At ten o’clock Saturday night, the Masonic Temple dance floor in downtown Monterey was jumping with peacemakers celebrating the end of a two-day conference. Through a field of shimmying Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) students bobbed the Einsteinian hair of Hillel Shenker, editor of the Palestinian-Israeli Journal. Near the dessert table, MIIS professor of negotiation Bill Monning shook his booty. Across the floor Tatsushi Arai, a slightly built doctoral student of conflict analysis and resolution at Virginia’s George Mason University, beamed and swung his shoulders experimentally, looking ethereal and out of place in his stiff dress clothes.

Arai may be tentative on the dance floor, but not so on the subject of nonviolent conflict resolution.

A spell settled over Irvine Auditorium when Arai opened the May 6 morning panel of the Global Majority inaugural conference. The aim of the conference was to promote peaceful negotiations over the reflexive reach for weapons in the world’s many conflict zones, and Arai seemed to embody the spirit of the entire enterprise: smiling, soft-spoken, radical.

What if, he asked, humans rejected “we-ness and they-ness” and instead took joint responsibility for transforming human nature? What if negotiations were conducted for maximum recognition of the other side’s humanity, with the “enemy” you were about to shock and awe projected onto a big screen as you discussed the options? What if on September 11, 2006 we commemorated not the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks but the 100th anniversary of Gandhi’s declaration of nonviolence in Johannesburg?

Smiling, soft-spoken, radical.

Back on the dance floor, Arai had to almost shout to be heard above the world beat. “I take peacebuilding very seriously,” he said.

And so it was with all the panelists and participants who spent May 5 through May 7 in policy discussions, hands-on mediation workshops and in conference hammering out a declaration of their bold intent, which they termed the Monterey Call. They all take peacebuilding very seriously, seriously enough to risk looking like hopeless idealists, seriously enough to keep talking even when the auditorium is mostly empty, as it was through most of the weekend except for Friday night, when people flocked to see the gentle anarchist and folk icon Utah Phillips raise his brand of populist hell, for a donation.

The few dozen people who were there the rest of the time are taking a dramatic stand. The heart of the Monterey Call is nothing less than “to prioritize the use of non-violent means of conflict resolution as a moral imperative of the 21st Century” and to “activate the ‘powerful power of the powerless.’” Brush away the jargon and that means that this core group of 65 people, most of them affiliated with MIIS, wants to ignite a global movement whereby war falls out of fashion, negotiation becomes the right way to settle disputes and ordinary people get to weigh in on what affects their lives.

It goes without saying that the obstacles are enormous: How to promote peacemaking in a country with a defense budget of $500 billion a year? How to get the word out when the media doesn’t show up? How to get a radical idea taken seriously?

“At a conference like this we are preaching to the choir,” warned Joyce Neu of the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.  

Defense analysis professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School provided one answer from the subject he studies most closely: terrorist networks. Arquilla, who touched off a fierce debate last summer when he suggested the US negotiate with al-Qaeda, turned on its head the conventional wisdom that networks are the province of the enemy.

“We can put together a strategy by Sept. 11, 2006 whereby the people of the world can stand up—and they’re a network, too; civil society is a network,” Arquilla said. “And the first great war between networks and nations can be waged by a network of civil society.”

That is, in fact, Global Majority’s strategy, to bypass the seats of power and start their movement in decentralized fashion, forming a worldwide network of experts and activists who can nurture peacemaking in their individual spheres of influence.

The stakes are high.

In Colombia, the failure of the guerrillas, the government and the paramilitaries to negotiate an end to their 40-year war has left thousands dead and driven 3 million people from their homes.

In Darfur, the UN estimates 180,000 people have died in the two-year conflict, and 2 million have fled their homes only to find their problems are just beginning.

MIIS graduate and U.N. volunteer Mavis Matenge, who works at the Dukwi Refugee Camp in northern Botswana, says the refugees straggling in from Africa’s many conflicts face a new threat once they arrive: the region’s 37.7 percent HIV prevalence rate.

The effort requires something extraordinary, says Jeffrey Mapendere, a senior associate at the Carter Center in Atlanta (named for the president). A former freedom fighter in his native Zimbabwe, Mapendere walks with a cane and confesses to a fear of heights, even though he used to parachute into hostile territory as part of his freedom-fighting duties. War takes its toll. But it’s peace, not war, that requires the most of people, he says.

“Any idiot can make war,” Mapendere told the audience. “A single person can cause chaos. But making peace, that’s where you need moral giants, real generals—and there are very few.”