Understanding Peace Cultures is exceptionally practical as well as theoretically grounded. As Elise Boulding tells us, culture consists of the shared values, ideas, practices, and artifacts of a group united by a common history. Rebecca Oxford explains that peace cultures are cultures, large or small, which foster any of the dimensions of peace – inner, interpersonal, intergroup, international, intercultural, or ecological – and thus help transform the world. As in her earlier book, The Language of Peace: Communicating to Create Harmony, Oxford contends here that peace is a serious and desirable option. Excellent educators help build peace cultures. In this book, Shelley Wong and Rachel Grant reveal how highly diverse public school classrooms serve as peace cultures, using activities and themes founded on womanist and critical race theories. Yingji Wang portrays a peace culture in a university classroom. Rui Ma’s model reaches out interculturally to Abraham’s children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim youth, who share an ancient heritage. Children’s literature (Rebecca Oxford et al.) and students’ own writing (Tina Wei) spread cultures of peace. Deep traditions, such as African performance art, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Islam, give rise to peace cultures, as shown here by John Grayzel, Sister Jewel (a colleague of Thich Nhat Hanh), Yingji Wang et al., and Dian Marissa et al. Peace cultures also emerge in completely unexpected venues, such as gangsta rap, unveiled by Charles Blake et al., and a prison where inmates learn Lois Liggett’s “spiritual semantics.” Finally, the book includes perspectives from Jerusalem (by Lawrence Berlin) and North Korea and South Korea (by Carol Griffiths) to help us envision – and hope for – new, transformative peace cultures where now there is strife.

A volume in Peace Education Series Editors Jing Lin, University of Maryland, Edward Brantmeier, James Madison University, and Ian Harris, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Understanding Peace Cultures is exceptionally practical as well as theoretically grounded. As Elise Boulding tells us, culture consists of the shared values, ideas, practices, and artifacts of a group united by a common history. Rebecca Oxford explains thatpeace cultures are cultures, large or small, which foster any of the dimensions of peace - inner, interpersonal, intergroup, international, intercultural, or ecological - and thus help transform the world. As in her earlier book, The Language of Peace: Communicating to Create Har-mony, Oxford contends herethat peace is a serious and desirable option. Excellent educators help build peace cultures. In this book, Shelley Wong and Rachel Grant reveal how highly diverse public school classrooms serve as peace cultures, using activities and themes founded on womanistand critical race theories. Yingji Wang portrays a peace culture in a university classroom. Rui Ma's model reaches out interculturally to Abraham's children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim youth, who share an ancient heritage. Children's literature (Rebecca Oxford et al.) and students' own writing (Tina Wei) spread cultures of peace. Deep traditions, such as African performance art, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Islam, give rise to peace cultures, as shown here by John Grayzel, Sister Jewel (a colleague of Thich Nhat Hanh), Yingji Wang et al., and Dian Marissa et al. Peace cultures also emerge in completely unex-pected venues, such as gangsta rap, unveiled by Charles Blake etal., and a prison where inmates learn Lois Liggett's "spiritual semantics." Finally, the book includes perspectives from Jerusalem (by Lawrence Berlin) and North Korea and South Korea (by Carol Griffiths) to help us envision - and hope for - new, transformative peace cultures where now there is strife.

The Language of Peace: Communicating to Create Harmony offers practical insights for educators, students, researchers, peace activists, and all others interested in communication for peace. This book is a perfect text for courses in peace education, communications, media, culture, and other fields. Individuals concerned about violence, war, and peace will find this volume both crucial and informative. This book sheds light on peaceful versus destructive ways we use words, body language, and the language of visual images. Noted author and educator Rebecca L. Oxford guides us to use all these forms of language more positively and effectively, thereby generating greater possibilities for peace. Peace has many dimensions: inner, interpersonal, intergroup, international, intercultural, and ecological. The language of peace helps us resolve conflicts, avoid violence, and reduce bullying, misogyny, war, terrorism, genocide, circus journalism, political deception, cultural misunderstanding, and social and ecological injustice. Peace language, along with positive intention, enables us to find harmony inside ourselves and with people around us, attain greater peace in the wider world, and halt environmental destruction. This insightful book reveals why and how.

Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction fills the need for an original, contemporary examination of peace that is challenging, informative, and empowering. This well-researched, fully documented, and highly accessible textbook moves beyond fixation on war to highlight the human capacity for nonviolent cooperation in everyday life and in conflict situations. After deconstructing numerous ideas about war and explaining its heavy costs to humans, animals, and the environment, discussion turns to evidence for the existence of peaceful societies. Further topics include the role of nonviolence in history, the nature of violence and aggression, and the theory and practice of nonviolence. The book offers two new moral arguments against war, and concludes by defining peace carefully from different angles and then describing conditions for creating a culture of peace. Understanding Peace brings a fresh philosophical perspective to discussions of peace, and also addresses down-to-earth issues about effecting constructive change in a complex world. The particular strength of Understanding Peace lies in its commitment to reflecting on and integrating material from many fields of knowledge. This approach will appeal to a diverse audience of students and scholars in peace studies, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as to general-interest readers.

Sociologist Elise Boulding offers a collection of essays that emphasize her study of civil society during the second half of the 20th century. She revisits her theme of connection among family, community and government, offering perspectives and advice on how to fuel the process of peace.

Since the early 1980s John Paul Lederach has traveled worldwide as a mediation trainer and conflict resolution consultant. Currently the director of the International Conciliation Committee, he has worked with governments, justice departments, youth programs, and other groups in Latin America, the Philippines, Cambodia, as well as Asia and Africa. Lederach blends a special training method in mediation with a tradition derived from his work in development. Throughout the book, he uses anecdote and pertinent experiences to demonstrate his resolution techniques. With an emphasis on the exchange involved in negotiation, Lederach conveys the key to successful conflict resolution: understanding how to guide disputants, transform their conflicts, and launch a process that empowers them.

This is the first volume in the trilogy 'Many Peaces' on transrational peace and elicitive conflict transformation. It proposes an innovative analysis of peace interpretations in global history and contemporary cultures of peace, the so-called five families of energetic, moral, modern, post-modern, and transrational.