Working together, we can build the foundations for a more peaceful, equitable, sustainable world.

by Riane Eisler
(Excerpted and abridged from The Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer 2014)

Can we build a more peaceful world where our great human potential for consciousness, caring, and creativity are realized? What would this more equitable, less violent world look like? How can we build it?

To answer these questions, my examination of social systems looks at the whole of humanity, including the thousands of years we call prehistory. This more complete picture makes it possible to see two historical social systems — a domination system and a partnership system.

Until just a few thousand years ago, archeological records show we lived in a partnership system. Archeology shows no signs of warfare; houses and burials do not reflect large gaps between haves and have-nots; and these earlier societies were neither patriarchies nor matriarchies, but cultures where women and men were equally valued in partnership.

However, archeology and myths since that time show a major cultural shift toward the domination system. Fortunately, over the last centuries there has been strong movement to reverse this shift in cultural direction back toward a partnership system.

One modern progressive movement after another has challenged the oppressive features of this dominator system. These include democratic challenges against: the “divinely-ordained” right of despotic kings to rule their “subjects;” the anti-colonial liberation movements that challenged the “divinely-ordained” right of one race or nation to rule over another; the women’s rights movement that has challenged the right of men to rule women and children; all the way to the environmental movement challenging man’s “divinely ordained” right to dominate and conquer nature.

Unfortunately, the focus of these progressive movements toward a more equitable and peaceful society has only been on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid. The primary relations between men and women, and between them and their daughters and sons, on which the pyramid keeps rebuilding itself, has remained largely in place. Since these relationships have been ignored, we lack the solid foundations for a peaceful and caring society.

Moving toward the partnership side of the continuum requires a more democratic organization in both the family and state or tribe, where both halves of humanity are equally valued, and stereotypically feminine values such as caring and nonviolence (which are considered “unmanly” in the domination system) are highly regarded, whether in women or men.

The relationships of women and men shapes families, education, religion, politics, and economics. The social construction of gender roles and relations also shapes a society’s guiding values.

As long as boys and men learn to equate “real masculinity” with violence and control we cannot realistically expect an end to the arms build-ups that are today bankrupting our world, and the terrorism and aggressive warfare that in our age of nuclear and chemical warfare threaten our survival.

A peaceful way of living fosters mutual respect and accountability. It uses power to empower rather than disempower others. The partnership configuration is a blueprint for a more equitable, caring, and peaceful future.

We must show that the struggle for our future is not between religion and secularism, right and left, East and West, or capitalism and socialism, but within all these societies between traditions of domination and a partnership way of life.

Every one of us can play a role in the cultural transformation from domination to partnership. Working together, we can build the foundations for a more peaceful, equitable, sustainable world, where all children can realize their capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity — the capacities that make us fully human.

Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. She is president of the Center for Partnership Systems (CPS), and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies.

graphic: Raj Phairembam

Young feminists took the stage with rousing singalongs and demands to demilitarize, denuclearize, decarbonize, decolonialize, and defund militaries.

By Cindy Piester

In November 2022, I headed out to COP 27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, as an NGO delegate with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). I hoped to move forward the conversation on the need for the United Nations to count all emissions, including military emissions, so that we might limit warming to the 1.5 C (2.7 F) rise above pre-industrial times by this century’s end.

Our military is the world’s largest institutional user of fossil fuels and the world’s largest institutional producer of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Yet, thanks to the US government, these emissions have flown under the radar since the Kyoto Accords in 1997. Globally, military emissions are 5% of total annual emissions, yet reporting them remains optional, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) protocols serve to intentionally obscure any military emissions reported, by mixing them in with civilian emissions.

COP 27’s opening day was also the annual International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. Coinciding with that, WILPF partnered with the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and World BEYOND War (WBW) to release two bold letters. One called for, while the other requested, that the UNFCCC add the impacts of military emissions and military expenditures on climate to its 2023 agenda.

Our days began with informative and inspirational gatherings of feminists at the well-attended Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) meetings, where we mixed and mingled with women leaders from around the world. At times, the young feminists took the stage with rousing sing-alongs and demands to demilitarize, denuclearize, decarbonize, decolonialize, and defund militaries. Inevitably, these concerns were also included in WGC’s negotiations and reports.

We must understanding how quickly the planet and oceans are warming and how devastating the impacts — among them, droughts, desertification, fires, ice melt, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, catastrophic storms, hurricanes, flooding, and loss of keystone species and biodiversity — are to life on the planet. Clearly all emissions, including military emissions, must be counted and reported. So, when the US State Department called an informal meeting with all US delegates at COP 27, I raised the issue that, because of pressure from the US government, military emissions were exempted from mandatory UNFCCC reporting. These emissions and their reduction targets need to be included in our Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) consistent with GHG emissions protocols.

Among other questionable reporting mechanisms: emissions from hundreds of US overseas military bases are charged to host nations rather than to the United States; emissions from overseas transport associated with military supply lines are not charged to the US Department of Defense (DoD), but reported separately as “bunker fuels;” and war-related emissions are ignored entirely. The US State Department noted these issues as concerns, and moved on. Many US delegates, however, paid careful attention. Axel Michaelowa, senior founding partner of the Perspectives Climate Group, called for solutions that included reporting military and conflict-related emissions in the Global Stocktake — a long, hard look at the state of our planet, Stocktake charts a better course for the future, and for COP 28, held in Dubai, November 30 – December 12, 2023.

Our Department of Defense with its unsustainable annual budgetary allotment and global emissions is a disaster for our country and for the world. We seriously need to rethink our national security as we speed past climate tipping points dooming our youth to triple nightmares of out-of-control climate change, unbearable debt, and permanent war. 

Cindy Piester participates in the alternative media, documents US war crimes, and stands with VFP, WILPF, the Unitarians, Code Pink and justice lovers everywhere.

graphic: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom