Promote high profile events such as exhibitions (“Ecritures”, “Voir la Paix”, etc.), campaigns (“Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion”, “Coalition of Cities against Racism”, etc.), sports (such as the initiative “Imagine Peace”), existing relevant Prizes (such as the Felix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize) and UNESCO anniversaries; revisit the founding texts of UNESCO (such as Race, Histoire et Culture, Claude Levy-Strauss) and outstanding figures (Khan Abdul Ghaff ar Khan, Ibn Khaldun, Al Farabi, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Archibald McLeish, Tagore/Césaire/Neruda, etc.).

Writing Peace, an exhibition for thinking and sharing peace across time and space

The Writing Peace exhibition is one of the major activities of the Programme of Action for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO at its thirty-sixth session, in November 2011. The exhibition, opened on the occasion of the International Day of Peace, 21 September 2012, at United Nations Headquarters in New York, forms part of the global effort by UNESCO to promote the emergence of a sense of belonging to a shared and plural humanity while giving prominence to the wealth of cultures, mutual respect between them and the resulting intercultural dialogue. The objective of this exhibition is to raise awareness on the various forms of transmission of culture down the ages, and the convergence of values conducive to peace, through a number of alphabets and other writing systems used in various parts of the world that transcend time and space. The scripts portrayed here and presented chronologically have been chosen for this exhibition because they are part of the mosaic of writing systems existing in today’s world. Each of them shows the word for “peace” and its first letter or character,

and they have been combined in the logo of the exhibition. Naturally, they represent only a small fraction of the vast wealth of which they form a part, including many other writing systems of the past or the present, such as the Burmese, Loma, Bassa, Lao and Georgian scripts and so on...Not to mention the oral traditions, which would all have their rightful place in an exhibition on a wider range of issues, thus expanding the semiotic and cultural power of humanity, neither the new challenges posed by the digital revolution. However, we are all aware that an exhibition

conveys a message. In its follow-up and through appropriation, the message may be perpetually spread, amplified and embodied in many other forms. This is the exhibition’s raison d’être. Merely imagining it as a future topic in conversations, workshops, schools and among circles of friends is quite exciting, namely due to its evolutive aspect. As we invite you to discover and extend the written forms of “peace” in some of the planet’s current writing systems, we also encourage you to enrich this interactive exhibition and to begin a new adventure without frontiers, into the worlds and cultures where these scripts came into being. The ultimate purpose of the exhibition is to create new meeting places that will magnify our cultural diversity, with a view to unleashing the power held by the world “peace” to open an infinite space of dignity and liberty.