Distinguishing between Positive and Negative Approaches to Peace

The distinction between positive and negative goals is important in the psychology of peace because it affects the way people respond to the threat of nuclear war. An orientation toward the negative goal of avoiding war has been a priority because of the great danger of the nuclear threat and also because negative means and goals, being primarily reactive, more concrete, and more oriented to short-term objectives than positive goals, are more conducive to action. However, there are unfortunate consequences of too exclusive a concentration on avoiding war: inadequate conceptualization of a positive, more easily maintained goal of peace, and increased anxiety resulting in poor-quality thinking about ways to achieve peace. Choosing positive means of working toward peace is consonant with peace as a positive goal, and it compensates for some of the disadvantages of an exclusive focus on avoiding a nuclear confrontation.     

Peace Fair or Warfare: Educating the Community

Psychologists who wish to promote peace and justice must investigate how to mobilize the political will of the people in order to improve the policy making of the elite. This is the second study in a program of action research designed to investigate ways of encouraging people to accept personal responsiblity for influencing governmental foreign policy. It reports an attempt to create an ideal educational experience—a peace fair—that would provide the set of conditions that the first study suggested were essential for the acceptance of personal responsibility. The fair was successful in convincing individuals that they personally could do something to help prevent nuclear war. However, it revealed a serious weakness in the current peace movement—an inability to portray convincingly a course of national action that could promote peace and justice. This is an essential component for efficient action. Suggestions are made for the next round of research.     

Psychosocial Assistance for Youth: Toward Reconstruction for Peace in Angola

Following decades of war, Angolan youth are at risk of continuing cycles of violence and need support in developing positive behaviors and social roles. Accordingly, a community-based program, conducted in Angola 1998–2001, taught youth life skills, provided peer support and peace education, educated adults about youth, and engaged youth as workers on community development projects. The main results included increased adult awareness of the situation and needs of youth, improved youth-adult relations, reduced perceptions of youth as troublemakers, reduced fighting between youth, increased community planning, and increased perceptions that youth make a positive contribution to the community. The results suggest that a dual focus on youth and community development contributes to peacebuilding and the disruption of cycles of violence.     

Subjective Well-Being and Peace

Hierarchical generalized linear modeling was employed to examine the relations between person-level subjective well-being (SWB) and peace-relevant attitudes, and how these relations vary across nations in the World Values Survey. Person-level SWB was associated with more confidence in the government and armed forces, greater emphasis on postmaterialist values, stronger support for democracy, less intolerance of immigrants and racial groups, and greater willingness to fight for one's country. These associations were moderated at the nation level by liberal development, violent inequality, gross domestic product, and nation-level SWB. The moderator effects indicate that happy people are not completely blind to the conditions of their society and that their endorsement of peace attitudes is sensitive to whether the conditions for peace do exist.     

Image and Action in Peace Building

That images of the future motivate behavior in the present is a theory with both socio-historical and psychological evidence. Due to the difficulty of generating positive images of the future in the nuclear age, in contrast to the Utopian imagery of earlier ages, an experimental workshop was developed by Boulding and Ziegler to help people imagine positive futures—specifically, to image a future world without weapons. The workshop procedures are described, and three case examples are given of imaging groups with widely different background characteristics. Participants were able to create positive imagery in the workshop setting, and their imagery varied according to the background of the participating group. The paper explores the relationships among the intensity of the imaging experience, its saliency for the imager, and the action readiness of the imager; and it raises questions about the role of imaging workshops in the peace movement and the kinds of research that might make such workshops more effective.     

Peace building: a conceptual framework

An interdisciplinary legal and social work framework for peace building is presented. Inequality and its eradication are identified as linking factors transforming conflict into coexistence. Peace building is determined to entail participation in the struggle for social justice. Three conditions are identified as central to the peace building process. The first necessitates the establishment of inclusive, autonomous communities, each free to express religious, cultural and national aspirations and identity. The second requires the recognition of the legitimacy of each community to assert rights and claims without denying those of the other . This premise supports the view of the individual in relation and notes that coexistence can only be advanced through the building of mutual relationships. Finally, peace building requires recognition of human rights as a tool to promote relationships both within and between societies.     

Religion and World Change: Violence and Terrorism versus Peace

Our article portrays religion as a double-edged sword that can both encourage and discourage world change, and can facilitate both violent and peaceful activism. The article demonstrates how the meaning system approach to religion can shed light on the complicated relationship between religion and world change by illuminating the meaning of world change and the means to achieve it, inherent differences across religious groups, the complexity and malleability of religious meaning systems, and processes that can facilitate either the status quo or violent and peaceful activism. The article discusses context and personality variables that may determine whether religion supports world change and either violent or peaceful activism. It recommends intensive collaboration between researchers, policy–makers, and religious leaders in the contexts of national and international conflicts and religious terrorism.     

Rabbi Engagement with the Peace Process in the Middle East*

Objectives. Support for Israel has been a hallmark issue of the Jewish lobby in American politics. But what do Jewish religious leaders think about U.S. policy toward Israel and the peace process, and how often do they address these issues? Methods. Using a sample of more than 400 rabbis drawn from the four major movements of American Judaism in the fall of 2000, we investigate rabbi views of and speech about foreign affairs, especially about Israel. Results. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find considerable diversity in opinion among rabbis (if not public speech), particularly on issues concerning Israel and the peace process. Conclusions. We conclude that the Jewish community—really, several communities organized by movement—is hearing a diversity of opinions about the peace process. We argue that reference group theory and movement socialization help explain this diversity.     

What is Peace Psychology the Psychology of?

Peace psychology emerged as a distinct area of research and practice during the Cold War, when the preeminent concern was the prevention of nuclear war. Now global in scope, the focal concerns of peace psychologists are nuanced by geohistorical contexts and the distinction between episodic violence and structural violence, the latter of which also kills people, albeit slowly through the deprivation of basic need satisfaction. Accordingly, the focal concerns of contributors to this issue vary depending on geohistorical context: some being primarily concerned with patterns of behavior and cognition involved in the prevention of violent episodes and others with the amelioration of structural violence. A systems perspective is used as a framework for integrating episodes and structures of violence and peace. Articles emphasizing "systemic violence" demonstrate the interplay between structures and episodes of violence. Articles on "systemic peacebuilding" examine intergroup contact, the nonviolent management of conflict, and movement toward socially just structures, thereby yielding an increase in cooperative and equitable relationships across levels, from interpersonal to intergroup.     

Specifics in a Positive Approach to Peace

An approach to peace is called "positive" here if, in addition to appearing as a realistic means toward peace, it is inherently attractive and morally unobjectionable. Positive approaches include drastic reduction of nuclear weapons (bilateral if possible, but unilateral if necessary), total elimination of first-strike nuclear weapons, a wholehearted no-first-use policy in actions as well as in words, humanization of our own diabolical image of the U.S.S.R., cultivation of realistic empathy and global consciousness, drastic reduction of fear appeals by the peace movement, and cultivation of realistic hope. However, some "negative" actions are also well worth considering as paths to peace: retention of approximately 5% of our present nuclear strength, retention of "adequate" conventional strength, realistic criticism of the U.S.S.R., occasional use of fear appeals, and guarding against unrealistic hope. As a model of positive reasoning and a source of useful references, an imaginary dialogue is presented in which a peace activist answers, in a factual and two-sided way, a number of highly skeptical hawkish questions. Learning to answer such questions effectively may add to both immediate effectiveness and long-term hope within the peace movement.     

人心决断:和平的堡垒——卡尔·雅斯贝尔斯对康德《永久和平论》的解释

雅斯贝尔斯对康德的著名文本《永久和平论》进行了一种人道主义或者说生存论的解释:要实现真正的和平,政治决断、社会理念固然重要,但最重要的是"思维方式的革命",即人心的决断。与格哈德把《永久和平论》解释为政治哲学主题和哈贝马斯解释为社会哲学主题相比,雅斯贝尔斯的人道主义解释更有价值,也更易于理解。     

The Emotional Climate of Nations and Their Culture of Peace

Societies seem to have emotional climates that affect how people feel and act in public situations. Unlike the emotions experienced in an individual's personal life, these modal feelings reflect a collective response to the socio-economic-political situation of the society and influence how most people behave toward one another and their government. A government may foster a climate of fear to ensure social control, or it may encourage the formation of heterogeneous social groups to facilitate a climate of trust between people from different groups. On one hand, emotional climates may be viewed as reflecting the relative peacefulness or violence of a society. Thus, an assessment of emotional climate may provide a subjective index of human security to complement objective measures of democracy, human rights, equality, and other factors that we presume are beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, we may view emotional climates as influences that act to further or to impede the development of the culture of peace advocated by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus, their assessment may have predictive power, and measuring a society's emotional climate may help us to create desirable policy. In this article we show that it is possible to measure some important aspects of the emotional climates of three nations that have different degrees of a culture of peace: Norway, the United States, and India. We show that estimates of the collective emotions that constitute climate can be distinguished from reports of personal emotions in that the former are more influenced by nation and the latter by social class. It is the subjective experience of national emotional climate, rather than personal emotional experience, that appears most related to objective indices for the culture of peace in the different nations.     

Off the Couch and into the Streets: Psychotherapy and Political Activism

In this article, the author discusses the intersection between psychotherapy and social activism. She argues that activism is a form of empathy in action and is a natural extension of her work as a therapist. The author reviews the history of psychoanalysis and social activism, demonstrating that the roots of psychoanalysis were embedded in the work of social activism. She discusses some of the recent history of events in her state that led her to engage in activism and some issues this presents for clinical practice.     

Conflict over forest resources in Northern New Mexico: Rethinking cultural activism as a strategy for environmental justice

Through an examination of a conflict over the management of forest resources in northern New Mexico between rural Hispanics and white environmentalists, this paper sketches a critique of the use of cultural activism on the part of environmental justice activists as they seek to maintain and diversify their political support base. Using resource mobilization and frame alignment perspectives as a lens on collective action, the central point derived from this analysis is that environmental activism which presumes shared interests on the basis of cultural values runs the considerable risk of losing sight of the structural factors that strongly influence the way ethnic and racial minorities will view environmental issues.     

合法化资源与中国工人的行动主义——1957年上海“工潮”再研究

本文引入资源动员理论与政治过程理论，重新考察了1957年上海“工潮”中参与者、资源、动员网络和国家制度环境之间的互动关系。笔者认为，20世纪50年代的中国工人逐渐形成了影响其后的行动主义传统，这种传统突出表现在行动者对外部合法化资源（来自国家意识形态、权威领导人的言论、官方舆论倾向等）的依赖和获取之上，并与精英、认同和网络一起构成其行动主义动员机制中的诸多要素。     

Terrorism: A Peace Psychological Analysis

Peace psychologists emphasize the importance of recognizing both direct and structural bases of peace and conflict. In the peace psychological analysis of terrorism presented here, I attempt to further our understanding of the bases of terrorism in the context of how inequities in political, economic, and social structures may feed into or exacerbate terrorism. I analyze the effectiveness of responses to terrorism in terms of the tripartite peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding model of nonviolent response to violence.     

从和平到和谐:中国外交理念的历史性飞跃

建国以来,我国的外交理念经历了从和平到和谐的飞跃。从建国后到20世纪90年代初的"独立自主、不结盟"、"和平共处、不称霸"、"建立国际新秩序",到90年代中期以来过渡到和谐,实现了质的飞跃。和谐理念是对和平理念的继承和深化,体现了中国外交的成熟与自信,是我国应对国际各种怀疑甚至敌对思潮的回应。     

Culture of Peace: Sociostructural Dimensions, Cultural Values, and Emotional Climate

This article examines how objective measures of sociostructural dimensions of a culture of peace are related to subjective national values, attitudes, and emotional climate. National scores on objective measures of four sociostructural dimensions were correlated with national means from a number of cultural value data sets and national indexes of emotional climate. Liberal Development was congruently associated with egalitarian, individualist values, a low negative emotional climate, and less willingness to fight in a new war. By contrast, Violent Inequality was associated with lower harmony values and less valuing of intellectual autonomy. State Use of Violent Means was strongly associated with low harmony values. Nurturance was associated with horizontal individualism, tolerance, cooperative values, and positive emotional climate. The conclusion discusses how the construction of a culture of peace must be based on values as well as objective sociocultural factors.     

土司制度与边疆和平：卓尼传统政治组织及其转型机制研究

在后弘期，绝大部分前弘期吐蕃藏王的后代流落到了卫藏地区之外，他们的贵族身份往往成为边疆土司制度的卡里斯马基础。本文从谷苞先生对卓尼土司政体组织方式的研究出发，系统分析了卓尼土司从明代的巫术型王权转变为清康熙年间的司法型王权的历史过程及其社会学机制。通过与其他王权形态的比较，可以发现，仅从部落头人或酋长入手理解王权制度是不够的，王权的本质在于对社会多样性的涵盖，基于祭司的等级制度和基于司法的和平是王权取得这一地位的关键。在清康熙年间的边疆和平运动中，卓尼土司通过刊刻大藏经和扩张禅定寺教区建立了相对完整的等级制度，但这并不能彻底遏制土司治下各部的分离倾向，只有中央王朝的司法裁决才是土司维系自身的根本凭据。但是，无论是巫术型王权还是司法型王权都无法彻底控制武士集团，神圣王权始终都只是政治体系的局部而已。     

中国和合思想与21世纪的人类和平

世界和平问题是为全球化过程所引发的问题。二战后的新质全球化过程并没有从根本上改变威胁世界和平的基本因素,尤其是没有改变近代全球化以来的哲学上的笛卡儿的主体中心主义以及反映在政治舞台上的欧洲中心主义。笛卡儿的二分性主体中心主义是世界冲突的最深刻根源,要实现21世纪的世界和平,就要将二分性的哲学理念转变为中国传统的和合理念。换言之,中国的和合思想可以为21世纪的人类和平提供宝贵的思想资源。