Thinking Peace 6: Human right to peace

One of the necessary measures needed to stop the war and curtail post-Soviet militarism that exacerbates it, is improvement of peace culture, starting from human rights education and further development of democratic institutions. It is especially important to protect fully the human right to conscientious objection to military service in any time, especially in wartime, as institutional safeguard of existence of peace activists and movements, peace thinkers and writers, peace entrepreneurs and benefactors, peace academies and churches, able to mobilize people for effective nonviolent resistance to aggressors and oppressors, maintaining dialogue and social cohesion, caring for needy and suffering, advocating sanity, morality and diplomacy, preserving democracy from self-destruction in the fog of war. These policy prescriptions could be derived not only from urgent necessity to remove from power in Russia the Putin’s criminal warmongering regime and resurrect democracy, but also from a need to stop militarist brinkmanship in Ukraine with persecution of peace activists and human rights defenders like myself.