Page 13 - Geopolítica del Mundo Actual. Una Visión Multidisciplinar

GEOPOLÍTICA DEL MUNDO ACTUAL. UNA VISIÓN MULTIDISCIPLINAR:
Cultura de Paz, Conflictos, Educación y Derechos Humanos
nice to a diseases and see how far it takes you.
Time is overdue to push peace education at all levels. What stands in the way is a mainstream “peace” narrative:
* Problem: There are dangerous and unruly classes and countries.
* If let loose life becomes brutish, nasty and short for all.
* Remedy: Economic-military-political-cultural rule from above.
* If vertical enough we get pax: rule from above by law and force. We challenges that and argues an alternative narrative.
* Problem: There is an endless agenda of conflicts to be solved.
* There is an endless agenda of projects to be built.
* Remedy: Solve conflicts equitably and we get negative peace.
* Build equitable projects and we get positive peace.
This does not belittle the significance of the party’s intent and capability to build peaceful relations, nor the circumstances.
But a marriage is not only the sum of capabilities of the partners. We can have lovely people related in a less-than-lovely marriage. And vice versa. Like for countries.
What kind of relations can we have? Three types, it seems:
* Negative, disharmonious: good-bad for Self is bad-good for Other.
* Indifferent: a non-relation, there is no cor- relation.
* Positive, harmonious: good-bad for Self is good- bad for Other. In the real world relations may of course be mixes of all three.
When a negative relation is brought about with intent, the party is an actor, we talk about direct violence, or harm, and about war if the actor is collective. If the violence to a party is not intended (but watch out for acts of omission that are intended!) it may be referred to as indirect, often caused by inequitable structures producing harm - structural violence. And then there is role of culture legitimizing either or both types of violence: cultural violence.
From this follows two concepts of peace:
* negative peace: the absence of violence, like a cease-fire, like keeping them apart, not deteriorating, but indifferent relations
* positive peace: the presence of harmony, intended or not, a generally positive relation.
They are as different as negative health--the; absence of illness and positive health, a state of mental, physical and social wellness, of ever higher self- realization, with the capacity to handle much illness.
From this, then, follow three ways of exploring peace: violence-war-arms studies: of intent-
The mainstream narrative is not a culture of peace but non-peace, based on the concept of security and threats to security. They are real, not necessarily paranoid; but the approach argued here is that the road to security passes through peace, not the other way round. For that we need a mini-theory of peace.
The basic point is that peace, like conflict and violence, is a relation, between two or more parties inside or between persons, groups, states or nations, regions or civilizations. Peace is not a characteristic of any party, but of the relation between them.
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