Ellie Gutowski – Engaging Peace

A review by guest contributor Ellen Gutowski of Sowing Seeds: The Militarisation of Youth and How to Counter It (Edited by Owen Everett)

Sergeiy Sandler, in his introduction to the War Resisters International book Sowing Seeds: The Militarisation of Youth and How to Counter It, argues that “For a war to be waged, sufficiently many people have to actively wage it and sufficiently many people have to passively accept and condone it.” (p. 7)

This readable book describes the kinds of social forces that prepare young people around the world to accept and participate in armed conflict—e.g., through campaigns that “militarise young minds” (p. 8)

In a total of 32 countries from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, themes observed in military advertising and recruitment include:

Portraying the military as an agent of humanitarian aid work
Depicting the military as a safeguard against imminent threat
Describing the military as a path to adventure
Promoting the military as an agent for peace
Partnering the military with schools
Promising citizenship to immigrants and financial security and success to youth from low-income communities.

To resist such propaganda, Sowing Seeds suggests:

Sponsoring talks by veterans against war
Staging international campaigns to discuss resistance to militarization
Devising school-based educational programs to counter militarization

The map at the beginning of this post shows a great deal of militarization in the U.S. Can you suggest additional ways to shift the balance to conflict reduction and promotion of peace?

By guest author Ellie Gutowski

The Peace Corps is an initiative of the U.S. government to promote peace and friendship among participating countries and the United States. It was started in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, who called for Americans to serve abroad. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger and in Malawi from 2010 to 2013.

Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy discuss the Peace Corps in 1961. Image in public domain.

The Peace Corps helped me to understand the world from a broader perspective. In Niger, I was a newcomer to a Muslim community where a family cared for me, listening patiently as I spoke in broken Hausa, pulling my water from a well that was over a football field deep, and sharing two meals per day of pounded millet and okra.

My time in Niger allowed me and my American friends and family to question and combat stereotypes perpetuated in the U.S. media about people from other lands.

I lived in that village for nine days until Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb ventured over the Mali border and kidnapped two French men from a restaurant. After hearing this news on the radio, the Peace Corps chose to evacuate, and I was reassigned. Peace Corps volunteers had to leave their communities, all due to what seemed like a relatively small group of desperate individuals.

Before the vehicle came to get me in the morning, I visited newborn twins and my Nigerien host mother finally let me pound millet–a difficult task that she had previously not allowed me to do. When I was back in America, she called me on my cell phone to greet me in Hausa.

I hope that the connections I made and my efforts to understand another culture were a step in promoting peace locally and abroad, and I am inspired by others doing the same.

Ellie Gutowski has spent the past four years working in the realm of social justice. Before joining the Peace Corps, she developed a peer support program at Whitman Walker Health in Washington, D.C. She served in the Peace Corps as a Community Health Advisor, first in Niger and then for 27 months in the southern African country of Malawi, where she worked on HIV prevention. She is currently laboratory manager for the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP) in the Boston University Psychology Department.

Militarization: How can we resist?

Engaging peace with the Peace Corps