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.

Continue reading →

Conflict Resolution: What Is It and How Can I Be a Part of It?

Goal: To learn how to identify and manage conflicts in a productive manner.

Objectives: Students will be able to:

  • Describe various sources of conflicts
  • List the variety of ways people choose to respond to conflict
  • Reflect on the ways in which they have chosen to respond to conflict
  • Use active listening and “I statements” to solve conflicts

Continue reading →

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.

Read the whole article

Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You?

http://www.alternet.org/rights/86692/

This is a bit frightening…an invisible ray that boils the skin producing a burning sensation?! The things people invent…

That being said, as awful as it feels to type this, maybe this is a “good” thing depending on how you look at it. Could this “save” lives, in that violent mobs of people may no longer need to be dispersed with bombs and bullets?

The danger is of course in the title of the article…could this machine be used to disperse nonviolent resisters?

How to use this article with your students…

Continue reading →