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.
Since then, Stephan Schmidheiny has lent crucial support to various initiatives aimed at resolving armed conflict. At the start of the new millennium, he was involved in setting up the International Council on Security and Development. The organisation’s founder, Norine MacDonald QC, is committed to finding a lasting solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, addressing the interests of small farmers in particular.
In 2010, Stephan Schmidheiny was one of the initiators of the UK-based foundation Inter Mediate, which specialises in conflict mediation and now works successfully in countries such as Colombia, Turkey, Libya and Afghanistan.