On Friday 24 February 2023, UPF New Zealand hosted a Peace Kingdom Building Seminar at the Fickling Convention Centre, Lynfield Room, 546 Mt Albert Road, Three Kings, Auckland. The seminar ran from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm and drew participants from across UPF New Zealand’s network of Ambassadors for Peace and community leaders.
The theme — “Peace and Security in the Pacific Region” — was chosen in direct response to a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. In the months preceding the seminar, the Pacific had become the focal point of intensifying competition between major world powers, raising urgent questions about what kind of future New Zealand and its Pacific neighbours were building together.
The Context: A Pacific Under Pressure
The seminar took place against a backdrop of significant international tension. The announcement of a security deal between China and the Solomon Islands had shocked the region — including New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and the United States — and prompted a renewed scramble for strategic influence across the Pacific Islands.
US President Biden had been invited to visit the Pacific following a summit at the White House, and leaders of Kiribati, Palau, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia were actively navigating the competing pressures of two global superpowers. The question for small Pacific nations was increasingly stark: how to maintain sovereignty, cultural integrity, and peace in an era of intensifying great-power rivalry?
For New Zealand, the question was equally pointed. As UPF New Zealand Chairman Kenji Watanabe wrote in a reflection circulated at the time, New Zealand’s voice in Pacific affairs had grown quieter even as the stakes had grown higher — and it was time for that to change.
A Values-Based Response
The seminar presented UPF’s framework as a principled alternative to ideological competition. Rather than choosing sides between left-wing and right-wing geopolitical blocs, the Pacific community was invited to return to its deeper common heritage — as peoples of the Blue Pacific Continent, sharing lands, oceans, and a profound spiritual inheritance.
Kenji Watanabe’s keynote reflection articulated this vision clearly: “Peace and security in the Pacific have to be built on common faiths, cultural values, and traditional knowledge in the region — that is, a God-centred individual, family, society, and nation.”
The UPF framework of interdependence, mutual prosperity, and universally shared values — what the co-founders of UPF called “Godism” or Head-Wing Thought — was presented not as an abstract ideology, but as a practical guide for navigating the tensions that Pacific nations face. The goal is a society that transcends the hatred, hostility, and self-centredness that fuel geopolitical rivalry, and that instead builds cooperation from the ground up — beginning in families, and expanding outward to communities, nations, and the region.
New Zealand’s Responsibility
A central theme of the seminar was New Zealand’s particular role and responsibility in the Pacific. As one of the closest neighbours to Pacific Island nations, and as a fellow member of the Blue Pacific family, New Zealand has both the cultural connections and the institutional capacity to serve as a genuine partner — not merely a proxy for outside powers.
The seminar noted that Australia and New Zealand had long supported Pacific Island nations through the Pacific Islands Forum, guided by a shared vision of peace, harmony, security, social inclusion, and prosperity. That vision, the participants affirmed, must be renewed and strengthened — not because it is strategically convenient, but because it reflects a genuine kinship and a shared moral commitment to the wellbeing of all peoples in the region.
Looking to Seoul
The seminar was timed to complement the World Summit 2023 in Seoul, scheduled for May, under the theme “Contemporary Challenges to Global Order: Toward a World Culture of Peace.” The Fickling Convention Centre gathering was UPF New Zealand’s local contribution to that global conversation — a reminder that peace is not only made in conference halls and diplomatic corridors, but in community rooms where ordinary people commit to extraordinary values.
Participants left the seminar with a renewed sense of their own agency. The Pacific’s future is not determined only by the decisions of great powers. It is shaped, day by day, by the choices of families, communities, and organisations like UPF New Zealand that refuse to cede the language of peace to geopolitics.
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