Violence-prevention

By Chaiwat Satha-Anand, TFF Associate At the 16th International Peace Research Association (IPRA) conference held in Brisbane, Australia in 1996 under the guidance of Ralph Summy with the theme” Creating Nonviolent Future”, Glenn D.Paige began his keynote address titled: “To Leap Beyond Yet Nearer Bring: from war to peace to nonviolence to nonkilling” by recounting another IPRA meeting held in Yokohama, in 1980. At that meeting, a question was raised as to whether it would be possible for IPRA to take up the subject of “nonviolence”. A distinguished European researcher responded in the negative saying that nonviolence “would discredit peace research”. Six years later in 1986 at the IPRA conference held in Sussex, Theodore Herman convened what I believe to be the first IPRA nonviolence commission. Later in 1988 at the IPRA meeting held in Rio de Janeiro, Herman asked Paige to help convene the next nonviolence commission. Paige became...

When President Barack Obama leaves office will the world be better or worse than eight years ago? Taking the big picture, so often obscured by the wars and uprisings that dominate the front page, more often than not he has resisted the foreign-policy establishment, most importantly in Syria, which makes a fetish of “credibility”. Obama has argued that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you are willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force”. In a long interview last April with Jeffrey Goldberg in Atlantic Magazine Obama made the point, “Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow that comes out of the foreign policy establishment. The playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarised responses. In the midst of an...

This New Year announces itself with bangs all over, not whimpers. Pope Francis made a tour d’horizon on all continents, strongly denouncing the violence in favor of his alternative: negotiation. Much violence is copycat or copyrat; violence being a la mode. Copying–aka learning–is not wrong. But it depends on what is copied. Here my 10-11 wishes: Wish no. 1: copying peace rather than violence, for instance from ASEAN and the Nordic Community, making peace self-reinforcing. Wish no. 2: reporting violence less prominently, more toward the end of newspapers-TV-radio news, and reporting peace upfront. Wish no. 3: understanding war better, not only how many killed but how many bereaved; understanding peace better as model for others. Wish no. 4: introducing Yin/Yang in Western thought: no totally good or bad humans or states around; they are all improvable mixtures. Wish no. 5: linking the good in ourselves to the good in others...

“][/caption] In spring 2011 I was invited by then Danish foreign minister, Villy Søvndal, to be a keynote speaker at a conference in Copenhagen arranged by the ministry and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) with experts, then UN mediator Kofi Annan’s adviser, scholars, diplomats and, most importantly, a number of Syrian (opposition) politicians and civil society representatives. The minister left the conference when he had opened it and, like most politicians today, obviously did not give priority to listen to the input of this high-level group present in the conference room. I made these major points, trying to be as educative as I possibly could: 1) Look at conflicts as if they are problems to be solved – adhere to the peace research concept of the ABC conflict triangle and study A for Attitudes, B for Behaviour and C for the Contradiction/conflict that stands between people. (Cf. Johan...

TFF Conflict and Peace Report Syria # 2 I’ve only passed through Damascus once before, in 2002 on my way to Baghdad. What meets you today is a beautiful city with checkpoints all over the place, your car trunk will be opened and papers checked. Seemingly useless explosives detectors are used – useless because they don’t catch that many drivers here today have a revolver or hand-grenade under their seat. But you’d probably be surprised, like I was, at how normal it otherwise feels. At the surface. Traffic is intense, pollution thick, shops are filled with goods, I see fewer beggars here than in Lund, Sweden. People enjoy excellent food (I haven’t had such good meals for long) at restaurants with live music and entertain themselves at the omnipresent cafés. As everywhere else in war zones, people whose lives have been shattered in many ways – and there are few...


 
 I’m writing to you from war-torn Syria where the suffering of the people is beyond comprehension, heart-breaking. 
 The war in and on Syria has been started in spring 2011 – the underlying conflicts much much earlier. 
 What our media have shown us is snipers, bombings, killings, ruins, dead bodies and press conferences with Western politicians. 
 But did you “see” the underlying conflicts? 
 Get an understanding of what the problems standing between the parties are? 

Did you get the impression that weapons is the only thing “they” understand? 
 Did you feel hopeless about it all? Confused? Depressed because of all the human suffering? 
 That peace is impossible? 
 If so it’s because we are missing a huge part of the picture. We need something else. 
 We need to switch from – repetitive and depressive – war and violence reporting to conflict and...

The National Society of High School Scholars, Claes Nobel World Betterment Award The Carter Center I am very grateful for the 2016 Claes Nobel World Betterment Award – Claes being the great grandnephew of Alfred – and to the NSHSS-National Society for High School Scholars, here at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Let me start by praising you for your dedication to Education, focusing on the high school–in the middle, after K and grade school, before college and graduate school–on teachers and students, learning and doing research, treating them with respect, bestowing dignity. Society has institutions, like Family, Work and Economy. Sports get too much attention, Education too little. Politics is about leading and being led, Military is about killing not to be killed. These two get you into trouble. I have heard this afternoon much about leading, leaders, led. Führer and Duce are German and Italian for leader, “duce”...

“View” meaning not only a glimpse from above, but a position taken on the world on which the US electorate is now dumping Donald Trump. That world is today basically multi-polar, maybe with 8 poles: 1) Anglo-America, 2) Latin America-Caribbean, 3) African Unity, 4) Islam-OIC from Casablanca to Mindanao, 5) European Union, 6) Russia more region than state, 7) SAARC from Nepal to Sri Lanka, 8. ASEAN, Australia-New Zealand. [See list of abbreviations with links to the mentioned organisations under the article] And thre is the multi-regional Shanghai Cooperation Organization, SCO, with China and Russia, Islamic countries, India and Pakistan. There is a waning state reality, smaller states being increasingly absorbed into regions. There is a waxing region reality with the above eight; adding West Asian, Central Asian and Northeast Asian regions, maybe eleven. There is a global reality based on IGOs, inter-governmental organizations, with the United Nations on top;...