Colin Irwin

The People's Peace Second Edition Colin Irwin

The people made peace in Northern Ireland. After 30 years of failure the peace process there was a great success. Dr. Irwin's contribution to that achievement was to work with the parties on a program of independent public opinion research and public diplomacy that allowed the people to be consulted and brought into the process at each critical stage of the negotiations. Dr. Irwin has spent the past twenty years applying those lessons in the Balkans, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Israel and Palestine, the West and Muslim World, Sudan, and Syria. In all the cases where peace polling has been used it has made a positive contribution to peace building and peace making but the ultimate goal of peace, all too frequently, has not been achieved. This book explains why and how such failures might now be turned into success with the introduction of a World Peace Poll that allows the citizens of our fragile planet to 'speak truth to power', and those in power have moral responsibility to listen. Colin Irwin received his Doctoral degree in Social Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in the US in 1985 with a study of the Inuit and how they developed a society without war. Then, through a series of appointments at Dalhousie University in Canada, Queen's University of Belfast and the University of Liverpool developed 'peace polls' to bring the views of 'the people' into the negotiations of the Nunavut settlement in Canada in the 1980s and the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland in the 1990s.