Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

This book articulates a practice and theory of education that aims to facilitate the emergence of sustainable peace and conflict-resilient communities in societies plagued by conflict. It does so by examining the agency of conflict-resilient communities and the dynamic processes of their interactions with larger societal structure. Although education is seen as a human right, the design of education policies, schooling models and curricula has primarily been the prerogative of elites, be they governments, academics or international actors. This book argues for a different approach to education, contending for more inclusivity and open deliberation in modeling education frameworks. Drawing on case studies and interviews with practitioners, scholars, activists, and policymakers, it applies the lenses of conflict resolution to a variety of education issues within fragile societies.

'The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another...' Although we have developed the technology to make communication more efficent and to bring people closer together, we have failed to use it to build a true global community. Dr M. Scott Peck believes that if we are to prevent civilization destroying itself, we must urgently rebuild on all levels, local, national and international and that is the first step to spiritual survival. In this radical and challenging book, he describes how the communities work, how group action can be developed on the principles of tolerance and love, and how we can start to transform world society into a true community.

This Handbook represents an unprecedented exploration of the positive peace platform. It permits a comprehensive appreciation of the breadth of positive peace that engages with nonviolence, environmental sustainability, social justice and positive relationships scholarship. The work serves as a one-stop shop for scholar/practitioners interested in locating their inquiry and outputs in the field of positive peace and provides readers from a multitude of disciplines and academic departments with a comprehensive overview of the multiplicity of positive peace research in one location. In doing so, the Handbook of Positive Peace securely demarcates and recognizes the positive peace platform in social scientific and humanities academic disciplines.

For Jacques Derrida, the notions and experiences of 'community, ' 'living, ' and 'together' never ceased to harbour radical, in fact infinite interrogations. In this volume, the paradoxes, impossibilities, and singular chances that haunt the necessity of 'living together' are evoked in Derrida's essay 'Avowing--The Impossible' around which the collection is gathered.

Civil Paths to Peace contains the analyses and findings of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding, established in response to the 2005 request of Commonwealth Head of Government for the Commonwealth Secretary-General to 'explore initiatives to promote mutual understanding and respect among all faiths and communities in the Commonwealth.' This report focuses particularly on the issues of terrorism, extremism, conflict and violence, which are much in ascendancy and afflict Commonwealth countries as well as the rest of the world. It argues that cultivating respect and understanding is both important in itself and consequential in reducing violence and terrorism. It further argues that cultivated violence is generated through fomenting disrespect and fostering confrontational misunderstandings. The report looks at the mechanisms through which violence is cultivated through advocacy and recruitment, and the pre-existing inequalities, deprivations and humiliations on which those advocacies draw. These diagnoses also clear the way for methods of countering disaffection and violence. In various chapters the different connections are explored and examined to yield general policy recommendations. Accepting diversity, respecting all human beings, and understanding the richness of perspectives that people have are of great relevance for all Commonwealth countries, and for its 1.8 billion people. They are also importance for the rest of the world. The civil paths to peace are presented here for use both inside the Commonwealth and beyond its boundaries. The Commonwealth has survived and flourished, despite the hostilities associated with past colonial history, through the use of a number of far-sighted guiding principles. The Commission argues that those principles have continuing relevance today for the future of the Commonwealth--and also for the world at large.

In this compelling collection of oral histories, more than seventy-five peacemakers describe how they say no to war-making in the strongest way possible--by engaging in civil disobedience and paying the consequences in jail or prison. These courageous resisters leave family and community and life on the outside in their efforts to direct U.S. policy away from its militarism. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right. In their own words, the narrators describe their motivations and their preparations for acts of resistance, the actions themselves, and their trials and subsequent jail time. We hear from those who do their time by caring for their families and managing communities while their partners are imprisoned. Spouses and children talk frankly of the strains on family ties that a life of working for peace in the world can cause. The voices range from a World War II conscientious objector to those protesting the recent war in Iraq. The book includes sections on resister families, the Berrigans and Jonah House, the Plowshares Communities, the Syracuse Peace Council, and Catholic Worker houses and communities. The introduction by Dan McKanan situates these activists in the long tradition of resistance to war and witness to peace.