Page 14 - Geopolítica del Mundo Actual. Una Visión Multidisciplinar

GEOPOLÍTICA DEL MUNDO ACTUAL. UNA VISIÓN MULTIDISCIPLINAR:
Cultura de Paz, Conflictos, Educación y Derechos Humanos
capability to inflict harm; negative peace studies: how to reduce-eliminate negative relations; positive peace studies: how to build ever more positive relations.
The first, very frequently found, may be useful, but only when coupled with the other two, violence-reduction and-or harmony-building. Like pathology coupled with therapy.
One approach to negative peace studies is through conflict and peace studies, seeing violence-war as the smoke signals from the underlying fire of a conflict. And that leads to a major approach to negative peace: remove the conflict, by solving it, or, more modestly, by transforming it so that the parties can handle it in a nonviolent way, with empathy for each other, and with creativity.
The root of a conflict is a contradiction, incompatibility or clash of goals, which then easily translates into a clash of parties and violent behavior. At any stage in this process negative attitudes may enter - and attitudes, behavior and contradictions then feed into each other in vicious cycles. In the wake of those processes are traumatized parties and actors with festering wounds on body, mind and spirit, yearning for revenge.
That leads us to the two key tasks in search of, as a minimum, negative peace: mediation to resolve the incompatibility, and conciliation, healing the traumas, removing them from the relation between the parties, and closure. If some closure is brought about without conflict resolution better not talk about conciliation but pacification. A non- starter; violence is likely to erupt later.
A useful conciliation metaphor is turning the page in the book of relations, opening a blank page. But if the page remains blank, only bland indifference has been obtained. Arguably better than hatred and harm, but much below our potentials as human beings.
Using mediation and conciliation to inscribe
that page with positive peace projects gives us the other side of the peace coin: harmony. In a marriage as the harmony of body, mind and spirit. Among states as a community. A commonly used term is cooperation, a better term is joint project, based on compatible goals, beyond positive cognitions and emotions. A project is something spiritual, imbuing the parties with meaningful lives together. The sky is the limit.
Exactly what do we mean by cooperation, by a joint project?
In two words: structural peace. And that means, for a start, equity: that all parties benefit from the relation, and those net benefits, if not exactly equal, are at least not too unequal, exploitative. And it means mutuality, as opposed to the mental conditioning of one by the other. And holism, the use of many faculties in all of them, as opposed to segmentation. It implies integration in the sense of all relating to all, as opposed to fragmentation. And certainly inclusion of them all, as opposed to exclusion, marginalization, a division in first and second classes. A hard bill to meet? Not at all. This is what friendship, close kinship and neighborship, a good family and a good married couple, good relations of worship and workship are about.
Bring in the components of structural violence indicated above and we are in deep trouble. At the level of a multi-national state this is what a
community of nations is about. At the macro- level this points to a community, even a union, of countries. And at the mega-level to the mobilization of both genders, three generations,
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