Academy of Social Sciences in Australia

Occasional Paper 2001 Number 1

Thinking peace, making peace

Margaret Jolly and Barry Hindess

February 2005

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Introduction

The year 2000 not only marked the millennium in Western calendars but, as a sign of millennial optimism perhaps, was declared by the United Nations to be the International Year for a Culture of Peace, inaugurating an International Decade for Peace. UNESCO was selected as the focal UN agency for all related activities. In response to an approach from UNESCO Australia, both the Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Humanities focused their annual symposia on the question of peace. The ASSA Symposium on 5 November 2000 was organised under the rubric of 'thinking peace, making peace'. Our aim was to combine the insights of scholars and practitioners - to connect the intellectual challenges of 'thinking peace' with the moral and political challenges of 'making peace' - in a world pervaded by violence and war.

Peace: the absence of violence and/or injustice?

But what is peace? It is, as most of our speakers insisted, much more than the absence of war or violence. As Rob Walker attests many prefer to see peace as the absence of injustice, or more fully the absence of the forces which generate injustice and violence. Yet struggles to redress injustices of ethnicity, class or gender can generate violence and war while appeals to the values of peace can entrench such injustices in the name of law and order. So, the rival norms of order and justice haunt both the ideals of peace and its practical realisation - as is eloquently attested in this volume by Jacqueline Siapno for Aceh and East Timor and Ruth Saovana Spriggs for Bougainville. In struggling to reconcile the claims of nationalists for justice and freedom from Indonesian imperialism and their espousal of violent masculinist values Siapno suggests, that 'the opposite of war is not peace - it is creativity'

Walker points out that our very notions of peace, as a normative ambition, as a cultural ideal, are closely entangled, even congealed with those of state sovereignty. The emergence of the state system in Europe entailed foundational claims to sovereignty over what were contingent containments of space and time: particular territories were defined by borders and particular histories proclaimed through selective genealogies of 'nations'. Within its borders, a state arrogated a legitimate monopoly on violence while peace and altruism were proclaimed as internal ideals. Without its borders a state arrogated a right to violent defence of its selfinterests and war was presumed a natural outcome of relations between hostile states. Thus, the emergence of European models of states and citizens generated potent and persisting paradoxes between the universalist ideals of the 'human' and the relativist claims of particular nations, and between the demarcation of zones of peaceful altruism and agonistic selfinterest. But, as Walker argues genocide against enemies in war was often more visible than genocide against a state's own citizens through routine injustice and neglect.

Contributors
  • Norman Etherington, FASSA, Professor of History, the University of Western Australia.
  • Barry Hindess, FASSA, Professor of Political Science, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University
  • Ian Hunter, Professor of Humanities and ARC Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, Griffith University.
  • Margaret Jolly, FASSA, Professor and Head, Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
  • Malama Meleisea, Regional Advisor on Social and Human Sciences for Asia and the Pacific, Principal Regional Office, UNESCO, Bangkok.
  • Jacqueline Aquino Siapno, Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies, the University of Melbourne
  • Evelyn Scott, Chair, Aboriginal Reconciliation Council.
  • Ruth Saovana-Spriggs, Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
  • Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Professor of Japanese History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
  • RBJ Walker, Professor of International Relations, School of Politics, International Relations and Environment, Keele University, UK.

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