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https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_can_we_learn_from_the_worlds_most_peaceful_societies>
"Given the grinding wars and toxic political divisions that dominate the news,
it might come as a surprise to hear that there are also a multitude of
sustainably peaceful societies thriving across the globe today. These are
communities that have managed to figure out how to live together in
peace—internally within their borders, externally with neighbors, or both—for
50, 100, even several hundred years. This simple fact directly refutes the
widely held and often self-fulfilling belief that humans are innately
territorial and hardwired for war.
The international community has struggled with a similar attention-to-peace
deficit disorder. In fact, the United Nations has been attempting for decades
to pivot from crisis management to its primary mandate to “sustain
international peace in all its dimensions.” Yet by its own account, “the key
Charter task of sustaining peace remains critically under-recognized,
under-prioritized, and under-resourced globally and within the United Nations.”
Science could play a crucial role in specifying the aspects of community life
that contribute to sustaining peace. Unfortunately, our understanding of more
pacific societies is limited by the fact that they are rarely studied. Humans
mostly study the things we fear—cancer, depression, violence, and war—and so we
have mostly studied peace in the context or aftermath of war. When peaceful
places are studied, researchers (much like the U.N.) tend to focus primarily on
negative peace, or the circumstances that keep violence at bay, to the neglect
of positive peace, or the things that promote and sustain more just,
harmonious, prosocial relations. As a result, we know much more about how to
get out of war than we do about how to build thriving, peaceful communities.
In response to this gap in our understanding of how to sustain peace, an
eclectic group of scholars started gathering together in 2014. We are
psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, astrophysicists, environmental
scientists, political scientists, data scientists, and communications experts,
who are interested in gaining a more comprehensive and accurate understanding
of lasting peace. We also share an appreciation of the benefits of using
methods from complexity science to better visualize and model the complex
dynamics of such societies, and as a platform for communicating with one
another across such different disciplines to develop a shared understanding of
stable, peaceful societies and of peace systems."
Via Ted Kahn.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
