New books

De svenska stridsflygplan som sattes in i Libyen borde användas till att också angripa mål på marken i offensiv krigföring. Det tyckte Folkpartiets militante ledare Jan Björklund, när den svenska insatsen i Libyen diskuterades i mars 2011. Så blev det dessbättre inte. Men Sverige deltog, med brett parlamentariskt stöd, i ett krig som efteråt alltför lite har ifrågasatts. Sverige svarade för en fjärdedel av flygspaningen för att lokalisera bombmål. Kriget kallades ”humanitär intervention” och genomfördes av Nato med stöd av FN-resolution nummer 1 973. Men i själva verket var det inget annat än ett traditionellt kolonialkrig, sammanfattar den norske fredsforskaren Ola Tunander i sin bok Libyenkrigets geopolitik, som är en svidande genomgång av krigets förutsättningar och konsekvenser. Det här är en bok som politiker som Björklund och Bildt borde läsa. Om de gör det tvivlar jag på att de kommer att sova gott efteråt.

Review of The Glorious Art of Peace by John Gittings, NYC: Oxford University Press, 2012. Info about this book and a video with Gittings here. Editor’s note This is Galtung’s draft which has been submitted to International Affairs. What a wonderful idea, the history of peace! Something most people want to learn about, the art of peace! Like the history of health, food and love, as opposed to the history of wars, illness and hunger, of generals, kings and empires. This is the history of something that can inspire people, statesmen-women among them, to do better. This is a more adequate textbook for schools than the usual list of kings (and queens, like “divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived”). Gittings’ historiography covers seven periods: “ancient peace” based on Greece and China; the “morality of peace” of the middle ages, from Jesus to the Crusades; the “humanist approach” of the early modern renaissance with a focus...

Thinking aloud: we need all good ideas to combat our double economic crisis: the increasing misery crisis at the bottom, now also in rich countries in the West, and the increasing system crisis, also striking those countries; but both are all over. So the following are notes for an epilogue to a forthcoming book, Peace Economics, about how to overcome the flagrant structural violence in the misery crisis, and the threat of direct violence, not only terrorism and state terrorism, but a major world war to get the West out of the system – like the Second World War lifted them out of the Great Depression.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> The two bombs that went off last week in Damascus, Syria, killing 55 people suggest that Al Qaeda is out and about, not on the verge of defeat as appeared so after the death of Osama bin Laden. The movement that claimed to be responsible, the Al-Nusra Front, whilst independent, almost certainly has ties with Al-Qaeda. In an eight minute video released in February Dr Aymen Zawaheri, who took over from bin Laden, urged Muslims to help “brothers in Syria with all that they can”. According to US intelligence Al Qaeda in Iraq responded by establishing terrorist cells in Syria. This is one reason why the US and Nato don’t want to get militarily involved in Syria. They have at last learnt that it would radicalise more people and push them towards Al Qaeda. (Besides, the situation is not as straightforward as it was in Libya with one all-powerful...

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities. Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?

US politics has for a long time, since the 1970s, been the politics of inequality. Not only have the indicators of inequality, like the ratio in average income between the top and the bottom 20%, or the salary ratio between a CEO and the average employee in a corporation, increased (from 50 to 1100). But the top 10 or 1 or 0.1 percent, has acquired wealth so far unheard of. And the bottom 90, or 99 or 99.1 percent see the average family income in real terms decreasing; for the lowest down below the poverty line, way down into misery like worrying about where the next meal comes from (from the soup kitchen for very many).

It does, even in print; pardon some publicity! You may start at the end with the table of contents, then, here is the book epilogue: Epilogue: Enthusiast E and Skeptic S: Dialogue at a Higher Level E: Well, where are we now? How do you feel? S: A little exhausted. But greatly relieved at one major point. E: Any particular chapter, branch, part of peace theory? S: No, the whole thing. I worried that you would put something belonging to all of us, peace, into a big machine with parameters and then the machine would produce outputs about what to do. Like economists do with something belonging to us, our own livelihood. I liked your distinction between equations and formulas, between mathematics and mathematese. E: Is your worry that reality is so complex that no set of equations can ever mirror it? Like linear equations being inadequate, non-linear equations being...