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.

Jonathan Safran Foer meets Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason in a poignant, provocative memoir of survival, compassion, and awakening to the reality of our food system. Jenny Brown was just ten years old when she lost a leg to bone cancer. Throughout the ordeal, her constant companion was a cat named Boogie. Years later, she would make the connection between her feline friend and the farm animals she ate, acknowledging that most of America’s domesticated animals live on industrialized farms, and are viewed as mere production units. Raised in a conservative Southern Baptist family in Kentucky, Brown had been taught to avoid asking questions. But she found her calling and the courage to speak out. She left a flourishing career as a film and television producer after going undercover and exposing horrific animal abuse in Texas stockyards. Bringing to life this exhilarating transformation, The Lucky Ones introduces readers to Brown’s crowning achievement, the renowned Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary she established with her husband in 2004. With a cast of unforgettable survivors, including a fugitive slaughterhouse cow named Kayli; Albie, the three-legged goat; and Quincy, an Easter duckling found abandoned in New York City, The Lucky Ones reveals shocking statistics about the prevalence of animal abuse throughout America’s agribusinesses. Blending wry humor with unflinching honesty, Brown brings a compelling new voice to the healthy-living movement—and to the vulnerable, voiceless creatures among us.

This book examines the role that community-based educators in violence-affected cities play in advancing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical nonviolent vision for racial and social justice. This work argues that nonviolence education can help communities build capacity to disrupt and transform cycles of violence by recognizing that people impacted by violence are effective educators and vital knowledge producers who develop unique insights into racial oppression and other forms of systemic harm. This book focuses on informal education that takes place beyond school walls, a type of education that too often remains invisible and undervalued in both civil society and scholarly research. It draws on thousands of hours of work with the Connecticut Center for Nonviolence (CTCN), a grassroots organization that presents an ideal case study of the implementation of King’s core principles of nonviolence in 21st-century urban communities. Stories of educators’ life-changing educational encounters, their successes and failures, and their understanding of the six principles of Kingian nonviolence animate the text. Each chapter delves into one of the six principles by introducing the reader to the lives of these educators, providing a rich analysis of how educators teach each principle, and sharing academic resources for thinking more deeply about each principle. Against the backdrop of today’s educational system, in which reductive and caricatured treatments of King are often presented within the formal classroom, CTCN’s work outside of the classroom takes a fundamentally different approach, connecting King’s thinking around nonviolence principles to working for racial justice in cities deeply impacted by violence. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, race studies, politics and education studies, as well as to practitioners in the field.

A writer for the Washington Post for twenty-five years, Colman McCarthy is well respected as a pacifist, teacher, journalist, and advocate of nonviolence. In his twice-weekly columns which are nationally syndicated, he has extolled nonviolence as both a philosophy and a practical way of life. As a high-school, college, and law school teacher, he has taught the principles and history of nonviolence to more than three thousand students in the past decade. What McCarthy has written over the years is, as he puts it, all of one peace. His consistency of vision derives from the indwelling of nonviolence. He blames no one for the culture of violence in which we live, but for a quarter-century he has spoken out honestly and passionately against that culture. All of One Peace is a major part of the body of work that has come to stand for integrity, reason, and candor in a time marked by lies, violence, and absurdity.

Marshall Rosenberg's remarkable process of Nonviolent CommunicationTM has gained worldwide recognition as a tool for turning even the most volatile situations into a natural interchange of compassion, generosity, and mutual enrichment. Modeled after this visionary peacemaker's nine-day international intensive retreats, The Nonviolent Communication Training Course presents the first ever self-guided curriculum for putting Rosenberg's transformative ideas into everyday practice—whether you're at the office, at the dinner table, in a parent-teacher conference—any situation where you want to honor what is alive in yourself and others. Join the pioneering creator of NVC for more than nine hours of in-depth instruction that includes: Nine immersive CDs that teach you how to use NVC to discuss difficult emotions, deepen intimate relationships, mediate impossible conflicts, and much moreWorkbook with more than 50 exercises to strengthen your ability to successfully apply NVC in the fieldSeven Nonviolent Communication training cards you can use on the spot to express yourself and listen to othersCourse objectives: Identify the four steps of the Nonviolent Communication processEmploy the four-step Nonviolent Communication process in every dialogue you engage inUtilize empathy to safely confront anger, fear, and other powerful emotionsDiscover how to overcome the blocks to compassion, and open to our natural desire to enrich the lives of those around us