Term
| "For Muslims, jihad is much more than armed struggle against an enemy from the outside, for it includes constant struggles within both oneself and one's own society. When jihad actually does take the form of armed struggle, Muslims are aware that it can only be done for the sake of a just cause." |
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Definition
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Term
| "The military, then, is the distilled embodiment of patriarchy; the militarization of society is the unchecked manifestation of patriarchy as the overt and explicit mode of governance... Substantive progress toward either peace or justice cannot be achieved without the elimination of sexism. |
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Definition
| Betty Reardon, "Sexism and the War System" |
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Term
| "War makes the world understandable, a black-and-white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good; for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning." |
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Definition
| Chris Hedges, "War is a Force that Gives it Meaning" |
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Term
| "The motives for the adoption of nonviolent action may be religious or ethical, or they may be based on considerations of expediency... Nonviolent actions is an alternative means of struggle; in this, it has more in common with military struggle than with conciliation and arbitration." |
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Definition
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Term
| "We should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right... Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine... Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison." |
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Definition
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Term
| "The over one million foreign Christian visitors and pilgrims who come to the Holy Land every year mostly come and go without internalizing the gospel at all, without being involved in the passion of Christ, without responding to the needs of the sick, the hungry, and the captives even right here." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Nonviolence is threatening to the powers that be because nonviolence undermines their pretense to moral authority. Nonviolence reconceptualizes power and it gives the ordinary person power to effect change. Nonviolence exposes and then challenges the structures of domination and not just the overt symptoms. It then, in turn, requires the oppressor to examine how they, too, are victims of the very violence that they impart. For in the end, the violence of occupation is killing- morally, physically, and spiritually- both peoples." |
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Definition
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Term
| "The moral imagination requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Nonwithstanding a coating of education and of Christianity, the habits of the stone age are yet so strong in man that he still commits actions long since condemned by his reasonable conscience... Christ taught us to disbelieve in any excuse for violence, and (contrary to what had been taught by them of old times) never to use violence." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Nonviolence is a power which can be wielded equally by all -children, young men and women, or grown up people... When nonviolence is accepted as the law of life it must pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated acts." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Warfare of this sort is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury, or burial of the dead, and so on... We can take comfort from the fact that a poor invention will usually give place to a better invention." |
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Definition
| Margaret Mead, "Warfare is only an Invention" |
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Term
| "The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored... I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension'. I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth." |
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Definition
| Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" |
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Term
| "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects of directly affects all indirectly." |
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Definition
| Martin Luther King, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" |
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Term
| "The new wars involve a blurring of the distinctions between war (usually defined as violence between states or organizes political groups for political motives), organized crime (violence undertaken by privately organized groups for private purposes, usually financial gain), and large-scale violations of human rights (violence undertaken by states of politically organized groups against individuals)." |
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Definition
| Mary Kaldor, "New and Old Wars" |
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Term
| "The conflicts between states which have usually led to war have normally arisen, not from any irrational and emotive drives, but from almost a superabundance of analytic rationality... Wars begin with conscious and reasoned decisions based on the calculation, made by both parties, that they can achieve more by going to war than by remaining at peace." |
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Definition
| Michael Howard, "The Causes of War" |
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Term
| "Nationalism is a fiction: it requires the willing suspension of disbelief. To believe in nationalist fictions is to forget certain realities... Nationalism denies that multiple belonging is possible. It insists on the primacy of national belonging over all other allegiances... What is wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be the master in your own house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be in the house." |
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Definition
| Michael Ignatieff, "The Narcissism of Minor Difference" |
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Term
| "States can be invaded and wars justly begun to assist secessionist movements (once they have demonstrated their representative character), to balance the prior interventions of other powers, and to rescue peoples threatened with massacre... The actual requirements of just interventions are constraining indeed." |
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Definition
| Michael Walzer, "Interventions" |
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Term
| "Large-scale forces crystallize into the sharp, hard surfaces of individual suffering. Such suffering is structured by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire... to constrain agency. For many... life choices are structured by racism, sexism, political violence, and grinding poverty... To explain suffering, one must embed individual biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy." |
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Definition
| Paul Farmer, "On Suffering and Structural Violence" |
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Term
| "Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves." |
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Definition
| Paulo Freire, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" |
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Term
| "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future." |
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Definition
| Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations" |
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Term
| "What I will call 'religious illiteracy' - the low level or virtual absence of second-order moral reflection and basic theological knowledge among religious actors - is a structural condition that increases the likelihood of collective violence in crisis situations. This occurs when religious actors are victimized, or made to feel victimized, by secular, ethnic, or religious 'outsiders' and see vengeance on the alleged victimizer." |
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Definition
| Scott Appleby, "Religion's Violent Accomplices" |
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Term
| "The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain organs, it directs its action outward against external objects... There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies." |
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Definition
| Sigmund Freud, "Why War?" |
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Term
| "A murderer who did not want to be a murderer but who had been made into a murderer by a murderous ideology... Few of them were born murderers... In their youth, they had received religious instruction; and one had a previous criminal record. Yet they became murderers, expert murderers by conviction." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger... But when you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self." |
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Definition
| The Bhagavad Gita (Buddhism) |
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Term
| "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say unto you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also... You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." |
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Definition
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Term
| "Do not be idolatrous about or bound any doctrine, theory, or ideology... Human life is more precious than any ideology, any doctrine... Peace can only be achieved when we are not attached to a view, when we are free from fanaticism... Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others' viewpoints... Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views." |
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Definition
| Thich Naht Hanh (Buddhism) |
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Term
| "It begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous... No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot... The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless." |
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Definition
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Term
| "The moral theory of the 'just war' or 'limited war' doctrine begins with the presumption which binds all Christians: we should do no harm to our neighbors; how we treat our enemy is the key test of whether we love our neighbor; and the possibility of taking even one human life is a prospect we should consider in fear and trembling." |
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Definition
| US Catholic Bishops, "The Challenge of Peace" |
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Term
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Definition
| Internal Pluralism means that there is variety even within religions. The texts/scriptures, leadership, practice, and culture among religions in terms of what individual members believe. There is "ambivalence of the sacred" meaning that there is relative ambivalence and indecision on what direction individual believers may take. There is even pluralism within texts in that they sometimes contradict each other. The KKK and the Hutaree both believed that they were following the words of Jesus. |
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Term
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Definition
| Religion that draws from the larger Christian tradition and promotes tolerant cultures. Christianity is not the only religion that is attractive for bringing peace, but it is a religion that has been seen more frequently than others in 20th century peace movements. |
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Term
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Definition
| He was a Muslim pacifist and nonviolent leader in India during the resistance movement of British control. He created the "servants of God" which is an organization that worked nonviolently to free India from British rule. He worked with Gandhi and preached nonviolence, and thought that the weapons of war were patience and righteousness. |
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Term
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Definition
| An idea created by Henry David Thoreau. It influenced Gandhi and was very important in the idea of nonviolence. It promotes the active, nonviolent refusal to obey certain laws that are unjust. It is based on the idea that the state treats individuals as objects and that there is tension between the state and the individual. He felt that the "government is best which governs least". He thought government should have the lowest amount of control over the people and that through civil disobedience people could avoid enabling the evils of government. He thought that when we follow unjust laws we become unjust. Civil disobedience emphasizes the importance of the individual over the state. |
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Term
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Definition
| Philosophy of nonviolent resistance developed by Gandhi. It was used in the nonviolent Indian independence movement, the Civil Rights Movement by MLK and also was used in South Africa. It is rooted in the words satya which means truth and involves using truth to guide actions to the nonviolent effort. It is more than passive resistance in that there is a firmness and Gandhi says that satyagraha is a "message of the strong". Satyagraha wants to convert, not coerce. |
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Term
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Definition
| A theory of Gene Sharp wherein civilian defenders would not violently resist occupation of their country, but would rather they would willingly expose themselves to hardship, suffering, and even death. Primary goal is to deny the enemy assistance and cooperation which are necessary to exercise control over a population. Nonviolent protest, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention are all part of civilian based defense. The least amount of violence from civilians may justify intense repression, so all civilians must be dedicated to nonviolence. |
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Term
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Definition
| Theory by John Paul Lederach in which all aspects of a conflict are explored. It treats conflicts as opportunities for positive change to come about, for violence to be reduced, and for real-life problems to be addressed. It doesn't view conflict negatively, simply something that is a natural aspect of human nature. He says conflict "ebbs and flows". Conflict transformation focuses on the past and future of a conflict. It understands that conflict can't be solved overnight, it is more realistic, and takes steps to figure it out. The theory is centered on relationships, and brings about a moral imagination in which we imagine ourselves in a relationship even with our enemies. It is thinking in the long term. |
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Term
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Definition
| "Mercy and truth have met each other; justice and peace have kissed." At reconciliation, all of these four things come together. Reconciliation, when it comes after nonviolence, can serve to tranform the enemy and creating lasting peace. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and South Africa are examples of places where reconciliation has worked. |
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Term
| Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) |
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Definition
| Passed unanimously by the UN is 1948 following human rights violations in WWII. It contains 30 articles that outline rights of all humans. It has become customary international law. A denial in human rights is equitable to a denial in peace, because a world where human rights are ignored would not be peaceful |
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