Several hundred members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment gathered on a hillside overlooking the National Mall on June 5, 2008, to break ground for a new headquarters for the United States Institute of Peace. The $186 million structure, with a giant, dovelike roof sculpture, is expected to raise the profile of a somewhat obscure national institution that currently resides on the second floor of the National Restaurant Association building.
The United States Institute of Peace is a federally funded institution dedicated to researching, preventing and resolving violent international conflicts. Its origins can be traced to a grassroots movement for a “National Peace Academy” in the 1970s and ’80s. A group of Kansan Mennonites supported this movement by persuading their congressional representative, Dan Glickman, to propose a National Peace Academy bill, according to James Juhnke, a retired Bethel College history professor who took part in the effort.
The National Peace Academy was initially conceived as a school to train peacemakers in roughly the same way that war colleges train military officers. However, Congress followed a somewhat different blueprint when it created the United States Institute of Peace in 1984. Rather than enrolling students and conferring degrees, the institute serves as a home for more than 70 specialists who research international conflicts and promote conflict mediation and peace-building. The institute also conducts public education activities such as a National Peace Essay Contest for U.S. high school students. I attended the groundbreaking ceremony as a past winner of the peace essay contest.
The groundbreaking was a bipartisan affair that featured speeches by President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other dignitaries. Just as President Reagan is reported to have said at the institute’s founding, “Peace through strength must be our motto,” President Bush’s comments highlighted the tension between the institute’s mission and his administration’s hawkish foreign policy. The president credited the institute with promoting free societies and put its work in the context of an ideological struggle against violent extremism, which includes using military force to remove dangerous regimes and “deliver justice to the terrorists.”
Juhnke said he continues to have a favorable view of the institute and believes it may move U.S. foreign policy in a more peaceable direction. He also suggested that Mennonites should advocate for the institute to be true to pacifist ideals.
“We ought to be, in whatever ways we can, pushing the U.S. Institute of Peace to consider more anti-military, more radical options,” Juhnke said.
Tim Shenk is a news coordinator for Mennonite Central Committee.
