By Jake Lynch • “Free elections and free markets” represent “the single sustainable model for national success”. So declared the US National Security Strategy published by the Administration of George W Bush in 2002. It’s a document better known for the novelty of its proposed variation on the traditional UN provision for the legal use […]
By Johan Galtung Farewell Seminar SCAR, George Mason University, Arlington-VA 6 Dec 2017 • Two basic institutions in Western history and individual lives: Christianity offering Salvation to those following Laws, Commandments, and Science offering Truth to those who believe in scientific laws. After Enlightenment ushered in a godless world, one is waning and the other […]
By David Kline A year ago, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi (sha-oh-me) had fallen from the world’s most valuable unicorn to a “unicorpse.” Sales plunged in 2016, pushing the company from first to fifth place among China’s smartphone makers. No firm had ever come back from a wound that severe in the trench warfare of […]
New book by Evelin Lindner • Humankind has reached a boiling point. Violence, hatred, and terror have become deeply entangled with honor, heroism, glory, loyalty, and love. Over the past five percent of modern human history on planet Earth, roughly the past ten millennia, human activity has reached a crescendo of rapid and ruthless competition […]
By John S. Uebersax • Pitirim Sorokin, a leading 20th century sociologist, is someone you should know about. Consider this quote of his: The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; […]
By Richard Falk • Prefatory Note -This post addresses the need for dialogue with the political, economic, and cultural ‘other,’ that is, those multitudes acutely alienated from and angry with secular globalism and the Enlightenment legacy often equated with ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization.’ At the core is a search for closure on the nature of reality […]
Portrait of a TFF Associate December 29, 2017 • John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of […]
By Roberto Savio Human Wrongs Watch • Rome, Dec 27, 2017 – On 20 December, Europe’s 28 Ministers of Environment met in Brussels, to discuss the plan for reducing emissions prepared by the Commission, to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change. Well, it is now clear that we have lost the battle in […]
By Johan Galtung • Two important words enriching each other. “Nonviolent” easily becomes bla-bla, and “economy” is too general. But, does “nonviolent” make a difference for the better to the economy? And vice versa, can “economy” make “nonviolent” more positive, beyond resistance to evil? Let us start with “economy”, here conceived of as a […]
By Jan Oberg Written April 1990 • Published in Bulletin of Peace Proposals 3-1990, pp 287-298 and on TFF’s homepage at the same time 1. Four hypotheses The West has lost a close enemy, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Which reactions can be discerned and what psycho-political emotions are they indicative of? How […]