Naturally, nobody cares about that fraud in today’s Sweden.
SIPRI is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, established in 1966. Read about it here and see how it has twisted its aims to not include the words ‘peace research.’ Because here is what it should do according to § 2 of its statutes: “…to conduct scientific research on questions of conflict and cooperation of importance for international peace and security, with the aim of contributing to an understanding of the conditions for peaceful solutions of interstate conflicts and for stable peace. (My italics).
The rather low intellectual level is indicated by the statement that “SIPRI’s vision is a world in which sources of insecurity are identified and understood, conflicts are prevented or resolved, and peace is sustained.”
Sources of insecurity shall not be removed, they shall only be identified and understood. Conflicts shall be ‘prevented’ – what an absurd idea since any dynamic organisation will always have conflicts; what we shall prevent or reduce is, of course, not conflicts but violence in all its forms and shapes. And peace is ‘sustained’ – such nonsense sounds like a marketing firm formulation. Excuse us all: How shall that peace come about before it is sustained? Is it a ‘peace’ on the present, perverse level of global military expenditures, weapons of mass destruction, ongoing warfare and rampant militarism – or a new different kind peace? SIPRI has no answers when it comes to the latter interpreetation.
Since 2016, I’ve written about SIPRI as a totally lost institution for peace and disarmament, conflict-resolution, mediation, reconciliation and the outlining of peaceful proposals. It’s a parody of peace for more than a decade. Read here, here and here.
Editorial offices and journalists in Sweden and elsewhere never took up this criticism. It’s so natural in these militarist times that the world’s perhaps most well-known “peace” research institute – originally a pride of the Swedish government and ‘ranked among the most respected think tanks worldwide’ – simply drops its mandate and becomes yet one more former peace research institute now devoted to military-based security issues in total contrast to what it was supposed to do.
The reason is simple: for years, it has had no creative or moral leadership with any understanding of peace in the sense mentioned below, and it is mainly financed by NATO member governments. Its kind of “peace” is NATO “peace.” In addition, the concept/word – and discourse – of ‘peace’ has been deliberately cancelled in Western societies.
I’ve therefore suggested a change of name to SIMSI, Stockholm International Military Security Institute. A bit of honesty instead of continued faking would be appropriate.
You may ask what peace research is, and there are many definitions and approaches. But one overarching element can be formulated this way: an intellectual effort to understand all kinds of violence with the aim of devising strategies to reduce every kind and outline strategies for intelligent conflict-resolution with the least possible use of violence – on the road to more peaceful, nonviolent futures for the whole human being and all human beings.
Now, keep that in mind and then click here to see today’s front page of SIPRI – “the independent source on international security” (no longer peace as stated before) accompanied with images, headlines, titles and texts filled with arms…
And it’s extremely deceptive that this institute calls itself independent. Just look at its funding here.
To continue the decay and get even further away from anything called peace, SIPRI has just appointed a new director. His name is Karim Haggag, and you can read about this Egyptian career diplomat and his role at the The American University in Cairo here – a servant, one can safely assume, of US military interests with close relations to hawkish people like Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger of the Albright Stonebridge Group – that, by the way, goes unmentioned in SIPRI’s official announcement about him here.
In case you want to know about Madeleine Albright, she served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, masterminded the fake negotiation at Rambouillet about Kosovo with the NATO bombings that followed and thought, as she stated it, it was acceptable to kill half a million Iraqi women and children by the US economic sanctions.
Haggag holds only a master’s degree in War Studies from King’s College, London, and has served as a career diplomat most of his life, in Washington. Here is his official CV at the American University Cairo, which indicates only two selected ten-year-old publications and his academic interests being “security.”
Nothing indicates the slightest knowledge, experience or interest in the academic discipline of peace and conflict research, theoretical or applied.
In short, surely the right mainstream man for the former SIPRI peace research institute in the year 2025.
