Category Archives: Positive Peace

Interview with Nonviolent Activist, Dolores Huerta

Check out this interview with Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez.  Here are some great quotes…

So one of the things we do in our organization is anytime we do a plan or have an event, we do an evaluation. What went well, what can be improved, you know? And to see how to make things better.

And the thing is, the people you are working with, they will give you the answers. So, you don’t have to have all of the answers when you start. As long as you have an idea of what you want to happen and start working on that idea, then the answers will come.

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New resource from Educators for Social Responsibility

Book by Book, by Carol Spiegel, is a valuable resource for librarians, teachers, guidance counselors, and parents to find books to complement the standard language arts curriculum for teaching important peacemaking and social and emotional learning concepts. Written by a veteran peace educator, Book by Book leads adults to children’s literature that will help students explore themes related to conflict and its resolution, social justice, and appreciation for diversity.

Learn more…

Nonviolent Civic Action Time Line

Goal: Increase exposure to the history of nonviolent action

Objective:  Participants will be able to

  • List nonviolent movements, campaigns and struggles throughout history
  • Identify tactics and methods that nonviolent movements have used
  • Research various moments, times, and themes in history
  • Design a time line of nonviolent movements
  • Collectively learn and research together the history of nonviolent struggles

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Remembering Elise Boulding

Elise Boulding, 89, a sociologist who was instrumental in establishing peace studies and conflict resolution as an academic discipline, died June 24 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at a nursing home in Needham, Mass.

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Elise Boulding will continue to be an inspiration to all the peace educators, researchers, and builders in the world.  Her commitment and advancement of the field has put the study of peace on the map in monumental ways and the ripples of those efforts continue to expand.

If you are not familiar with Boulding’s work, be sure to check out one of her more famous books, Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History.

Children Full of Life

“In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates.”

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Negative Peace: "Economics and Power"

Goal: The purpose of this lesson is to examine negative and positive peace through a hands on exercise. The class will work to solve a specific set of problems present in modern society. The goal for the instructor is to provide circumstances that could potentially create conflict within or between groups. These conflicts would make it necessary to set up institutions related to the concepts of negative peace. Conversely, participants may peacefully work through these obstacles and create a mock society that would be desirable for the concept positive peace.

Objectives: Students will be able to:

  • Understand economics, politics, and potential conflict from a perspective of experience.
  • Participate in an activity that illustrates economics and political cooperation/conflict. This activity will simulate regions with different natural, industrial, and human resources.
  • Examine how trade, negotiation, availability of resources, and strength determines power structures in an international system.
  • negotiate ways to provide for their region under particular set of circumstances; specifically experiencing negative and positive peace structures.
  • Understand how regulation, sanctions, and political influence can create situations of negative peace.
  • follow the rules set forth in the beginning stages of the activity, and examine potential conflicts if such barriers to trade are broken.
  • Begin to understand how a world could be created using positive peace with a strong history of a negative peace structure.
  • explain how they experienced negative peace in the simulation and explain what elements would have to be added or eliminated make a culture of positive peace work; inside and outside of the simulation.

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It Takes a School, Not Missiles

Nicholas D. Kristof, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, makes a great case for altering that way America is fighting the war on terrorism.

It Takes A School, Not Missiles

“Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11.

“Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.”

Also check out the book about Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea.

Switching a National Psyche from War to Peace – Japanese Style

Japan is one of the most prosperous and technologically advanced countries in the world. And, as the previous blog post mentions, Japan is also the only G8 country that is among the top 5 most peaceful countries in the world. With conflicts brewing right next door in North Korea and between China and Taiwan, how can Japan be so peaceful? It may have something to do with the fact that Japan’s Constitution forbids the maintaining of a standing army and denounces war as a tool for foreign policy:

Article 9 of their Constitution says:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

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