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Abstract
Seeds of Peace is a nongovernmental organization that annually brings together children from the Middle East and various other regions of conflict for a summer camp experience in the woods of Maine, USA. It also operates coexistence centers throughout the world. Founded in 1993, the organization has gained worldwide acclaim for its peace education programs. This fantasy‐theme rhetorical analysis explains Seeds of Peace’s rhetorical vision using Ernest Bormann’s symbolic convergence theory. The analysis suggests that the rhetorical vision constituted by organizational stakeholders and promoted in marketing and promotional publications by Seeds of Peace project peace as something achievable only in the future. The result is an organization that seeks to bring peace to the world, but potentially participates in sustaining conflict in the present. This article considers the ways in which peace institutes and nongovernmental organizations can unknowingly participate, rhetorically, in maintaining a deferred sense of peace because of the ways in which they utilize policymakers’ talk about their organizations’ work.
Notes
1. It is important to note that Lazarus (Citation2006) provides a relatively positive evaluation of SOP work, noting that it is an example of an ‘ideal‐typical process of critical enlightenment’ (10) and works together with Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the US Department of State to make it possible for graduate Seeds to travel to and from the coexistence center located in Jerusalem. While this is welcomed, it also makes the organization increasingly dependent on the politics of these states (see especially Lazarus Citation2006, 11).
2. It is important that we continually question whose values of tolerance and respect are going to be ‘injected’, whose children are going to be ‘injected’, and who gets to decide when and where the ‘injecting’ occurs. In other words, we need to be concerned with issues of power, especially when research consistently shows that Palestinians are less likely to show that peace education has had a significant effect on their view of the conflict (see, for example, Biton and Salomon Citation2006; Schleien Citation2007).
3. Although websites tend to change frequently, the website that was in existence at the time of this analysis should be accessible (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://seedsofpeace.org). (See the site between 11 August 2004 and October 2007).
4. Of course, this is only in reference to SOP’s work with Israeli and Palestinian youths. The tragic past of Maine, including the extermination of Indigenous peoples, does not provide a unified history for children attending the Maine camp.