Peace Studies

Bread Not Bombs by Douglas Roche Housing, health, and education services are desperately needed for the world's poorest people but instead, governments spend billions on war. The international community must be mobilized to provide human security and Senator Roche asserts that this is where Canada can play a crucial role.

Building Peace by Craig Zelizer (Editor); Robert A. Rubinstein (Editor) Presents 13 stories of innovative peacebuilding practices from around the world. This volume provides tools for policymakers, academics and practitioners who seek to make significant and valuable contributions towards achieving peace.

Disarming conflict by Ernie Regehr Wars fought over the past quarter century have been a spectacular failure. The overwhelming majority end in military stalemate and are settled at the negotiating table, with the grievances that led to the war still unresolved. In Disarming Conflict famed peace activist Ernie Regehr shows that force cannot simply override or transcend the social, political, and economic realities of conflict. - Amazon.ca

A Force More Powerful by Jack Duvall; Peter Ackerman; Duvall Jack In this volume, Peter Ackerman, an authority on non-violent strategy, and Jack DuVall, a veteran writer, show how popular movements used non-violent action to overthrow dictators, obstruct military invaders and secure human rights in country after country, over the past century. A cavalcade of far-flung locations and history-changing crises, the book depicts how non-violent sanctions such as protests, strikes and boycotts separate brutal regimes from their means of control. It tells inside stories - how Danes out-manoeuvered the Nazis, Solidarity defeated Polish communism, and mass action removed a Chilean dictator. It also shows how non-violent power is changing the world today, from Burma to Serbia. Covering characters such as Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi, Lech Walesa and the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, the book is a companion to a feature-length documentary showing at film festivals worldwide.

Human and environmental justice in Guatemala by Henighan, Stephen, 1960- (editor.). Johnson, Candace, 1971- (editor.). In 1996, the Guatemalan civil war ended with the signing of the Peace Accords, facilitated by the UN and promoted as a beacon of hope for a country with a history of conflict. Twenty years later, the new era of political protest in Guatemala is highly complex and contradictory: the persistence of colonialism, fraught indigenous-settler relations, political exclusion, corruption, criminal impunity, gendered violence, judicial procedures conducted under threat, entrenched inequality, as well as economic fragility. This examines the complexities of the quest for justice in Guatemala, and the realities of both new forms of resistance and long-standing obstacles to the rule of law in the human and environmental realms. Written by prominent scholars and activists, this book explores high-profile trials, the activities of foreign mining companies, attempts to prosecute war crimes, and cultural responses to injustice in literature, feminist performance art and the media. The challenges to human and environmental capacities for justice are constrained, or facilitated, by factors that shape culture, politics, society, and the economy.

Peace and justice studies : critical pedagogy by Margaret Groarke, (editor.). Emily Welty, (editor.). This book explores the interdisciplinary arena of peace studies and shows how the field has evolved and continues to grow and change. Dedicated to bringing students face to face with the grave injustices and violence in the contemporary world, it equips them with the tools to work for transformational change. Informed by an intersectional perspective, scholar-activist authors probe contested terrain, including teaching social justice from a place of privilege, decolonializing pedagogies, and community organizing. Games and simulations, storytelling, experiential integrated learning, and other pedagogical approaches are employed to encourage critical thinking, empathy, optimism, and activism. - Amazon.ca

Peace and Power by Peggy L. Chinn Based on her experiences in classrooms, committees, and workshops, author and nurse educator Peggy Chinn illustrates how every participant in a group can be valued as a leader in Peace and Power: New Directions for Building Community, Eighth Edition. This text is the essential hands-on guide for developing cooperative group processes and overcoming the habits of exclusionary group interactions. A perfect resource for faculty, community groups, committees, and others seeking to promote greater integrity and cooperation in their groups and organizations!

Peace Ecology by Randall Amster "Peace Ecology" presents a cutting-edge exploration of an emerging paradigm that links the essence of peace and nonviolence with the tenets of ecology and the principles of environmentalism. Looking at issues including food justice, water sharing, climate change, peace zones, and the free economy, this book considers examples and illustrations from around the world where people, communities, and nations are employing the teachings of ecology as a tool for mitigating conflict and promoting peace. "Peace Ecology" presents an integrative perspective that bears directly upon the most pressing issues of our time, constituting both the ecological realm of peace and the peacemaking potential of ecology. The volume examines the rich history, contemporary relevance, and transformative future potential inherent in this dynamic nexus of theory and action. Its overarching aim is no less than moving the current scarcity-conflict paradigm to one of cooperative resource management and, ultimately, toward peaceful coexistence both among ourselves and within the balance of nature.To read the Common Dreams excerpt of "Peace Ecology" Click Here.Talk Nation Radio Interview with Randall Amster and David Swanson here."

Peace Movements Worldwide by Marc Pilisuk (Editor); Michael N. Nagler (Editor) This three-volume anthology is a comprehensive overview of how the human yearning for peace has played out, and is playing out, on this planet. * Is the first work on the subject of peace movements to offer this level of depth and breadth and to capture the pulse of this multifacted effort to create a world of peace with justice * Features more than 70 insightful articles, many of them original to this anthology, by a team of cross-disciplinary scholars from the fields of psychology, sociology, history, political science, women's studies, psychiatry, and more * Combines personal reminiscences and theoretical studies

Elusive Justice by Donny Meertens Fifty years of violence perpetrated by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and official armed forces in Colombia displaced more than six million people. In 2011, as part of a larger transitional justice process, the Colombian government approved a law that would restore land rights for those who lost their homes during the conflicts. However, this restitution process lacked appropriate provisions for rural women beyond granting them a formal property title. Drawing on decades of research, Elusive Justice demonstrates how these women continue to face numerous adverse circumstances, including geographical isolation, encroaching capitalist enterprises, and a dearth of social and institutional support. Donny Meertens contends that women's advocacy organizations must have a prominent role in overseeing these transitional policies in order to create a more just society. By bringing together the underresearched topic of property repayment and the pursuit of gender justice in peacebuilding, these findings have broad significance elsewhere in the world.

The Power of Dialogue Between Israelis and Palestinians by Nava Sonnenschein; Tamar Saguy (Introduction by); Deb Reich (Translator, Editor) In The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, scholar and activist Nava Sonnenschein shares a collection of twenty-five powerful interviews she conducted with Palestinian and Jewish Israeli alumni of peacebuilding courses, a decade after their graduation. Participants with diverse personal and professional backgrounds completed a series of conflict transformation workshops using the model developed by the School for Peace at the world's only intentional Jewish-Palestinian community, Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam ("Oasis of Peace" in Hebrew and Arabic). Critically, the interviews vividly demonstrate that peacebuilding does not end with the courses. Most of the graduates choose to work professionally in roles that contribute to peace-building. Sonnenschein shows the transformational potential of encounter between members of groups in conflict, sharing how ordinary Israelis and Palestinians coming together in an open and honest environment undergo life-changing experiences that provide concrete hope for a sustainable path to a peaceful shared existence as equals in Israel and Palestine.   

The United Nations and Higher Education: Peacebuilding, Social Justice and Global Cooperation for the 21st Century by Kevin Kester In this book, Kevin Kester details how the United Nations promotion of higher education for peace and international understanding sometimes unintentionally contributes to the reproduction of conflict and violence across diverse cultures. He shows this through an in-depth examination of peace curricula, pedagogy and policy in one United Nations higher education institution, where he indicates how dominant philosophical and pedagogical models that signify acceptable peace education ultimately undermine the very goals of educational peacebuilding. Kester contends that theoretical and pedagogical training must develop beyond the dominant psycho-social, rational and state-centric assumptions that permeate the field today if higher education is to better contribute to personal and societal peacebuilding. Drawing from the fields of educational philosophy and sociology, he argues for new concepts of poststructural violence and second order reflexivity that can assist scholars in reducing conflict and building peace in lasting ways. He complements his fieldwork findings with personal reflections throughout the book to reimagine the transformative possibilities of peacebuilding education for the 21st century.