A global campaign for peace

In 1985, Bahá'ís around the world launched an effort to help eradicate from human consciousness the old world attitudes and behaviors that have for so long presented seemingly insurmountable barriers to the achievement of world peace.

This campaign began with a letter, entitled The Promise of World Peace, and addressed to "The Peoples of the World." It called on world leaders to gather and discuss the ways and means by which world peace may be established. More than simply a demand for action by the world's political leaders, however, the document analyzed the reasons that world peace had for so long been considered unattainable--citing the barriers of nationalism, racism, poverty, and religious strife--and outlined new approaches for the demolition of those barriers.

Written by the Univeral House of Justice, the document also indicated that because of humanity's new stage of maturity, these barriers could at last be overcome and that peace was now inevitable although whether it would be achieved through intelligent collaboration or after disastrous conflicts remained to be seen.

Galvanized by this message, the world-wide Bahá'í community began a systematic campaign to diffuse these ideas around the world. Within a few years, more than one million copies of this treatise had been disseminated, many to individuals in the highest ranks of government and academia. Indeed, copies were presented to virtually all of the world's heads of state. It has also been published whole or in part in magazines and newspapers around the world. In conjunction with this distribution, Bahá'í communities around the world organized thousands of local, regional, and national peace conferences, lectures, concerts, dramas, exhibitions and fairs.

In 1987, the Bahá'í International Community and five national Bahá'í communities were recognized by the United Nations with the "Peace Messenger" award, a prize in recognition of contributions by non-governmental organizations during the 1986 United Nations International Year of Peace.

In 1985, Madam Ruhiyyih Rabbani, the widow of Shoghi Effendi and a Hand of the Cause of God, presented The Promise of World Peace to United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar.

The Promise of World Peace

The Great Peace towards which people of goodwill throughout the centuries have inclined their hearts...is now at long last within the reach of the nations. For the first time in history it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad diversified peoples, in one perspective. World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet--in the words of one great thinker, "the planetization of mankind."

The human race, as a distinct, organic unit, has passed through evolutionary stages of infancy and childhood in the lives of its individual members, and is now in the culminating period of its turbulent adolescence approaching its long-awaited coming of age....

The time has come when those who preach the dogmas of materialism, whether of the east or the west, whether of capitalism or socialism, must give account of the moral stewardship they have presumed to exercise. Where is the "new world" promised by these ideologies? Where is the international peace to whose ideals they proclaim their devotion? Where are the breakthroughs into new realms of cultural achievement produced by the aggrandizement of this race, of that nation or of that particular class? Why is the vast majority of the world 's peoples sinking ever deeper into hunger when wealth on a scale undreamed of by the Pharaohs, the Caesars, or even the imperialist powers of the nineteenth century is at the disposal of the present arbiters of human affairs?...

Clearly, a common remedial effort is urgently required. It is primarily a matter of attitude. Will humanity continue in its waywardness, holding to outworn concepts and unworkable assumptions? Or will its leaders, regardless of ideology, step forth and, with a resolute will, consult together in a united search for appropriate solutions?...

...in essence, peace stems from an inner state supported by a spiritual or moral attitude, and it is chiefly in evoking this attitude that the possibility of enduring solutions can be found....

World order can be founded only on an unshakeable consciousness of the oneness of mankind, a spiritual truth which all the human sciences confirm. Anthropology, physiology, psychology, recognize only one human species, albeit infinitely varied in the secondary aspects of life. Recognition of this truth requires the abandonment of prejudic~prejudice of every kind--race, class, colour, creed, nation, sex, degree of material civilization, everything which enables people to consider themselves superior to others....

-- THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE