News/Events

Video Series and Book Tackle Public Discourse on Global Problems

Feb 1, 2021
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“Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.” These inspiring and instructive words by Bahá’u’lláh (from the Tabernacle of Unity 2), encountered by Sovaida Ma’ani Ewing as a teenager, launched her on a lifelong path to “find practical ways of applying the vision and framework offered by the Bahá’í Writings to solving our global challenges including climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, migration, financial crises, and genocide, to name but a few.”

Ms Ma’ani Ewing, a faculty member with the Wilmette Institute, founded the Center for Peace and Global Governance (www.cpgg.org) with the intent of developing “a set of shared global ethics … and demonstrating how we can apply them methodically to find practical and politically palatable solutions to our global problems.”

Screenshot: In her latest “Re-Imagining” video Sovaida reflects on the the process of “growing up” and quotes from the 2021 inauguration poem by Amanda Gorman.

One of her latest projects has expanded the reach of the CPGG through a weekly video series entitled “Re-Imagining the World.” Launched in December 2020, the series airs live on Facebook and YouTube every Saturday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. ET. The videos are “intended as a contribution to public discourse surrounding peace and the efforts necessary to shift our world from where we are today to where we want to be.” Each short program aims to “infuse a sense of hope and motivation to take positive action in those who are feeling anxious, depressed, and fearful due to the tribulations unleashed by the challenges of our time.” The program is recorded and available on the CPGG YouTube channel.

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Ms Ma’ani Ewing has also published her latest book, The Alchemy of Peace: 6 Essential Shifts in Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace. The book describes “a viable and effective path to achieving peace in our world. While inspired by the Writings, it also draws on other sources of knowledge and understanding and seeks to correlate them to address the needs of humanity today.” The process of achieving peace, Ms Ma’ani Ewing emphasizes, involves harnessing the power of choice to replace six outworn collective mindsets and the dysfunctional habits they have spawned with six new mindsets and related constructive habits. The book is available on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback format.


“Re-Imagining Our World” Episode 2 (26 December, 2020)
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Sovaida Ma'ani Ewing, LLM

Director, Center for Peace and Global Governance (CPGG)

Sovaida Maani Ewing is a prolific author, speaker and an international lawyer (with 18 years experience in private and government practice). She is a barrister-at-law of England and Wales, an LLM graduate in International Law and European Union Law from Cambridge University and an attorney-at-law in the United States. Her eighteen year legal career has included private practice with respected law firms in Washington, DC, including her own, teaching as an adjunct professor of law and most recently service as an Attorney-Advisor in the Legal Advisor’s Office of the US State Department. Sovaida is also the founding director of The Center for Peace and Global Governance (cpgg.org), a virtual think tank and online forum that pools and proposes principled solutions to pressing global challenges through publications, podcasts, lectures, online courses, workshops, and targeted consulting.  Over the past 18 years she has written five books in the area of peace, collective security, and global governance:  “Collective Security Within Reach” (2008) with a foreword written by an Under-Secretary General of the United Nations ,“Building a World Federation: The Key to Resolving Our Global Crises” (2015), “21st Century Ready” (2018), “Bridge to Global Governance: Tackling Climate Change, Energy Distribution, and Nuclear Proliferation,”  and her latest, “The Alchemy of Peace: 6 Essential Shifts in Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace” (2021).  All are available in paperback and digital forms on Amazon.com. Her book “Building a World Federation” is the basis for her Wilmette Institute Course “Building a New System of Global Governance.” The book posits that humanity has been passing through stages of collective growth towards integration and unity. Our current collective crises–including climate change, financial upheavals, proliferation of nuclear weapons, gross human rights atrocities, and mismanagement of critical natural resources–are simply manifestations of our passage through a turbulent adolescence. The only way to a peaceful world is for humanity to take the next step towards maturity by establishing collective decision-making institutions that can evolve into a world federation of nation-states.  Her other publications include Laws of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, Tracing Their Evolution in Religious History, co-authored with Baharieh Rouhani Ma’ani (published by George Ronald) and Creating a Baha’i Identity in Our Children published by Grace Publications. Sovaida also hosts a live monthly video cast entitled “Reimagining Our World” on her CPGG — Center for Peace and Global Governance — YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/centerforpeaceandglobalgovernancecpgg which is dedicated to creating a vision of the world we want and infusing hope that we can make the choices necessary to attain it. All past episodes (51 at the current count) are available both on the YouTube channel and as audio podcasts on most popular podcast platforms such as Apple Podcast, Spotify, etc..  In addition, she maintains a blog that analyzes and offers principled solutions to current global problems at http://collectivesecurity.blogspot.com.  Sovaida was born to a pioneer family in Kenya, and went to school in Haifa, Israel for several years during which her mother served at the World Center. She has lived in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. Her Baha’i service includes membership on Local Spiritual Assemblies in England and the US, membership on the National Youth Committee in the UK, work as an assistant to an Auxiliary Board Member, membership on the Board of the Baha’i Justice Society, and service as the Baha’i representative on the Washington Metropolitan Interfaith Council. She has lived and worked on four continents and speaks four languages. Listen to Sovaida’s interview with Rainn Wilson on ‘Bahá’í Blogcast' Listen to Sovaida’s interview on ‘A Bahá’í Perspective’ podcastSee Faculty Bio

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