Visions of Peace: Asia and the West explores the diversity of past conceptualizations as well as the remarkable continuity in the hope for peace across global intellectual traditions. Current literature, prompted by September 11, predominantly focuses on the laws and ethics of just wars or modern ideals of peace. Asian and Western ideals of peace before the modern era have largely escaped scholarly attention. This book examines Western and Asian visions of peace that existed prior to c.1800 by bringing together experts from a variety of intellectual traditions. The historical survey ranges from ancient Greek thought, early Christianity and medieval scholasticism to Hinduism, classical Confucianism and Tokuguwa Japanese learning, before illuminating unfamiliar aspects of peace visions in the European Enlightenment. Each chapter offers a particular case study and attempts to rehabilitate a 'forgotten' conception of peace and reclaim its contemporary relevance. Collectively they provide the conceptual resources to inspire more creative thinking towards a new vision of peace in the present. Students and specialists in international relations, peace studies, history, political theory, philosophy, and religious studies will find this book a valuable resource on diverse conceptions of peace.

This book explores the meaning of peace according to (some of) the people who make it. Based on some 200 interviews, it empirically studies the visions of peace that professional peaceworkers from the Netherlands, Lebanon and Mindanao (Philippines) are working on. As such, it seeks to add a strong empirical element to the debate on liberal peacebuilding. The main argument of the book is that amongst practitioners, there is no liberal peace consensus at all. Rather, peace professionals work on a distinct set of peaces, that differ along four dimensions. In five case study chapters, the operational visions of peace held by Dutch military officers, diplomats and civil society peace workers, as well as civil society peace workers from Lebanon and the Philippines are explored and compared to each other. Differences are observed along both geographical and professional lines, but also within each group.

Lynda Van Devanter--author of the backlist classic Home Before Morning, which inspired the TV show "China Beach"--edited this powerful collection of poems reminiscent of Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. All author proceeds from the book will go to the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project. 6 photographs.

Celebrates the power of nonviolence in a tribute to seventy-five of the world's peacemakers, including such spiritual leaders, activists, writers, and scientists as Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, Jane Goodall, Coretta Scott King, and Mother Teresa.

A study of how artists and photographers shaped imperial visions of war and peace in the Victorian period In an era that saw the birth of photography (c. 1839) and the rise of the illustrated press (c. 1842), the British experience of their empire became increasingly defined by the processes and products of image-making. Examining moments of military and diplomatic crisis, this book considers how artists and photographers operating "in the field" helped to define British visions of war and peace. The Victorians increasingly turned to visual spectacle to help them compose imperial sovereignty. The British Empire was thus rendered into a spectacle of "peace," from world's fairs to staged diplomatic rituals. Yet this occurred against a backdrop of incessant colonial war--campaigns which, far from being ignored, were in fact unprecedentedly visible within the cultural forms of Victorian society. Visual media thus shaped the contours of imperial statecraft and established many of the aesthetic and ethical frames within which the colonial violence was confronted.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, recurring political violence at both state and non-state levels has eroded confidence in the progressively peaceful character of international relations, and has unsettled the parameters of political thought. Frames of peace and frames of war have, throughout Western thought, colored the questions that we ask about politics, the descriptions of the pragmatic and moral alternatives that we face, and the ideas and metaphors that we use at any given moment. These frames, as this book argues, also obscure too much of political life. Gerald M. Mara proposes, instead, a political philosophy that takes both war and peace seriously, and a style of theory committed to questioning rather than closure. He challenges two powerful currents in contemporary political philosophy: the verdict that "premodern" or "metaphysical" texts cannot speak to modern and postmodern societies and the insistence that all forms of political theory be some form of democratic theory. Mara reexamines seminal texts in the history of political theory, from Thucydides to Jacques Derrida, and from Machiavelli to Judith Butler, to examine how frames of reference of war and peace have structured both the writing of these texts, as well as interpretations of them. The result is not a linear history of ideas, but a series of conversations between them, and a democratic justification for moving beyond democratic theory.