Peace Studies Lecture 2023

On October 4, the Irene and Doug Schmeiser Centre for Faith, Reason, Peace, and Justice presented the 2023 Peace Studies Lecture. The invited speaker was the renowned humanitarian, author, and former senator General Roméo Dallaire. The title of his lecture was, “Peace, Faith, and Humanity in Times of Crisis.”

General Dallaire is the founder of the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security, a global partnership with the mission to end the recruitment and use of children in violent conflicts. He is best known for his service as the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda before and during the 1994 genocide. Disobeying the order to withdraw from the conflict, General Dallaire, along with a small contingent of Ghanaian and Tunisian soldiers, remained in Rwanda to protect those who sought refuge with the UN forces.

General Dallaire began the Peace Studies Lecture by reflecting on the advancement of global telecommunications as it relates to creating a lasting peace. He claimed that young people—whom he calls the ‘borderless generation’—make use of this new technology to gain a global perspective on humanitarian and environmental crises. He also encouraged young people to engage with democratic systems as a way of making their voices heard. This participation is all the more important, General Dallaire argued, as self-interest and greed seem to be the primary drivers of political action. He related this to his time in Rwanda. He believes that he could have stopped the genocide if he had been granted 5,000 troops from Western countries. Time and time again, however, he was told that it was not in the self-interest of those countries to stop the genocide. It was against this normalization of self-interest and greed that General Dallaire decided to take a principled stance for the Rwandan civilians in the care of the UN forces.

Reflecting upon his decision to stay, General Dallaire then issued a clarion call to Canada’s educational and religious institutions. He questioned where the moral impulse to disobey the order to withdraw came from: “I didn’t learn that at military college, I didn’t learn that in any tactical books. I learned it from our society, from our schools, from my family, from our churches, from our communities, from the reference points that we have created.” In a world that is incredibly complex and has no shortage of ethical dilemmas, he concluded, “we need depth. Not just educational, intellectual depth, we need a moral depth.” These institutions and cultural reference points play a crucial role in developing the moral depth required to face the challenges ahead.

General Dallaire closed his lecture by unpacking the differences between a truce and a lasting peace. He claimed that humanity has never known a lasting peace. There have been truces, cessations of violence, but during those times the underlying tensions that produced the prior conflicts were not addressed. He believes that this is evidenced by the fact that “there has not been one peace agreement in the past twenty years that has survived without significant frictions, if not total breakdowns, longer than seven years.” These tensions contribute to the phenomenon of people not seeing other humans as fully human. General Dallaire urged that “there is not one human more human than another. We are all equal. Not one of us has a higher claim on our humanity than another.” He asserted that patriarchy and misogyny have been impediments to giving human beings the respect they deserve. A lasting peace is only possible by cultivating a culture of respect, which necessarily integrates the voices of women, youth, and people in marginalized communities.