We’re beginning this in and with the year 2018. It will be updated “backwards” in time as we get the time to do so.

We live in a time where short articles, secondary literature – as well as images and videos – dominate and is, mostly, accessible on the Internet. Readily available information of course has many good sides. But, while people have easy access to lots of information, what do they know?

Information and knowledge is not the same.

Knowledge is structured information, based on some categorisations of types of information which are again based on theories and concepts: How do things work, how are different types of information/facts/data related to each other, how complex is a problem that we need to solve?

Knowledge is a tool to avoid superficiality, and the more you know, the more you are likely to want to know more. It’s about a never-ending source of curiosity.

Self-deceptive simplifications reign everywhere in today’s fast and rather fleeting world – and little research and deep thinking. At TFF we do not endorse or contribute to it. Because, simply, it leads to civilisational decay…

To be able to search something isn’t the same as knowing that something in-depth. It doesn’t help us to distinguish between facts, fake and omissions.

A person without knowledge will be confused and – guaranteed – be fooled, at least in political matters, if she or he has no knowledge to interprete information with.

Knowledge leads to understanding, sheer information doesn’t. Knowledge is about the long argument, or reasoning. It’s about how various elements of a problem relate to each other.

Such long and complex stuff can only be found in books – not in smart arguments, slogans, mantras or public relation statements.

We need book learning to educate ourselves and it is the only effective barrier against fake, lies and propaganda.

We need books to avoid ending up in a dark place where we seem to be heading: toward the post-literate society with a thick surface and thin depth, no substance. Educated people stand a better chance to look through attempts to fool them.

TFF Associates are people who read and who write books. Too.

We have listed good sources to trustworthy knowledge about violence, peace and conflicts – and more – here.

On this page we focus only on TFF Associates’ books. This guides you to: a) substantial, longer analyses by TFF Associates and b) we want to help our Associates sell their books. So, it’s a win-win for all.

If you’ve read an interesting article by a TFF Associate here on The Transnational, why not visit this page and see whether she or he has also published the larger, complex argument from which you can learn more about the world?

2018


John Scales Avery
The Information Explosion

David Swanson
Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it?

Richard Falk
Revisiting the Vietnam War And International Law: View and Interpretation of Richard Falk
Editor Stefan Andersson
See also
TFF PressInfo # 447: Richard Falk on US wars as criminal enterprises

Ina Curic
Peace education books for children and parents

Scilla Elworthy
The Business Plan for Peace. Building a World Without War

Jonathan Power
Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals

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Tony Robinson October 4, 2026 Violence is easy to recognise when someone is being beaten, shot or killed. It becomes more difficult when nobody is holding a weapon. Poverty, discrimination, exploitation and repression can restrict a human life just as effectively, although they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences. Simply adding more categories to an ever-growing list of forms of violence does not really solve the problem. The more interesting question is what all these different situations have in common and why it makes sense to describe them using the same word. Human beings do not simply react to what happens around them. They remember the past, imagine things that do not yet exist, make plans and undertake projects. Workers organise because they imagine different working conditions; people migrate because they imagine another life somewhere else; social movements emerge because people refuse to accept the...
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Tony Robinson October 4, 2026 Violence is easy to recognise when someone is being beaten, shot or killed. It becomes more difficult when nobody is holding a weapon. Poverty, discrimination, exploitation and repression can restrict a human life just as effectively, although they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences. Simply adding more categories to an ever-growing list of forms of violence does not really solve the problem. The more interesting question is what all these different situations have in common and why it makes sense to describe them using the same word. Human beings do not simply react to what happens around them. They remember the past, imagine things that do not yet exist, make plans and undertake projects. Workers organise because they imagine different working conditions; people migrate because they imagine another life somewhere else; social movements emerge because people refuse to accept the...
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Johan Galtung 1930-2024October 2015 Published here on October 3, 2026 Let us focus on Civilization for conflict analysis and remedies. Major forms of disorder use violence; war is state organized violence. The most belligerent states are the United States of America and Israel, both with civilization roots. National Evangelism, the US Protestant Christian civilization– more national than evangelical–justifies US warfare as exceptionalism of a people chosen by God, with a manifest destiny to run the world. Orthodox Judaism justifies Israeli warfare to conquer and expand from Nile to Euphrates as a religious right and duty to the Eternal One. The third most belligerent country, the UK, no longer believes it is God-chosen but chosen by the USA; not quite the same but something. But the root cause of global disorder lies in the Occident–with Islam–seeing itself as the single, universal civilization valid for all at all times, all others being...
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Jan ObergPhD, director, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFFLund, Sweden October 2, 2026 This is my full original manuscript. The Chinese Academy of Social Science, CASS, makes two publications out if it. 1. China’s Five-year plan emphasized the capabilities of basic research and original innovation. It is regarded as the goal of the future social development, which, as required, should be significantly enhanced. Can you comment on the importance of original innovation in research and academic study? I believe it is easier to define “original innovation” in the natural sciences than in social sciences. The breaking points of what constitutes something new, or innovative, are not quite as sharp in the latter. But in both fields it is about opening up something that was closed, unseen, unexplored before – making manifest what was earlier latent. Innovations come in many forms and shapes – naming something that was not...
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The agreement is catastrophic both because of what it says and what it doesn’t mention. It reduces further the major asset of security policies: Freedom of action. Jan Oberg TFF director September 25, 2026 A couple of hours before the agreement was signed on September 22, 2026, I published the following 13 hypotheses about what it would most likely contain on TFF Substack (in English). I was wrong on only the first point. Contrary to what Trump had written on his Truth Social platform, it does not appear to come into force immediately. In fact, it turned out to be worse than even I had anticipated. After these hypotheses now come a number of reflections in light of what the agreement actually contains, and does not contain, as well as the way in which it has generally been presented by major media outlets and by the public-service broadcaster DR. My...
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Below are TFF-related media mentions, comments, videos and social media posts published elsewhere but not on this homepage. We happen to catch and list only a fraction. Regarding video comments and debates, we recommend that you go to the TFF Video Channel on Substack where many of them are reproduced. Jan Oberg is a contributor to China Daily – 52 million daily clicks – and Global Times, CGTN and CCTV (the national television), China Investment, Xinhua News Agency and several others. Articles and videos on these media very often multiply into countless Chinese (and Western media) that re-post them from these main media. Thanks to The China Academy, his analyses, interviews and comments are frequently posted on YouTube channels such as Thinkers Forum and Wave Media. These videos are often re-posted on Bilibili (China’s YouTube), the China Content Center on TikTok, and on the Chinese edition of TikTok, Douyin.com. This means reaching hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide over a year. While there are too many to catch on all these...