In a pioneering cross-cultural, transnational and multifaceted endeavor, Japanese and American scholars from various disciplines jointly explore challenging questions by redefining the three key concepts of "peace, security and kyosei." The book offers new perspectives for interdisciplinary peace studies and stimulates a public dialogue on how to shape a safer and more peaceful future for individuals, communities, and nations.

Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence demonstrates how imagination, empathy, and resilience contribute to the processes of social repair after ethnic and political violence. Adding to the literature on transitional justice, peacebuilding, and the anthropology of violence and social repair, the authors show how these conceptual pathways—imagination, empathy and resilience—enhance recovery, coexistence, and sustainable peace. Coexistence (or reconciliation) is the underlying goal or condition desired after mass violence, enabling survivors to move forward with their lives. Imagination allows these survivors (victims, perpetrators, bystanders) to draw guidance and inspiration from their social and cultural imaginaries, to develop empathy, and to envision a future of peace and coexistence. Resilience emerges through periods of violence and its aftermaths through acts of survival, compassion, modes of rebuilding social worlds, and the establishment of a peaceful society. Focusing on society at the grass roots level, the authors discuss the myriad and little understood processes of social repair that allow ruptured societies and communities to move toward a peaceful and stable future. The volume also illustrates some of the ways in which imagination, empathy, and resilience may contribute to the prevention of future violence and the authors conclude with a number of practical and policy recommendations. The cases include Cambodia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Colombia, the Southern Cone, Iraq, and Bosnia.

In Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education: Re-Engaging the Heart of Peace Studies, scholar-teachers across a variety of humanities fields explore the content, methods, and pedagogies that are unique to their respective disciplines in contributing to the study of peace and justice. In recent decades, even as peace scholarship has burgeoned, many peace studies texts—including those that purport to be interdisciplinary in nature—have emphasized social science perspectives and, in some cases, have foregone exploration of the role of the humanities altogether in comprehensive peace education. While humanities scholars continue to stake out space for peace scholarship within their fields, no volume has attempted to collect the wisdom of multiple humanities disciplines in order to make the case for their critical role in authentic peace education. Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education addresses that shortcoming in the field of peace studies by exploring the ways in which the humanities are uniquely situated to contribute particular content, knowledge, skills, and values required of comprehensive peace education, scholarship, and activism. These include the development of empathy and understanding, creative vision and imagination, personal and communal transformation toward “the good” in society (such as the pursuit of justice, nonviolence, freedom, and human thriving), and field-specific analytical lenses of their own, among other contributions. Both teachers and students of peace will find value in this interdisciplinary humanities volume. Each chapter of Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education offers a deep-dive into a particular humanities field—including philosophy, literature, language and culture studies, rhetoric, religion, history, and music—to mine the field’s unique contributions to peace and justice studies. Scholars ask: “What are we missing in peace education if we fail to include this academic discipline?” Chapters include suggestions for peace pedagogies within the humanities field as well as bibliographies and suggestions for further reading.

Towards a Future European Peace Order? explores the prospects for an international peace process emerging in the aftermath of the Cold War. Inspired by the basically peaceful revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, fourteen contributors from both East and West present their views and visions for a continent undergoing rapid transformation on the eve of the twenty-first century. Their perspectives are based on analyses of the underlying political, historical, societal, psychological, strategic and economic preconditions for a European peace order.

Japanese and American scholars explore new, multidisciplinary ways of thinking about peace and how to achieve it. Noriko Kawamura is associate professor of history at Washington State University. Yoichiro Murakami and Shin Chiba teach at the International Christian University in Tokyo.

The Ten Commandments belong to the classics of Western culture. They are an authoritative part of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. Since they come to us from an ancient past, it is both necessary and worthwhile to inquire what they may mean for us today. Thorwald Lorenzen contends it is important to hear God's invitation to an alternative lifestyle: you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not covet. His thoughtful reflections on the commandments for today's tumultuous world begin with the God who speaks ten word to liberate God's people from oppression. Grounded in God's liberating yes, the ten words are neither laws nor rules. They are elements for a culture of freedom in which people are invited to celebrate life.