Interpretaciones imperfectas y transracionales de paz (s).
| Autor | Wolfgang, Dietrich |
Imperfect and Transrational Interpretations of Peace(s)
Summary: 1. Author's Perspective, 2. Meeting the Spanish School(s) of Peace Studies, 3. The Four European Cultural Areas of Peace Studies, 4. Transrational Peaces, 5. Conclusion, 6. References
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Author's Perspective
Back in the 1970s when I was a student of history, literature and law, I did not plan to become a peace researcher. I was interested in general questions of human rights and international development. From there I got involved in human rights activism without losing the ties with academic life and I started venturing into practical work in this field in various countries.
What I saw and learned in the field in these years of apprenticeship provoked many doubts regarding the then predominating belief of the mainstream of human, social and cultural science.
My doubts and the encounters with the great brains of the 1980's like Ivan Illich, Gustavo Esteva, Wolfgang Sachs, Vandana Shiva and more (Sachs, 1992) led into what I call today my "postmodern period". That is, I intensely read authors like Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, Virilio, but most of all Lyotard and Vattimo. Based on their philosophies I tried to de-construct the myth of development.
Due to my fieldwork in some war zones I gained the reputation of an academic who knows the smell of gunpowder and blood better than the fug of the ivory tower. Since then, I have been invited to contribute to a so called "State of Peace Conference" in Switzerland, which was my first step into the world of Peace Studies, a world that had been completely unknown to me until then. The organizers were looking for somebody who could speak and write about the then hot conflicts in Central America. Since they could not find a declared and German speaking peace researcher they invited me to fill the gap. Though my lack of experience did not yet make me a peace researcher, I was lucky because I had the opportunity to meet Johan Galtung for the first time and a quite illustrious hand full of internationally well-known peace researchers like Dieter Senghaas and Ekkerhart Krippendorff.
After that I surprisingly happened to be invited to become the academic director of the European Peace University in Stadtschlaining. In these years I perceived peace studies academically as a very idealist undertaking, highly influenced by the German peace movement of the 1980s and in a way caught up in its own tight beliefs. I aspired to open and free the quite redundant discussion around missile warheads with the help of postmodern philosophy, especially Lyotard (1988) and Vattimo (1990), and the concerns that I brought from my practical work. Therefore, I finally accepted the job that seemed to enable a really interesting academic endeavor. However, I had to learn rapidly and painfully that epistemological liberation, as I understood it, was not welcome by the kingpins of German and especially Austrian peace research of those years. But struggling with their resistance drew my attention to discourses of other environments in Latin America, Asia and Africa. This is how a breathtaking inquiry into the peace philosophies of many schools, countries, languages, religions and cultures began.
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Meeting the Spanish School(s) of Peace Studies
I was precisely elaborating the later best known essay of my "postmodern period": A Call for Many Peaces (Dietrich, 2006), when I met the first Spanish peace researcher. It was Vicent Martinez Guzman who was at that time sacrificing his life energy to create what is today worldwide known as the Master Program in Peace and Development at UJI in Castellon. (1) Founding this project as such consumed a lot of energy and attention, but, nostalgically, I remember the moments when Vicent and I enthusiastically exchanged views on peace philosophy. Sometimes it was an ecstasy of mutual intellectual fecundation that culminated some time later in the well-known Filosofia para hacer las paces in Martinez-Guzman's (2001) case and the Many Peaces approach in my case. Those were the pioneer days of a new period of peace studies--even if neither of us was aware of that nor was it a consciously planned revolution of the discipline.
I also remember Vicent repeating constantly that his desire to meet Francisco Munoz in Granada, because his brilliant friend was working on something very similar. Finally, in the second half of the 1990s, when I was teaching in Castellon, Vicent and Mario Lopez arranged a trip to Granada for me. I gave a speech at this University -and there was Francisco Munoz reacting like Andalusian fireworks to the shy proposal that I brought in my luggage. I called it Energetic Peaces (Dietrich, 2012). My idea was simply that the notion of peace is derived from the broader understanding of the world by a society and its individuals. From my experience in Latin America, Africa and Asia I tried to discriminate among the varying definitions of peace constructed by different societies. Some understand existence as the expression of an omnipotent divine energy, while others see the mundane world as a creation of an external, almighty, personalized demiurge and understand peace as His commandment. I illustrated this difference with examples of Mediterranean Great Mother Goddesses such as Astarte, Inanna, Kybele, Ishtar or tantric couples such as Shiva and Shakti, Isis and Osiris, Pax and Mars or Freyr and Freya (Dietrich, 2012).
I did not know yet that my guest speech had struck a chord with Francisco Munoz's main research interest and that he had already worked on that extensively with Beatriz Molina. However, I was overwhelmed by his reaction to my speech and this was the beginning of an intense academic and personal friendship out of a common epistemological interest. A lot followed thereafter. Years later, I invited Beatriz and Paco to contribute exactly with this topic to the Palgrave International Handbook of Peace Studies (Munoz & Molina, 2011).
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The Four European Cultural Areas of Peace Studies
My close friendship with Vicent Martinez, Francisco Munoz and many more colleagues in Spain made me understand that their academic discourse about peace was quite different to what I knew from Austria and Germany. If UNESCO (2) states that peace is created in the minds of human beings as a function of linguistic and cultural pretexts it follows logically that not only peace has to be understood as a plural word--the Many Peaces--but also Peace Studies as an academic discipline itself must be a plural. A closer look unveils that in Europe we can define many different cultures of peace and at least four major regional cultures of peace studies:
1) The Scandinavian, which is spontaneously connected with the name Johan Galtung as the often so called father of peace studies. Nevertheless, that is misleading. While the...
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