At the 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on Tuesday, the UIC Forum was filled with individuals currently confronting some of the most grievous atrocities in the world today: denial of basic human rights, injustice and oppression. The themes present in the Summit transcended the circumstances of the day, and as I listened to some of the world’s most renowned philanthropists and leaders extrapolate on the urgency for eliminating systematic violence, I wondered about the realistic application of the sentiment.

The Summit was in honor of those who have paved the way for change, but their message was that the path is not for them alone. Change happens because individuals make decisions about what they can do, and the Nobel laureates in the room were not different because of extraordinary ability, but rather because of extraordinary tenacity. As Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, put it, change will be the result of the efforts of the individuals with courage and boldness — people who are willing to make mistakes, and those who refuse to accept the status quo if they feel it’s not acceptable.

The panelists echoed the importance of young people in laying the foundation for a more just society: Adolescence is when children start to establish their views of the world and when they are most eager to internalize the values they are taught. Professor and laureate Jody Williams said that lasting change will only be possible when we refuse to teach history through the glorification of war, and Caryl M. Stern of the United Nations Children’s Fund stated that the way children are conditioned to think about world peace is perhaps the most crucial aspect of progress.

Perhaps some of the world’s most effectual thinkers are those who refuse to become discouraged in the face of humanity’s disturbing shortcomings. The tenacity of the laureates is not something to be admired from afar, but is to be seen as a call to action. The ideas resonated with the audience because of their universality, and one of the loftiest of achievements, the Nobel Peace Prize, was given a uniquely humanistic touch. The accessibility of the message was an indication that there is something that everyone can contribute. The tragedies facing our generation are vast, but so is the power that can be harnessed by those willing to step outside of their comfort zones to do what they can in their own contexts. It is not constructive to fear that your contribution will be too little because then you will be paralyzed into inaction. 

Throughout the seminars, I noticed that among the assorted former presidents, activists and other distinguished individuals in the auditorium, the camera continuously settled on Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and pioneer of microcredit. Through his work with Grameen Bank and the values that he has embodied, Yunus has become a symbol of the mobilization of individual power among the most impoverished tier of society. His ideology was tangible in the bottom-up approach of the dialogue at the Summit, which was noticeably bereft of aloof assertions about sweeping legislation. 

Williams emphasized that peace is not simply the absence of armed conflict — it is the way that diversity is managed and incorporated, it is an emphasis on equity, it is the way individuals feel included as part of the whole. It will start with how we conceptualize the kind of world we want to live in as we build and rebuild it together. We cannot utilize the same thinking that we did when we created the problem, and the first step will be changing how we think about the way our actions will set an example — the way they will project onto the world and recycle into its collective environment.  Injustice will only flourish if individuals enable it.

Stephen Goose of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines reiterated that the Summit was not to establish a strategy for achieving world peace. Rather, it was a forum to initiate a dialogue about reversing the mentality that drives divisions between people. It was a call to reexamine the aggregate of thought processes that have manifest themselves in wars, in cyclical poverty and in denial of basic human rights. It was a challenge to recognize our desensitization toward the prevalence of violence and preventable illness, and to inexhaustibly resist a sense of defeatism and complacency. The point is not to become disillusioned by the problem, but to become inspired by the individual power that can be harnessed in establishing a basis for change through promoting equity.

The issues remained as the crowd streamed from the seminar into Chicago’s near West Side. A skeptic would say that the dialogue was out of touch with what at times seems to be a potentially disheartening reality. The issues that were discussed — rape as a tool of war, arms proliferation, the oppression of dictatorships — are so entrenched that they are difficult to conceptualize, let alone alleviate. To a skeptic, these talks might have been a brief insulation from the crushing weight of a world inundated with problems older than any individual — of wounds developed and calcified over time. If they were easy issues to fix, they would already be solved. The state of the world today is the result of a way of thinking that has become such an intuitive part of cognition that is difficult to disavow.   

However, the point was not to present the challenges as insurmountable, but to recognize our own power in stymieing their inertia. The message of the summit was one of reassurance for anyone who has questioned the veracity of the statement “the change starts with you.” The question is no longer who are you to say something, but how can you afford not to?

_Carolyn Lang is a graduate student _