manage conflict with peaceful means.”

Although the State and Defense departments remain the nation’s primary instruments of foreign policy, the Institute of Peace uses its small budget to make big contributions to world peace, spokeswoman Sheryl Brown said.

A speck in the federal bureaucracy, the institute has 55 employees and a budget this year of $11.3 million. The Defense Department, in contrast, has more than 800,000 civilian and military employees and a budget of $250 billion.

“We are well worth the money,” Brown said.

There are always new faces at the institute, as soldiers, diplomats and academics from around the world arrive on fellowships to study war and peace.

Brown said it was not uncommon to see traditional foes, like Arabs and Israelis, bouncing ideas off each other over lunch.

One common face at the agency is that of senior scholar Neil Kritz. With his small office and a view of rooftops, Kritz is indistinguishable from the army of government functionaries here in Washington.

But there is a difference: When Kritz talks, world leaders pay attention.

He was one of a handful of international experts who reviewed drafts of Russia’s new constitution after the fall of communism in 1991.

Kritz is an expert in preventing new waves of violence after periods of war and oppression. One of his recent clients was the Rwandan government, which was faced with the task of giving fair trials to more than 100,000 people in the Central African nation accused of war crimes. Thousands of Rwandans were ready to take the law into their own hands if the accused went unpunished.

“If those 100,000 were ignored, it would result in revenge and further cycles of violence,” Kritz said.

Kritz helped rewrite Rwanda’s laws so the defendants can get swift and fair trials, and so victims feel that justice is served. He said the best way to prevent further outbreaks of violence is to ensure that victims see their oppressors punished.

“Individuals who experienced trauma need … to confront the past, or it will affect their present and future in ways that cannot be predicted,” he said. “They need to feel that people acknowledge what’s been done to them.”

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by President Nelson Mandela to document abuses during the apartheid era, was based on models created by Kritz and the Institute of Peace.

“Governments need to document and tell the story, so people can’t revise history later,” he said.