It is for lack of Cross Cultural Understanding that many disputes arise between tribes, nations, regions, religions and civilizations. A concerted effort needs to be mounted to prevent people from being boxed in within the culture to which they were born. The Centre has done considerable work in this regard. Much of it is based on the trailblazing work of Judge Weeramantry who has written on the principal religions, extracting from their common core of central teachings the great values which all people treasure such as human dignity, the human family, the peaceful settlement of disputes, the avoidance of war, assistance to those in distress etc.
This is one of the three pillars of the structure of the Centre. The Centre explores peace studies from numerous perspectives and aims at reaching all levels of society from the junior school even to the higher ranks of the bureaucracy and the judiciary. The Centre strongly believes that peace studies are a much neglected part of general education and public information. Many of the problems and tensions in societies are due to lack of information in this area.
It is a very narrow construction of peace which merely sees it as the absence of war. The overall philosophy of the Centre is the principle which Martin Luther King, Jr. so rightly stressed. "True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice".
Peace studies are a major academic discipline in their own right. They include a range of peace related topics - the human right to peace, the principal peace movements and philosophies, an analysis of the major Peace Treaties and their flaws, humanism and the humanitarian tradition, disarmament, non-violence, world order, globalization, the military-industrial-technological complex, an increase in the gender balance in all aspects of the administrative and decisional process and many more topics. They need to be integrated into educational curricula so as to be mutually complementary, without being studied in isolation from each other.
The Centre program will also cover the peaceful resolution of disputes, conciliation, arbitration, mediation, equitable sharing of resources, the peace-related teachings of the major religions, fairness in contract and the spread of notions of Equality and Freedom.
The Centre aims at correcting the widespread impression that International Law is an area of expertise reserved for the specialists. On the contrary its basic principles, simply stated, can command the support and enthusiasm of all levels of society from the school room upwards. It is for lack of this basic knowledge of International Law, and of the sacrifices of centuries that were required to achieve it that international law is permitted to be disregarded.
The Centre aims at communicating this vital information in very simple terms so that even school children can. Members of the Centre and Judge Weeramantry have made it a point to communicate the basic principles of International Law to school children - a procedure which has resulted in much interest and enthusiasm for the subject. The origins of International Law, the relationships of International Law to the teachings of world religions, the United Nations, Human Rights, the Illegality of Nuclear Weapons, The Right to Development, Customary International Law, the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes. International Environmental Law, Sustainable Development, Conservation of the Rights of Future Generations – all these are covered in the work of the Centre.
Special resources available to the Centre are the Opinions of Judge Weeramantry on the International Court of Justice, explaining numerous principles of International Law in terms of all global traditions, and his books and articles on the subjects which are described later.
