Stephan Schmidheiny believes in the potential people have and the momentum development can bring. In keeping with this conviction, he has personally supported many innovative people in realizing their visions.
Overcoming armed conflict
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the terror of the Maoist Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) plunged Peru into a deep crisis. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives, and the poor rural population was hit hardest.
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto offered a different answer to the violence. In his book “El otro sendero” (1986), published in English as “The Other Path”, he showed that it is not revolution that gives the poor a future, but property, legal certainty and free enterprise. His Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) worked to ensure that small farmers and people in the informal economy received property titles and were taken seriously by the state as citizens. In doing so, it deprived the Shining Path of support and became a target itself: in July 1992, the organisation carried out a car bomb attack on the ILD in Lima.
Stephan Schmidheiny shared de Soto’s conviction that peace grows where people have property, rights and an economic future. He supported his friend and the work of the ILD. In 1991, the two jointly published the volume “Las nuevas reglas del juego”.
With the arrest of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán in September 1992 and the resistance of the rural population, the terror finally collapsed.
Peace begins with livelihoods
Stephan Schmidheiny pursued the same idea in Afghanistan. Through the Network of European Foundations, he was the main funder of the think tank Senlis Council, later renamed the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS). It had been founded in the early 2000s by the Canadian lawyer Norine MacDonald KC. From 2005, ICOS conducted research in the country’s embattled southern provinces, with its own field offices in Kandahar and Lashkar Gah.
Its studies showed how poverty, hunger and a lack of economic alternatives drove support for the Taliban. The forced eradication of poppy fields, for example, deprived many small farmers of their only source of income and fuelled resentment of the international presence. ICOS therefore proposed combining security, development and drug policy. This included the “Poppy for Medicine” concept: opium poppy was to be cultivated under controlled conditions and processed into painkillers. The proposal remained controversial and was not implemented.
Above all, what mattered was the change of perspective: people in conflict zones are not merely a security problem. Lasting peace requires that they can secure their livelihoods and shape their own lives.
ICOS later extended its work to other crisis regions such as Somalia and Syria. Norine MacDonald led the organisation until autumn 2021, shortly after the end of the Western engagement in Afghanistan. After almost twenty years, the United States had concluded an agreement with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020 and withdrawn its troops. In August 2021, the Taliban once again seized power in Kabul.
Since then, they have governed the country as an “Islamic Emirate” and largely excluded girls and women from secondary and higher education. In April 2022, the Taliban banned poppy cultivation, which according to the United Nations fell by around 95 per cent by 2023. For many farming families, this meant the loss of their most important source of income. The question of viable livelihoods thus arises today just as urgently as it did then.
Mediating where others cannot go
Stephan Schmidheiny was one of the first supporters of Inter-Mediate, a charity founded in London in 2011 by Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s long-serving chief of staff and the UK’s chief negotiator on the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland, and the diplomat Martin Griffiths. Its founding trustees included Lord Dennis Stevenson, a long-standing companion of Stephan Schmidheiny, who had previously chaired the Tate’s board of trustees for ten years.
Inter-Mediate discreetly supports negotiations in particularly difficult and dangerous conflicts. Among other things, it accompanied the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC, the peace negotiations in Mozambique and the end of the Basque group ETA. It later also worked in Turkey and Syria.