Peace

Why it is essential to travel and see for yourself and then build networks and promote dialogues in the world’s likely most serious conflict. PART II PART I I recommend you read Part I before reading this second part. A dynamic melting pot You may ask where Xinjiang’s immense cultural diversity comes from. While I have not studied its history, I have learned that it has always been one big meeting place, dating back to the first Silk Roads, where people travelled, traded, explored, and migrated. Crisscrossing also borders with eight neighbours so that over time, it became a melting pot. There is a lot of diversity; each national group or ethnicity seems to have preserved vital elements of its own culture, language, aesthetics, way of living, dancing, etc. and also become part of the unity called Xinjiang and China. A woman I met told me that each nationality’s way of dancing could be...

Swanson is the founding director of World Beyond War and a TFF Associate. Fredrik Heffermehl (1938-2023) established the prize, which Lay Down Your Arms awards. This is the public announcement about the November 10, 2024, ceremony in Oslo. You are hereby cordially invited! LAY DOWN YOUR ARMSThe Real Nobel Peace Prize for 2024IS AWARDED THE FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF “WORLD BEYOND WAR”David Swanson WHO WILL RECEIVE THE PRIZE IN A PUBLIC CEREMONY ATLITTERATURHUSET IN OSLO, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2024.Participating Jannik Bonnevie (poetry), Xiangtian Liu (grand piano), Marie Flognfeldt Jones (song), Jakob Rekdal Jones (guitar). After lunch, David Swanson will introduce a roundtable on “How can we stop today’s militarization?” with among others Glenn Diesen, Ingeborg Breines, Jan Oberg, Thore Vestby, Mariell Leraand, Ola Friholt, Tomas Magnusson and Ola TunanderFree entry The Real Nobel Peace Prize is established by Fredrik Heffermehl (see below). Art work “Gaza” by Mai-Bente Bonnevie More about David...

Claus KoldPhD, co-founder of TurningPoints and TFF Associate October 15, 2024 Even if you are not familiar with the philosophical logic of Aristotle, you probably would agree with him that ‘up’ cannot mean ‘down’, that ‘left’ cannot mean ‘right’, and that ‘white’ cannot mean ‘black’. This means also that ‘war’ cannot mean ‘peace’. In 2000, I carried out a field study of the Danish Armed Forces in Kosovo, Mitrovica, being part of the UN KFOR operation based on the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1244. So, this was a Peace Operation. I started my field observations already during the battalions’ preparation, and so I was also present during their final exercise before deployment. The major who started the exercise started it with these words: “So, now the war has started!” This was the end of 2000, and so, it was after the NATO bombing campaign had ended. There was no fighting...

Congratulations are in order for Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The Nobel Peace Prize has for the first time in at least six years gone to a group of people who work to reduce warmaking, people who in fact seek to abolish nuclear weapons. Nihon Hidankyo has relentlessly done the work of educating the world, thanklessly, for many years. This prize should be celebrated far and wide. Congratulations are also in order to the Nobel Committee for somehow maintaining the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize despite how the committee has mistreated it time and time again and for — this time — getting it right. May this mark a new principled commitment! This article was first published on WorldBeyondWar.org And congratulations may also be deserved by the Nobel Peace Prize Watch, which has worked for many years to influence the Nobel Committee to...

Sustainable peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of development, justice and harmony The three authors were published today by China Watch & China Daily’s English edition. It will also be published in Chinese and thereby reach a very large audience. The article also represents the first cooperative effort between Guangdong Institute for International Strategies and TFF. Li Xing who is a Yunshan leading scholar and a distinguished professor at Guangdong Institute for International Strategies, and professor of international relations at Aalborg University, Denmark. Jan Oberg is a former professor and co-founder and director of the independent Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Sweden. Li Qing is professor and executive president at the Guangdong Institute for International Strategies. The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. Now head over to China Daily > >

Contemporary reports of the birth of the United Nations in June 1945 in San Francisco warmly welcomed the news of its establishment and congratulated the United States for conceiving and delivering the new international organisation. President Truman’s remarks at the closing ceremony – “what a great day this can be in history” – were widely shared. There were enormous expectations that, in contrast to the discredited League of Nations, there was now a strong institution that would keep the peace and promote international cooperation. The momentum of San Francisco was maintained in the later months of 1945 in London where with the new Labour government and decisive leadership from the Foreign Office, the necessary practical measures were taken very quickly to put in place the principal organs, especially the Security Council, the General Assembly and the secretariat. A major deficiency of the Charter – the absence of provisions on human...

On August 6, Hiroshima Day, 2024, I published a long, very well-documented article by Irene Galtung, the daughter of peace research professor Johan Galtung, about the tragic circumstances surrounding his last months alive and the human rights violations they both had to endure. What is left of that publication now is only my foreword below. As the editor and publisher of The Transnational, I have decided under threat to delete it, and I owe our readers to explain how I came to that decision. The reason is that her mother and Johan’s wife, Fumiko Nishimura Galtung, her two half-brothers, Andreas Galtung and Harald Eide Galtung and her brother Fredrik Galtung, had turned to lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas at the Glitterlind Law Firm in Oslo, asking him to demand that it be deleted in its entirety. The reason behind that demand and warning was that they considered that text constituted violations of their constitutional right to privacy and amounted to defamation. Thus, according to the...

Jan Oberg July 16, 2024 On July 11, 2024, after the NATO Washington Summit, Global Times in Beijing was so kind as to publish my comparative thoughts on the famous Five Principles on Peaceful Coexistence – just celebrated in Beijing – and five principles I have extracted from NATO’s concepts and policies. Quite a contrast! Here is how it begins: “The West showed virtually no interest in the recent celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in Beijing. These Five Principles, created by then China’s premier Zhou Enlai and Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, are enshrined in the Chinese Constitution and aim to promote peaceful, nonviolent relations among nations. However, this is not the case with NATO, which marks its 75th anniversary on July 9-11. If officially it too had five principles, they would be: 1. offensive deterrence; 2. forward “defence”; 3. nuclear weapons and the...

Easter Island Rapa Nui “Best wishes for the Season,” we easily write and read these days. So let us reflect on religare, reconnect between that out there and that in here, in us, for globalizing truths. A few years ago, these unpublished lines for the Season were written in the Pacific, under a cloudless sky, with waves peaking, with white foam at the top. Rapa Nui, Easter Island was on the horizon, one of these places where the creation of humans looks about as old as God himself and human beings have not yet been able to pollute (deplete, yes!) everything.  Gratitude is seeping in, attaching itself to good emotions in body, mind and spirit. Happiness is the word, some kind of release. Sukha is the word in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition. Further out is nirvana, the dissolution at the end of the pilgrim’s journey. First published on Transcend Media Service,...

TFF Associate, Professor Chaiwat Satha-Anand has died at 69: Professor of nonviolence who opened path to peace in Thailand Noblest and kindest among – and for – humanity. TFF Associate since 1991 and a dear friend of Christina and me since before that, a great scholar of nonviolence, a mediator and a Muslim in the 94% Buddhist Thailand. We worked together for decades in IPRA, the International Peace Research Association, as teachers in Italy at IUPIP and throughout the decades at TFF, where we have published many of Chaiwat’s deeply insightful peace research analyses. His death is a great loss to true peace research, but his legacy will remain with all of us in this academic field. Years ago, Chaiwat invited me to a conference in Bangkok, but not only that. He told me that he thought I worked too hard and needed to relax a bit, so, consequently, he...

Photo © Jan Oberg 2024 July 5, 2024 Please find below a link to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s remarkable speech on the highly significant event for future world peace. TFF’s Jan Oberg was invited to attend the conference (and took the above photo from a long distance in the Great Hall of the People). When reading it, you’ll immediately notice that it is a comprehensive overview of why and how the world, in all its diversity, can shape a cooperative future for humankind that is also much more peaceful than the present. It illustrates that China’s foreign policy is based on long-term thinking and on unalterable principles. You’ll notice that there are no attacks on anyone; that President Xi talks about a global “us” and not a “we and them”; that there is a consistent philosophy about equality and win-win cooperation and that such cooperation – getting to know each...

July 4, 2024 “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership, and decision-making that have characterized this Administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity. Taken together, these paint a picture of an overlapping and systemic set of problems in this Administration’s policy approach, and a series of warnings that have gone unheeded…” Read the entire – extraordinarily important – statement here. It is a significant example of civil disobedience and personal ethics. It all began with Josh Paul when he resigned from the State Department last year. See also the video below. This is the way to go. May thousands upon thousands feel inspired and resign, too – and not only in the U.S. but in all Western countries that facilitate and support the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric policies in the Middle East.