The congress is international in scope, and will include women and men from the Middle East, USA, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It will embrace a range of discourses and topics, combining scholarly work with position papers, and creative peace literature: stories, poems and plays. It will also include background briefings, testimonial accounts, workshops, videos, and musical and artistic creative pieces. This purposely heterogeneous range of media and "languages" will appeal to the many communities, within and beyond the academy, concerned with issues involving conflict resolution, culture and literature.

This International Congress will address the root causes of conflict and war, and will examine the ways and means for building a Culture and Literature of Peace, toward the new millenium. What we read and what we watch on TV, movies and media, and the basic values, attitudes and norms we acquire through them, affect us and motivate us all our lives. All wars and most conflicts have at their roots a cultural and ethnic basis. The World seems to be changing at a dizzying pace, and much of the violent culture, literature and media we are increasingly exposed to, offer a serious threat to human well-being.

The Congress aims at assessing the shortcomings in today's existing world and national cultures, and at proposing new cultural social structures and processes which are more accurate and meaningful for the present, and desirable for the future. The challenge to participants lies in establishing an innovative conflict resolution view of humankind on the threshold of the twenty first century, and to examine how culture and literature can help in disentangling global, national and local conflicts, and offer concrete alternative cultural paths forward.

Some of the questions that will be posed and discussed are: Can satisfying global living standards only be achieved by homogenizing the world's cultures? Is humankind able to self-organize culturally and ethnically in such a way that international law and customs will render wars and mass destruction obsolete and unthinkable?

Participants are invited to present a comprehensive vision of a harmonious world culture including global, national and local implications. We will attempt to work together to produce useful proposals for research, creations and actions required to improve global, national and ethnic cultures, and thus promote the enhancement of our civilizations.