Unit 1 Peace and Conflict Studies Nature and Scope

UNIT 1 PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES:
NATURE AND SCOPE
Structure
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Peace Traditions

1.3 Peace and Violence
1.4 Fonns of Violence
1.4.1

Direct and Structural Violence

I .4.2

Negative and Positive Peace

1.5 Conflict Analysis and Conflict Management
1.5.1 Structural Conditions
1.5.2

Traditional Management Strategies

1.5.3 Dispu!e Settlement and Conflict Resoluiion

1.5.4

Conflict Transformdtion and Peace Building

1.0 Some Approaches to the Study of Peace
1.6.1

Feminist Approach

1.6.2 The Political Economy Approach
1.6.3

The Environmental Approach

1.7 S-ummaty
1 .8 Exercises

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1 . I INTRODUCTION
Peace is generally conceived of as equivalent to the absence of manifest violence. In the
Explanatory Phonographic Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (1850), peace is defined as a list of synonyms which include "respite from war", "quite from suits and disorders", "rest from any commotion", "freedom from terror", "silence", "suppressions of thoughts" etc. Most of these are definitions by exclusion and peace here has been defined by the absence of "non-peace". Juergen Dedring spines that the traditional assumption regards peace as the counterpart to the state of war and hence peace is defined as
"absence of war". According to Linus Pauling, the editor-in-chief of UToridblicycBspaedia of Peace (1986), "As history progress, peaks of joys and troughs of pain are experienced by the human bkings populating the system, peace studies are usually concerned more with the avoidance of the latter, than with obtaining the former''. Peace is thus largely identified as a lack of conflict of any serious kind. More often the term "peace-making" is associated with conflict resolution without the use of viole~ce.
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1.2 PEACE TRADITIONS
The concepts of peace have been rich in content across various religious and philosophical traditions. From the early period of human thinking, there has been a clear understanding that war is neither a natural