Peace

Keynote, European Peace Research Association – Tromsö, Norway, 7 Sep 2015 Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with valid knowledge; and the focus of this conference is peace in Europe. We live in a wonderful world blessed with many civilizations each with an epistemology, and in a continent with rich diversity. My task is to draw on some of this, and apply it to the peace politics of Europe. René Descartes, in Discours de la Méthode, Leiden 1637, had four basic rules; accepted, mainly unwittingly, by (North)Western science: 1. never to accept anything for true not clearly known to be such; 2. to divide difficulties examined into as many parts as possible; 3. start with the simplest and easiest, ascend to the more complex, pay attention to the asymmetric relation of antecedence and sequence; 4. make enumerations and reviews to assure that nothing was omitted. Giambattista Vico, in Scienza...

Dear Editor News release – October 6, 2015 RE: Nobel Foundation – lawsuit against misappropriation of funds – violating intended antimilitarist purpose of the Nobel peace prize The controversy over peace prizes disconnected from the specific peace vision of Alfred Nobel is now coming to a head in a lawsuit initiated the members of the Board of the Nobel Foundation did not heed protests from four Nobel laureates, Mairead Maguire, Perez Esquivel, Desmond Tutu, and the International Peace Bureau, who in a letter had warned that “The “EU is clearly not ‘the champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will.” – There can be many views on the EU as a contribution to peace, says one of the plaintiffs, Mairead Maguire, of Northern Ireland, but there can be no doubt that the Union has a military approach that is the opposite of the peace...

Bogotá, The accords were signed a week ago with still much work to do this coming half a year. 23 March 2016 is the deadline. However, are they peace accords? Or absence of violence eliminating “that other army”, for Weber’s state monopoly on ultima ratio regis, even strengthening the government’s army? That Western concept of peace practiced recently in Sri Lanka and Nepal, against LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and Maoists? Leaving untouched the problems that brought them into being unsolved? And the word “peace” violated, as “conflict”, saying “post-conflict”, as if nothing more to solve. Words matter; handle them with care. In all the Colombian conflict complexity, the focus is on only one conflict, between the violent parties:

. On the last day of last month right wing demonstrators, mostly from neo-fascist movements, hurled themselves against the police in Kiev’s Maidan square, the same place where in February 2014 a more heterogeneous group of demonstrators effectively ousted President Viktor Yanokovych. A grenade was thrown and three people died and 120 were hospitalized, mostly policemen. In an address to the nation President Poroshenko blamed the clashes on nationalistic forces, calling their actions “a stab in the back”. Finally the Western powers raised a voice of condemnation, although over the last year they have made little criticism of the rightist militias and parties. That is perhaps because it would interfere with their narrative – that the demonstrators that overthrew Yanukovych were of a liberal, democratic hue. The overwhelming majority were. But the ignored fact is that the people who led the crowd and fired the bullets when the demonstrations turned...

 Tokyo-Yokohama-Okinawa Abe’s policy of “collective self-defense”, an alliance with the most belligerent country in the world, USA, with 248 military interventions abroad since 1805–78 after the Second World War– is a policy of national insecurity. It involves Japan in US armed conflicts all over, eg., against the Islamic State with revenge against Japan, and in arms races easily leading to war. And the TPP-CSD makes Japan a periphery of a US economy with deep problems, also reducing welfare. All this is masked by focusing on the past, and on apologies. Positive Peace, from 1958, means cooperation with equity, harmony with empathy, institutions-fusion-transmission by inspiring others; nothing military, no arms. The Japanese government uses such words for the opposite of what they stand for: A Peace Umbrella, not neo-AMPO (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan). Negative Peace, aka security, stands for the absence of violence...

Lund, Sweden, September 5, 2015 Updated September 5 and our apologies if you’ve received this before. We want to catch all and miss no one over all these years. Dear friend! We are happy to invite you to the TFF 30th Anniversary Benefit Event ! September 11-12, 2015 Live Lectures by videostream Exciting lectures on world affairs and peace over two days – See program below. This is not an invitation to visit the foundation in person. It is an online, live video streamed event that you will be able to follow from anywhere in the world Here is the link and it’ll also be shown via Facebook, Twitter and on our website. And all the lectures will be available later as videos on our own video channels. Open House at the foundation Saturday September 12 at 14:00-17:00 It’s at Vegagatan 25 in Lund, Sweden – deadline for your registration...

By Gunnar Westberg The Canberra Commission had as members former leading politicians or military officers, among others a British Field Marshal, an American General and an American Secretary of Defence and a French Prime minister. The commission unanimously agreed in their report in 1996: The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never be used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again. So that’s it: Nuclear weapons will be used if they are allowed to remain with us. And even a “small” nuclear war, using one per cent or less of the world’s nuclear weapons, might cause a world wide famine leading to the death of a billion humans or more. Lt Colonel Bruce Blair was for several years in the 1970s commander of crews with the...

. We think that it’s 30th Anniversary is a fitting occasion to reflect on what has happened in the big world and in our lives with the foundation. It is also a piece of Lund’s research history in general and of peace research and education in particular. Part 2 Weak aspects of TFF • Being outside many networks and institutions – it has become more and more difficult to influence the world if you are small, independent and don’t accept governmental and corporate funds. • A perception that the interest/commitment of TFF is out of sync with the sentiments of times, of the Zeitgeist. In spite of that we maintain the fundamental belief that peace is essential and that we can forget about the rest if major wars or nuclear exchanges take place. • Too ‘academic’/theoretical to forge deeper, permanent links with public opinion and movements. • Too ‘radical’ or...

. We think that it’s 30th Anniversary is a fitting occasion to reflect on what has happened in the big world and in our lives with the foundation. It is also a piece of Lund’s research history in general and of peace research and education in particular. Motivation The 1980s was a decade of gross changes in Europe, the struggle against nuclear weapons in particular. Lund University was predominantly about education and single research projects – while TFF could be more of an experimental playground. We wanted to do truly free research and not negotiate with higher levels at, say, the university what to do where, in which countries to work and what to say to the media. Peace has always been controversial and there were – and remain – enough examples of places that become ‘mainstream’ and routine – rather than experimental and radically ’alternative.’ What we did not...

Seoul There was a big conference in 1972 in Kyoto, well over 40 years ago; that was my first effort, with thousands, millions of others. On the agendas for these countless encounters the U-word, “unification”, loomed high. In Kyoto, I made a distinction between unifying the Korean nation by opening the border for projects beyond unifying families, and unifying the two states. Which one are we talking about? The second is problematic if it means one state–and one president!–less. Could wait; from a human point of view unifying the nation has priority. Building on that a Korean Community with two states could emerge; building on that a Korean Federation with capital neither in Seoul nor in Pyongyang; building on that, maybe one day a unitary state. I rejected any idea of one collapsing and the other taking over – “the German model”. Unification is symmetric, neutral, a nuclear-free UN-monitored Korean...

The following post is more personal than is my natural mode of communicating on this website. I hope it causes no offense. It is confessional to the extent of acknowledging my own surroundings of digital devices that while liberating in some respects are repressive in others. To sustain our freedom under these ‘postmodern’ conditions requires the rechristening of meditative intelligence (as distinct from the instrumental rationality that acted as wet nurse of the ‘modern.’ Ever since I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen I have been haunted by the suggestive resonance of its opening line: “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.” Of course, Rankine allows this quietness to evoke her anguishing memories of past subtle racist slights that are the hurtful daily experiences of embedded racism that has for centuries undermined the...

is an historic date but it is not an historic example”. The French Revolution, violent to its fingertips, began with the highest motives, led by the most inspired and determined of people, but descended step by step into its own self-created inferno where the revolution consumed its own children. Violence begets violence and, as Martin Luther King said, “The means and the ends must cohere. We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represents the ideal in the making, and the end in process. And, ultimately, you can’t reach your good ends through evil means, because the means represents the seed and the end the tree.” According Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, writing in the August, 2014, edition of Foreign Affairs, “Between 1900 and 2006 campaigns of nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes were twice as...