Goal: Increase exposure to the history of nonviolent action
Objective: Participants will be able to
This past week, Rev. James Lawson – the prolific civil rights leaders and nonviolent action trainer – gave the opening keynote address at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict. In this address he talks about his experience working with youth in Nashville and training them in the techniques and strategies of nonviolent action; in this case, lunch-counter sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, marching, and making public statements.
Rev. James Lawson – FSI 2010 Keynote Address from ICNC on Vimeo.
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.
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.
“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.”
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:
Goal: To learn how to identify and manage conflicts in a productive manner.
Objectives: Students will be able to:
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.
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.
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…
Peace Learner 