Peace research

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...

The world famous Swedish-based flagship institute stopped doing peace research long ago. To be honest, it ought to change its name. Below is a proposal. Jan Oberg April 23, 2024 When NATO turned 75, the director of SIPRI – formally, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute – Dan Smith wrote this diplomatic wishy-washy essay about the alliance with program director Barbara Kunz who has a past in the US at the German Marshall Fund and in the German Federal Foreign Office’s policy planning unit as an external expert. The authors discuss the ‘security dilemma,’ deterrence, perceptions, and defence but do not address why NATO can be seen as co-responsible for the present, extremely serious security situation in Europe. Or, if you will, how it is a fiasco in terms of its self-perception as a defensive peace-making alliance. They do not address NATO’s homepage’s incredibly low intellectual level, which is filled with...

Dedication To all the brave people who refuse to participate in war, in Ukraine, Russia and everywhere else. “War is a crime against humanity. I am therefore determined not to support any kind of war, and to strive for the removal of all causes of war”The pacifist declaration of War Resisters’ International. Back cover text “How can you be a pacifist in times like these?” THE SCEPTIC asks, the Russian invasion of Ukraine fresh in mind. Majken Jul Sørensen’s first response is to counter with the opposite question: “How can you not be a pacifist in times like these? With all that we know about the consequences of modern warfare, why are all the alternatives to war not on the table?”  In “Pacifism Today”, Majken illustrates with numerous examples her understanding of pacifism and her commitment to nonviolent action and unarmed resistance to war. In this personal reflection on why...

A video conversation about those three connected themes was published in December 2023 on various Chinese Channels and on two YouTube channels, Wave Media and Thinkers Forum, where you may also see the viewers’ comments. In the first two months, they were seen by around 100,000 people and stimulated 1200 positive, even moving, comments. These days, such an interest in peace – and in Western historical wrongdoings – is unusual and can be found almost exclusively outside the Western world. It was recorded and produced in November 2023 by The China Academy, a media syndicating organisation in Shanghai. Please also consult the TFF report Yugoslavia – What Should Have Been Done? It contains all texts – the equivalent of 2000+ A4 pages – by Johan Galtung, Håkan Wiberg and Jan Oberg and published as written back then and not changed or editor ex-post, so everyone can see where they were...

Johan Galtung – over 50 years my dear friend, collaborator and one of my two peace research mentors – died this morning. He was 93. He was, beyond any doubt, one of the greatest and most innovative social scientists of our time and one of the early pioneers of the academic field of peace and conflict research. He was a controversial intellectual to some extent – the envy, of course, by others – but kept true to his Gandhian-inspired nonviolent values where many succumbed to ‘security’ with weapons. He was also a TFF Associate since 1986 and we remained in contact – last, just a few days ago. You’ll find hundreds of articles by his hand on TFF’s present and earlier archive sites. I smile when I think of the countless hours we spent together exploring the world and coming up with new ideas. I owe him more than words...

Jan Oberg February 6, 2024 Regrettably, the world’s allegedly most prestigious prize has been awarded to many who did not qualify according to the will of Alfred Nobel. I want to direct your attention to the most important book written about the peace deception called the Nobel Peace Prize. In his last meticulously researched book, “The Real Nobel Peace Prize. A Squandered Opportunity to Abolish War,” my friend and TFF Associate Fredrik Heffermehl (1938-2023) showed that only 36 out of 134 awards would qualify according to Nobel’s clearly anti-militarist intentions. Here is how Nobel himself formulated, in his will, that this prize should go “to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses” and that this prize for the “champions of peace” should be awarded “by a committee of...

Be a Peace Warrior – The Online Participatory Peace Project in English and German Dr Norbert Stute & Rachael Mellor September 4, 2023 Better World Info is a unique platform for peace, offering important resources and reliable information on the most pressing peace issues.We invite peace activists who enjoy research and content creation to contact us and contribute to this ever-growing, high-quality Peace Directory making a difference. While military budgets are skyrocketing, peacebuilding remains a grossly underfunded sideline. Global military spending increased for the eighth consecutive year in 2022, reaching a staggering $2.2 trillion. More 28 wars and armed conflicts are currently active, deadly, and unrelenting. “The world is over-armed, and peace is under-funded,” said Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General. Advancing peace efforts effectively is a collaborative journey. Our common goals for peace require the active participation and shared support of activists, organisations, journalists, scientists, politicians, and philanthropists. The power...

David SwansonWorld Beyond War & TFF Associate June 12, 2023 For any given war, one can examine the months or years or decades during which one or both sides worked diligently to make it happen, and both sides conspicuously failed to develop peaceful alternatives. Even in the moment of greatest violence, one can consider the unarmed-resistance alternatives that are carefully kept out of consideration. But even if you can explain away all justification for every side of every particular war — yes, even that one, there remains the false claim that war is somehow simply part of “humanity.” If ants were to stop waging wars, nobody would bat an eye, but such a feat is deemed simply beyond the intelligence of homo sapiens. There is a problem for this nonsense. It is the problem of peaceful human societies. We know that many, if not most, hunter-gatherer groups of humans engaged...

Jan Oberg May 29, 2023 We’re delighted to announce that Kristin Christman has accepted TFF’s invitation to join us as TFF Associate. Read about Kristin in my article from March this year. Head over to her excellent YouTube Channel – and subscribe! – and then visit Countercurrents, which publishes all Christman’s articles as well as the texts she reads in her videos. Here is the latest – an 8-part critical/devastating analysis of the US National Defence Strategy 2022. We love Kristin’s passionate, unique and super-knowledgeable work for a better world and look forward to much synergy and cooperation with her in the years to come. We’re both struggling to prepare for the renaissance of peace that we believe will come when the US empire has declined further and we live in a more just, balanced and multipolar world – a humanity and peace-ruled international order…

Peter Cronau – Declassified Australia January 11, 2023 An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war, Peter Cronau reports. The sample size dwarfs other studies of covert propaganda about the war on social media.  Originally published at Consortium News on November 6, 2022 A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to tff@transnational.live or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...

All wars are different from other wars and, thus, it is impossible to use the experiences of one war to predict the course, end, and consequences of the next. Yet, some wars and peace conferences are more important than others because they fundamentally change history. The war in Ukraine is a proxy war between Russia and NATO/USA, in which the USA openly says that the aim is to exhaust Russia. This raises several questions: If that is the purpose of the USA/NATO, then what will be the reaction of an existentially threatened and nuclear-armed Russia? One may further ask whether, in the light of nuclear war, there is something untouched ‘outside’ that will not be affected by the consequences of a nuclear war: a first destruction, after which the survivors will face global nuclear winter, with famine and mass death. If there is no ‘outside’ in a nuclear war, it...