In the USA at the same time, Congressman Dennis Kucinich has put forward a proposal for a US Department of Peace. The International Peace Bureau continues to bring together peacebuilders to promote international cooperation and nonviolent solutions to international conflicts; its publication, Peace is Possible, has compiled success stories from around the world to encourage further success. The Helsinki Citizens Assembly has brought together Turks, Armenians and Azeris to talk to each other; and I wonder, from my Middle Eastern context, what makes us think in our part of the world that our hatreds are any more profound or less resolvable?

One of the differences between Britain and less developed countries is that you have a stronger civil society and middle classes with the leisure and education to begin engineering change. In the Observer recently I was interested to read a plea for more and better use of public space and public dialogue, following the Royal Society of Arts call for 'coffee-shop' conversation on public issues. There is no democracy without a demos; 'the public' as an entity is formed through dialogue and exchange without the threat of 'losing' or the desire of 'winning' as is all too often the case in so-called "public debate" transmitted by the media.

I have told the story many times of how, in 1994 in Aqaba with my late brother, the late King Hussein, at the signing of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, I was asked by Israeli media, "What do you think of all this?" I replied "and I wish that my words had not subsequently been borne out by events " “With all due respect to the personalities involved, peace is not just about talking heads; this peace will only succeed when it becomes a 'warm' peace, a people's peace."

With the late Sadruddin Aga Khan I had the honour to chair an independent commission which reported to the UN on the desirability of promoting a "new international humanitarian order." That was in 1983 and the proposal continues to be endorsed every year without being put into effect. We can promote the new economic order, the new technological order, the new communications order but as soon as the words 'humanitarian' and "human rights" appear, it seems that political reservations emerge.

A New International Humanitarian Order means simply that we maintain a proper emphasis on peace for human beings, rather than a "realpolitik of peace." In a democracy or a would-be democracy, isn't peace about the conscious "even the stubborn" maintenance of peacefulness between people?

This is why the role of interfaith dialogue in peacemaking within and between countries is not really about religions talking to one another; it is about the adherents of religions talking to one another. Over the past few decades we have seen many meetings in which high-level representatives of the faiths have come together to proclaim a common ground between their beliefs and scriptures. Now, we need to make this a "people's peace" we need to find ways to bring together millions of individuals to talk to each other, not at each other, about their values, their convictions, their hopes and their anxieties.

It is said that, if you want people to agree with you, just invite your friends round for dinner; but if you want to make a change in the world, you must find a way to talk to those who disagree - your enemies and those who disapprove of you in some way. Technology has turned up the volume of our agreements and disagreements, but it has not taught us how to disagree.

"A civilised framework for disagreement" might be one way to define the difficult word 'peace'. Peace, to those who have seriously worked for it at a high level, is not merely the absence of war. It is a process which has to be continuously restarted with every new birth. It is easy for a human to agree peaceably with another; it is much less easy to disagree, and I think that the most important skill we can learn today is how to disagree, or how to agree upon rules of disagreement.

This means, as I have often emphasised, a code of conduct for state actors and non-state actors and a concerted effort towards broad compliance with that code. It means clear and unambiguous definitions of such terms as 'terror' and 'terrorism'. It means statesmanship rather than political jockeying. It means, at the level of the individual citizen, undertaking the responsibility to converse at a level which is not necessarily comfortable or reassuring with people very different from oneself, and to acknowledge agreements across cultural, religious and political divides without having to resolve all disagreements first.

As the Imam Shatibi said: each of us is to "enhance what is universal and respect difference." In English I think the word 'respect' often gets glossed over with the concept 'tolerate.' I do not want to tolerate you and have you tolerate me; I want to respect you, and feel that, even if you do not respect me, you can respect what I stand for. Respecting difference, in the end, means acknowledging the right of another to believe sincerely that one is wrong. This is not easy.

A Ministry for Peace as a government department might be expected to be more concerned about a foreign-policy advisory role than about citizen's conferencing; but I personally hope that this will not prove to be the case. I believe that, for change to occur, any top-down approach must meet with a bottom-up approach, whether in a democracy or a dictatorship. The final authority of any political power is vested in the people's acceptance of that power and the glory of a democratic system is that it recognises this fact and builds upon it. If a Ministry for Peace is also a Ministry for Peacefulness then I think we have reason to hope for a future in which our children can disagree without violence, and agree to work together on their shared problems.