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Ambassador ?Vijay Nambiar, the 51³Ô¹Ï Secretary-General's Special Adviser on Myanmar, delivered the 2015 51³Ô¹Ï Academic Impact annual lecture at Monmouth University entitled Practicing Nonviolence in a Violent World. ?Mr. Nambiar relied on his extensive experience in world conflict zones, including in high-level UN positions, to analyse nonviolence.?

Mr. Nambiar based his analysis within the larger philosophical treatment of nonviolence, focusing on Gandhi's writings about the issue. His talk provided a compelling review of recent strides made by the UN?to confront violence.?
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He noted that the UN's peacekeeping mission has shifted in recent decades to conflict within nations, rather than between them. ?The lack of adequate response to such conflicts led the Security Council (UNSC) to articulate a new principle, the responsibility to protect. ?He discussed the three key pillars of this responsibility, as formulated by the General Assembly: enhancing the protection responsibilities of the concerned states by helping them adopt preventive strategies; international capacity building assistance to strengthen such prevention capabilities; and, where these fail, timely and decisive action by the international community prior to but not excluding enforcement action.
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Another key extension of the UN's initiatives to challenge world violence is the recognition that violence against women, including sexual violence during wartime, is not just an unfortunate inevitability but a crime. One of the important resolutions he discussed is 2009 UNSC Resolution 1888, advocating the establishment of an Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC).
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New tactics of war, the absence of clear battlefields, diversification of parties to conflict and use of new technologies have caused increased risks of the killing of children, leading to increased international attention to this form of violence. The Security Council has identified the various types of such violence and the Secretary-General issues an annual report on such perpetrators of both newer and older forms of violence against children in conflict.
Mr. Nambiar offered three conclusions at the end of his lecture:
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*Practising nonviolence does not mean being unwilling to fight or acquiescing in injustice. But such practice must be based on what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called an avoidance of an internal violence of spirit too. It must incorporate a sense of hating the evil without hating the evildoer. It must also involve complete faith in the justice of the cause and in the fact that the universe is also on the side of justice.?

*As long as people remain intent on pursuing zero sum solutions to individual and collective differences, the impulse to violence cannot be contained. The practice of nonviolence must concentrate on producing hope of outcomes that are inclusive. However much such inclusive outcomes seem impossible, it becomes incumbent on us to persevere nonviolently to produce common solutions and avoid any impulse toward violence for the resolution of differences. ?Much of the UN's work strives precisely in this direction. But in some areas like peacekeeping, we face a different regional and international reality that is dictated by our mandates.?

*The bedrock of all human rights, duties and values must be based on the affirmation of Life. A line will have to be drawn between the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his life and the preservation of Life itself. At some point the willingness to sacrifice individual lives will have to translate into a refusal to compromise in any further loss of life in the nonviolent pursuit of justice. At that point, the preservation of Life must become an absolute value and be pursued by all means available including a resort to force. However, such recourse must be exceptional, proportional and subject to accountability.?
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by Martin Schoenhals