Peace

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Peace Education is about giving people the skills, attitudes, and knowledge:


 * to build, maintain, and restore relationships with everyone.
 * to develop positive ways to deal with conflicts - from the personal to the international.
 * to create safe environments, both physically and emotionally, that help everyone grow.
 * to create a safe world based on justice and human rights.
 * to build a sustainable environment and protect it from exploitation and war.

Peace education is based on a philosophy that teaches nonviolence, love, compassion, trust, fairness, cooperation and reverence for the human family and all life on our planet.

Skills include communication, listening, understanding different perspectives, cooperation, problem solving, critical thinking, decision making, conflict resolution, and social responsibility.

Peace education leads to peaceful living. Peace Education Theory 2009

=The Conflict Principle=

Conflict is a balancing of powers among interests, capabilities, and wills.9 It is a mutual adjusting of what people want, can get, and are willing to pursue. Conflict behavior, whether hostile actions, violence, or war, is then a means and manifestation of this process.

=The Cooperation Principle=

Cooperation depends on expectations aligned with power. Through conflict in a specific situation, a balance of powers and associated agreement are achieved. This balance is a definite equilibrium among the parties' interests, capabilities, and wills; the agreement is a simultaneous solution to the different equations of power, and thereby the achievement of a certain harmony structure of expectations. At the core of this structure is a status quo, or particular expectations over rights and obligations. Conflict thus interfaces and interlocks a specific balance of powers and an associated structure of expectations.

Cooperation depends on a harmony of expectations, a mutual ability of the parties to predict the outcome of their behavior. Such is, for example, the major value of a written contract or treaty. And this structure of expectations depends on a particular balance of powers. Thus, cooperation depends on expectations aligned with power.

=The Gap Principle=

A gap between expectations and power causes conflict. A structure of expectations, once established, has considerable social inertia, while the supporting balance of powers can change rapidly. Interests can shift, new capabilities can develop, wills can strengthen or weaken. As the underlying balance of powers changes, a gap between power and the structure of expectations can form, causing the associated agreement to lose support. The larger this gap, the greater the tension toward revising expectations in line with the change in power, and thus the more likely some random event will trigger conflict over the associated interests. Such conflict then serves to create a new congruence between expectations and power.

Conflict and cooperation therefore are interdependent. They are alternative phases in a continuous social process underlying human interaction: now conflict, then cooperation, and then again conflict. Cooperation involves a harmony of expectations congruent with a balance of powers achieved by conflict.

=The Helix Principle=

Conflict becomes less intense, cooperation14 more lasting. If interaction occurs in a closed system or is free from sudden, sharp changes in the conditions of a relationship (as, for example, if one party to a business contract goes bankrupt, or a signatory to a regional military alliance with the United States has a military coup), then through conflict and cooperation people gradually learn more about each other, their mutual adjustments come easier, their expectations more harmonious and lasting. Conflict and cooperation thus form a helix, moving upward on a curve of learning and adjustments, with the turn through cooperation being more familistic and durable; that through conflict shorter and less intense.

=The Second and Fourth Master Principles=

Through conflict is negotiated a social contract. As mentioned, conflict is a balancing of powers, a conscious or subconscious negotiation of opposing interests, capabilities, and wills. This process determines some implicit or explicit, subconscious or conscious social contract. It is social in involving a relationship or interaction between two or more wills. It is a contract in that there is an agreement, a harmonization of expectations. It is this social contract that is peace within social field theory. Peace, then is determined by a process of adjustment between what people, groups, or states want, can, and will do. Peace is based on a consequent balance of powers and involves a corresponding structure of expectations and patterns of cooperation. Moreover, peace may become unstable when an increasing gap develops between expectations and power, as here defined, and may collapse into conflict, violence, or war.



What is Peace? 2009

Teacher Planet Resources



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