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En su trayectoria como campo cientifico, la Peace Research o Investigacion para la Paz reconoce que definir “paz” es, de hecho, una parte fundamental de una estrategia cientifica. En ese contexto, se ha dedicado a conceptualizar paz de forma amplia, dialogica y compleja, tal como diverso y complejo es el mundo. Del mismo modo, definir violencia se convierte en una labor igualmente compleja, una vez que mas importante que llegar a una definicion o a tipologias, -pues hay, evidentemente, muchos tipos de violencia- indicar dimensiones teoricamente significativas de violencia es efectivamente lo fundamental, una vez que nos puede llevar a pensar, investigar y, potencialmente, actuar ante los problemas mas graves de la humanidad. Si la peace action debe ser considerada porque es una accion contra la violencia, el mismo concepto de violencia debe ser lo suficientemente amplio para incluir las variedades mas significativas y, ademas, tambien debe ser lo suficientemente especifico para servir de base para una accion concreta. En esa perspectiva, este articulo pretende presentar una reflexion teorico conceptual sobre paz y violencia en el contexto de la perspectiva critica de los Estudios para la Paz (Peace Studies).

All United Nations organisations are parts of a grand ameliorative endeavour in favour of the underprivileged, be they individuals, groups of individuals, countries or groups of countries. An organisation may be politically progressive precisely because it is intellectually rigid, crystallizes the energy of those who work in and for it and like a magnetized piece of iron becomes strong because the forces are aligned. A strong Executive Director may impose rules on the staff that would speed up the movement of the organisation in that direction. The most typical candidate for type A classification would be the organisations in the Bretton Woods system: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Finance Corporation, the International Development Association and the International Monetary Fund. In the World Health Organisation, however, intellectual rigidity was built in from the very beginning through the medical professions, particularly the physicians themselves - any change being the result of deliberate and difficult uphill work.

This chapter shows that politics is a phenomenon with phases that can be described in terms of five components: consciousness-formation, mobilization, confrontation, struggle proper, and transcendence. It describes use of the distinction between individual and collective levels of self-reliance, keeping in mind that nonterritorial units may also act more or less self-reliantly. Any ideology of self-reliance would also have to fill in the details on what to produce and the kind of structure most likely to yield the results. Self-reliance ideology might be similar to capitalism in its emphasis on creativity and initiative, but highly dissimilar in its emphasis on mass participation and an equitable relation with other units. In many countries, consequently, the politics of self-reliance will for some time is reduced to the politics of the armed forces, the struggle between those recruited from the national periphery and those who are drawn from the center and who have a more professional, less populist vision of development.

Show your opponent trust! Do not take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses! How does that work, you may well ask? Indeed, these are but two of 25 carefully selected guiding principles that the two Norwegian authors Johan Galtung and Arne Næss gleaned from Gandhi’s writings in 1955. They account for the successes Gandhi had in South Africa and India and inspired Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and, for example, Andreas Buro, who kept a brief synopsis of the Satyagraha Norms in his jacket pocket during all of his peace missions. Galtung, the founder of Peace and Conflict Research, wrote his first eminent work in prison as a conscientious objector in collaboration with the great philosopher Næss, who was 18 years his senior. This book had three print runs in Norway but was never translated and so has met with no response from German researchers on non-violence up to now. This first German edition focuses on the key chapters of the original work from 1955, while also offering an overview of it in its entirety. With contributions by Johan Galtung and Arne Naess, with an introduction and footnotes by Reiner Steinweg