Source: Good News Network
Reprinted with permission from Peace News Network
September 29th, 2018
The word “peacebuilding” gets 7 million hits on Google, yet isn’t in most dictionaries—but a campaign is well on its way to changing that.
“Peacebuilding” was coined in the 1970’s by Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, who defines it as projects that involve “concrete action” towards peace.
Mike Jobbins from Search for Common Ground says it’s been a real frustration in the peacebuilding field to constantly get the Microsoft Word red squiggle from the spellchecker.“We have UN departments, we have legislation in the States, we have governmental departments from Nigeria to Myanmar that use the word peacebuilding, but fundamentally we’re not well understood in the general public,” Jobbins said. “You sit next to someone on an airplane and say ‘I work for a peacebuilding organization’ and people don’t really know what that means, and there’s so many great people doing such amazing things around the world that we thought it was time to make sure that gets recognized.”
Harriet Lamb, CEO of International Alert, pointed to the variety of new words that have recently been introduced to dictionaries that…
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