Condition Of Peace Research Articles

Concept of jihad and its nature in Islam

This paper argues that the word Jihad is commonly translated into English as „the holy war‟ and for a long while now the word has been interpreted so that it has become synonymous with a mania of religion. But the word Jihad does not mean „holy war.‟ The concept of „holy war‟ does not occur in the term Jihād, which in Arabic would be al-ħarb al-muqaddasah تسدقملا برحلا. Thus the Arabic word „Jihad' has neither the connotation of ''holy'' nor that of ''war''. Islam simply put an end to the wars of aggression and permitted only defensive war under certain conditions after all effort to keep the peace has failed and enemy impose was on the Muslim State. Such defensive war is permitted in order to restore the condition of peace, but not to disturb the peace. Islam does not advocate “the law of the jungle and does not give Muslims any right to take life of others. Jihad is not terrorism; terrorism is under no circumstances permissible in Islam. But It is apparent that the understanding of Jihad as a concept is dismally blurred and employed by the extremists, and the only way to dispel the false notions of Jihad put forth by the extremists, who are massively funded by external sources, is an equally strong effort put forth by Muslim governments in re-education of their populations, in particular the youth, with a correct understanding of this term.

Interview with Tariq Ramadan

Prof. Tariq Ramadan discusses the meaning of Justice in Islam. He stresses the fact that “justice is a condition of peace because the highest principle is to enter into God's peace, with all your heart and all your being. No justice no peace.” Justice is thus strongly connected with the concepts of khilafa and jihad which should not be reduced to their political dimension. “Jihad is a twofold concept: it involves both resisting the bad and reforming it in view of the good. It is not the way towards war it is the way towards peace because we are trying to reach justice which is peace.”

The Distinction of Historiography: Dorrit Cohn and Referential Discourse

The Distinction of Historiography: Dorrit Cohn and Referential Discourse Philippe Carrard (bio) Dorrit Cohn’s work has essentially borne on narrative literature. From her examination of Hermann Broch’s trilogy The Sleepwalkers, to Transparent Minds, to The Distinction of Fiction, and to her translation of Jean-Marie Schaeffer Pourquoi la fiction?, she has mostly concerned herself with novels, short stories, and the theories that deal with that type of text. Yet “fiction” can only be “distinct” in relation to something else, and Cohn has also taken up what she calls “historical narrative” (Distinction 110): a label under which she does not mean “historical studies” exclusively, but also such genres as biography, autobiography, and case studies in psychoanalysis. What characterizes those genres, according to Cohn (and trade historians would certainly agree with her), resides of course in the fact that they deal with “real” events and persons, and are thus subject to “judgments of truth and falsity” (Distinction 15). Furthermore, and especially interesting from the perspective of narrative theory, historical discourse for Cohn is also endowed with a certain number of formal features. Specifically, it cannot be described, taking fiction as a benchmark, in terms of what novelists can do and historians cannot; it must also be defined positively, in terms of what historians can do and novelists cannot. Cohn’s interventions in this area have an obvious polemical dimension. With an old-world civility that does not inhibit decisiveness, Cohn takes on the postmodern or poststructuralist theorists who, starting in the 1970s, have questioned the existence of a borderline between fictional and historical narratives, or have located that borderline at the level of speech acts. Grounding her argument, as she usually [End Page 125] does, in specific quotations from the works she is discussing, she first engages with Hayden White, pointing to the following passages in Tropics of Discourse as particularly problematic: “Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by the similarities. There are many histories that could pass for novels, and many novels that could pass for histories, considered in purely formal (or I should say) formalist terms. Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another” (quoted in Distinction 113–14). As if eager to give her opponent as many chances as possible, Cohn first engages with White on White’s own turf: deep narrative structures. Since Metahistory, White has argued that most historical studies fall under four major categories, first identified by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. To take just one example: the German historian Leopold von Ranke, according to White, organizes his narratives according to the “ternary” model of comedy: they move “from a condition of apparent peace, through the revelation of conflict, to the resolution of the conflict in the establishment of a genuinely peaceful social order” (Metahistory 177). Cohn does not ask the obvious questions that literary theorists may ask, namely, why did White adopt Frye’s classification when several others were available? But she makes two points pertaining to narrative structures and what she takes to be the specificity of historical narratives. First, she emphasizes that the traditional distinction between “story” and “discourse” only applies to fiction. An accurate description of historical narratives must account for a third level, which Cohn calls “reference”: the “more or less reliably documented evidence of past events out of which the historian fashions his story” (Distinction 112). Such an apparatus is not needed in fiction, although it may be found in such genres as the historical novel or the postmodern novel that playfully adopt the conventions of historical discourse. Referencing sources, on the other hand, is mandatory in historical studies, even though notes and quotations remain sometimes virtual. In this latter case, historians may always be asked how they can state what they are stating, that is, where they have found the information that they offer as accurate. For Cohn, the presence of the level of “reference” in historical narratives accounts for another major distinctive trademark of these narratives: they are the only ones to be, properly speaking, “emplotted.” In other words, according to Cohn, White is mistaken when he argues that one...

Diritto internazionale umanitario, guerra e pace, diritti delle persone

SOMMARIO: 1. Il diritto umanitario nei conflitti armati - 2. La codificazione del diritto umanitario - 3. Diritto della guerra e diritto della pace - 4. L’articolo 11 della costituzione italiana - 5. La protezione internazionale dei diritti e delle liberta della persona - 6. Conclusioni. Abstract: The military operators must also assure the peace with the weapons and, above all, the persons responsible of the operations must give test of great sensibility because busy to conjugate laws and rules with the objectives of pacification. The authorities responsible for the operations at any time they need to know what they can or must do and what orders impart; they must know what it cannot do or what should be avoided. The international humanitarian law, important part of the international law, is constituted by conventional and consuetudinary norms that are applied in the relationships among States with a specific objective: to protect in time of armed conflict the people who do not take part or do not take more part in hostilities and impose bans or limits to the use of means offensive, of sophisticated weapons and methods of warfare in situations of armed conflict in act or to avoid sleepwalking. The codification of the international humanitarian law is initiated in the century XIX, above all when it was tried to introduce with the Declaration of Petersbourg in 1868 a principle that individualized in the contrariety to the laws of the humanity the impassable limit to respect in the armed conflicts. The codification has received then force and importance after the second world conflict that the consciences of the people had struck with the systematic practice of the most merciless violence making to record million of deads. The fundamental importance of the 1949 Geneva four Conventions is unanimously recognized. They are based on ratio of the existence and the responsibilities of the Organization of United Nations; they have properly constituted the central nucleus of the said humanitarian law and they can be also considered as a reaction of the civilization towards the unheard of violences committed toward civil populations, prisoners and deporteds. In this reflection it is normal entirely a reference to the rules of engagement that accompany every military operation. The rules of engagement substantially have an operational content and the busy soldiers on the field set their attention on these rules more and more that in practice they represent a daily vademecum, not only because they individualize the chain of command. Their juridical value depends on the single arrangements that of it therefore responsible. The word war in the contemporary age it doesn't boast an uncontested right of citizen anymore in the international relationships. Our constitution in art. 11 among the fundamental principles enact that Italy repudiates the as an instrument of offense against the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes. The war, as an instrument normally used in the past in the relationships among States, it is not in our juridical arrangement anymore. In 1948 started a very strong commitment to the universal level and at regional level; so much so that today we can count at least 130 Conventions and agreements for the protection of human rights, in various respects, for different situations. The reference to the international obligations placed to protection of the people led us to remember what has been written recently, i.e the two systems, the traditional humanitarian law and the recent human rights, with different historical training and technical configuration, based on a common philosophical basis, the affirmation of the value of the person, and tend toward the common goal of ensuring a stable and effective protection in every circumstance, that is then condition of world peace (U. Genesio, Le leggi dell’umanita, Nagard, Milano, 2009, p. 31).

Responsibility to Peace: A Critique of R2P

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 led to the doctrine of R2P, which envisages the use of force in defence of human rights. But as the Kosovo conflict demonstrates, nothing is more destructive of human rights than war. The protection and promotion of human rights should be done through lawful and non-lethal means. This essay argues that citizens and states have a responsibility to peace as much as to human rights because human rights can only flourish in a condition of peace. This essay seeks to restore peace to its proper place in the discussion of international politics and human rights.

Life on Venus: <i>Europe's Last Man</i>

zon. For a brief period, it became possible to believe that the West was headed for a condition of permanent peace; that technology, democracy, and globalization were driving a virtuous circle that no atavistic violence could disrupt. This vision never came very close to becoming a reality; the late nineteenth century was, after all, the era of communism and anarchism, imperialism and sci entific racism. It is remarkable, then, to consider how many of the greatest writers of the period were exercised by the possibility that reason, progress, and material well-being?in short, the bourgeois order?might destroy the human spirit. The definitive statement of this view was offered by Nietzsche in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he summons the specter of the Last Man?or, as R. J. Hollingdale renders it in his translation, the Ultimate Man:

Dialogue as a Relational Act: Sorely Needed in South Asia

The Politics of Dialogue: Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace. By Ranabir Samaddar. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 396 pp., $109.95 (ISBN: 0-7546-3607-07). Geopolitics conditions the practice of dialogue. This is the thesis of Ranabir Samaddar's The Politics of Dialogue . It is developed through a detailed examination of the history of South Asia from the partition in 1947 to the present—a period filled with “wars, fragile peace, endemic and structural violence, and a pervasive condition of no war-no peace” (p. 1). In South Asia, according to Samaddar, the establishment of postcolonial political systems eclipsed the practices of dialogue that had been so important during the resistance to colonial rule. Instead of recognizing the power of relationships built through dialogue, the political class that assumed governmental power after independence reverted to the traditional practices of constitutional government, which often left large elements of the body politic out of the political process. That same phenomenon has characterized the transitions from authoritarian to democratic systems in East Central Europe and South America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of those transitions were the product of citizens outside government working in concert through dialogic practices. When the governments they targeted fell, they and the new elites understandably turned to the traditional machinery of constitutional democratic government. Both failed to recognize until the mid-1990s that the politically active citizenries that brought about the transitions would be essential to sustaining them. When democratically elected governments failed to produce solutions in the 1990s, political activists began asking: “How can we …

Adam smith: A defence economist

For Smith, “defence” is presented as one of the three big areas requiring the “expenses of the sovereign or Commonwealth”, and therefore justifying state intervention in the economy, beside “justice” and “public works and public institutions”. Against the mercantilist thought, Smith considers that the process of liberalization is a condition of disarmament and peace. It supposes mainly the decolonization, the reduction of defence burden, the eradication of slavery, the denunciation of the mercantilist policy, and the international respect of free trade. Development is both a consequence of liberalization and the main cause of peace.

Opening the Future

To breed an animal with the right to make promises-is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Nietzsche When at the beginning of modernity philosophers were seeking an alternative account of political authority to that provided, for example, by proponents of the divine right of Kings, many of them looked to place at the very basis of society the idea of a contract.' The language of contract was already widespread in political discussions and so was by no means the sole property of social contract theorists.2 However, even though the social contract was not anything anyone remembered, nor even anything that could be found recorded in history, the idea of such a contract caught on and continues to resonate. This is because social contract theory provides a framework for answering questions not only about the way societies are formed and legitimate governments are established, but also about the relation of individuals to the societies to which they belong. The social contract was not just one contract among others. It was sometimes called the original contract. But how original was it? The more original it was, the more difficult it was to explain its own origins. Did the contract rely on preexisting obligations or did it introduce the first moral obligations? Was it a form of words by which one had to abide or was it the agreement that constituted language in the first place? Did it bind one to a preexisting identity or did it produce that identity? Did it commit one to a specific future or was it only through the contract that there was a future at all? On the standard interpretation, the social contract marked the moment when a collection of individuals agreed among themselves to form a societas in the sense of an alliance or partnership. They gave up their natural freedom for the sake of a more secure and more fulfilling freedom. In the process they exchanged an uncertain future for a less open but more definite future, one which they judged to be to their mutual benefit. In Hobbes, this future was defined as a condition of peace that made possible what he called industry.' Although it is true that, in general, promises introduce restrictions that either tie one down to the performance of a specific act or establish an ongoing commitment, I shall try to show that this does not hold for the Hobbesian social contract. I shall argue that the role of the social contract is not so much to secure a specific future, as it is to open the future as such. I shall also suggest that the social contract bound an individual not only to others but also to him- or her-self. This means that, although the institution of promising in general obliges one to be true to one's word, the social contract establishes the conditions for promising to be possible, which includes the provision of language, as well as the securing of the identity of the individual. However, the primary issue, the one to which I will turn first and to which I will devote the most attention, concerns promising itself. For Hobbes, the promise to keep one's promises is the initial principle, the principle of all principles, and the social contract is, among other things, that promise. The social contract so entirely exceeds that which precedes it that it cannot be reduced to a moment within a narrative. Because Hobbes's texts have largely been read as presenting a narrative, in part under the influence of subsequent developments in social contract theory, but also in part under the impact of certain directives within those texts themselves, there will be some tension not only between my reading and more conventional interpretations, but also within my reading. Hobbes's texts are not without ambiguity and, inevitably no single interpretation can accommodate all their facets. Contemporary Hobbes scholarship has perhaps tended to sacrifice what is most radical in the Hobbesian analysis for the sake of maximizing its overall coherence, but the result has been a version of the social contract that offers less to the philosophical imagination than the Kantian model. …

Progressive Visions of War in "The Red Badge of Courage" and "The Principles of Scientific Management"

As HENRY FLEMING TURNS HIS BACK ON WAR AT THE END OF THE Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane describes Henry's retreat with a biblical allusion that collapses the difference between war peace. He came from to prospects of clover tranquility, Crane writes, and it was as if were not.' His text is the famous passage from Isaiah 2:4: They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up swords against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But Crane mangles the logic of Isaiah's text, reversing its association of war with swords violence peace with agriculture, as if the battle Henry is retreating from-the place of hot plowshares -were the scene of a violently heated beating of swords into plowshares, or war itself the peaceful activity which produces from swords. Readers are left with the sense that the difference between war peace can be established maintained only by means of violence itself. Readers of The Red Badge have always noticed how detached its violence appears to be from any of the specific ideological or political issues of the Civil War, the image of the plowshare affirms that detachment: violence, in Crane's eyes, seems a general condition of peace as much as it is of war. In recent years some of Crane's most sophisticated critics have taken this apparent absence of ideological context in The Red Badge to

‘On the Safe and Right Lines’: The Lloyd George Government and the Origins of the League of Nations, 1916–1918

The success of wartime governments in the twentieth century is determined not just by their effectiveness in waging war, but also by their ability to plan for peace. Mobilizing the population for total war and winning the benevolent neutrality or active support of major uncommitted powers require the projection of a vision of a better, peaceful world which will be the necessary consequence of victory. The reordering of international society is therefore proclaimed as a war aim of each belligerent. By December 1916, when Lloyd George displaced Asquith, the desirability of establishing a league of nations was already a matter of serious popular and diplomatic discussion. The new administration almost immediately had to state its attitude on questions of post-war international organization. In launching his peace initiative President Wilson called for the establishment after the war of a ‘league of nations to insure peace and justice’. The joint reply of the Entente powers endorsed the setting up of such a body. In a separate commentary, which was given wide publicity in America, the foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, explained that, as a condition of durable peace, ‘behind international law, and behind all treaty arrangements for preventing or limiting hostilities, some form of international sanction should be devised which would give pause to the hardiest aggressor’.

Kant's Teaching of Historical Progress & Its Cosmopolitan Goal

Kant taught men to transcend their individual or parochial perspectives and look at themselves as cosmopolitans. He proposed a condition of perpetual peace, achieved through history, as an alternative to the state of nature which Rousseau thought impossible to recover. Cosmopolitanism is necessary for perpetual peace. Professor Nichols notes that Kant is nevertheless aware of the limits human nature imposes on cosmopolitanism. She goes on to argue that his teaching leads men to seek a world order that may be neither possible nor desirable.

Unlimited Acquisition and Equality of Right: A Reply to Professor Lewis

In a recent article, “An Environmental Case Against Equality of Right,” Professor Lewis argues for no less than the complete rejection of those highly-prized liberal values upon which much of the institutional framework of Western societies has been built, the values of civil peace, unlimited acquisition, and equality of right. This radical recommendation is urged on the basis of the mundane and, until very recently, much-ignored problem of environmental destruction. Lewis’ environmental case is (1) that equality of right, which is recommended by Hobbes as the necessary condition of civil peace, “logically entails”—and this is clear, he contends, from Locke's use of the concept in the Second Treatise—the right of unlimited appropriation; (2) that unlimited appropriation destroys nature and ultimately man; and (3) that we must consequently rethink our allegiance to unlimited appropriation, to equality of right (because it logically entails unlimited appropriation), and to civil peace (whose necessary condition is equality of right), and be prepared to accept alternative theoretical foundations upon which to reconstruct our major social institutions. While this attack on unlimited acquisition will undoubtedly strike a responsive chord among many social critics, the concomitant rejection of the Hobbesian hope of civil peace and of equality of right will receive a much less hospitable welcome. But the catch in Lewis’ argument is that we cannot get rid of the former without jettisoning the latter two at the same time. If his analysis of this matter is correct, then the costs of preventing the further destruction of nature and the future demise of man are extremely high, much higher than most critics have yet been willing to recognize.

The Spectre of a Separate Peace in the East: Russo-German 'Peace Feelers', 1942-44

In the volume British Foreign Policy in the Second World War of the official History of the Second World War, published in 1962, Sir Llewellyn Woodward informs us that in 1943 the British Foreign Office received rumours of Russo-German peace conversations and that Molotov stated when questioned about them that the Soviet Government had received no such approaches from the Germans. Strictly speaking, Molotov was telling the truth. Rumours in August of the same year emanating from Stockholm were regarded by the British Foreign Office as an attempt by the Germans to cause trouble between the British and the Russians.' When Captain Liddell Hart published his History of the Second World War in 1970 he revealed the astonishing fact that Molotov met the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at Kirovograd in the German occupied southern Ukraine prior to the Kursk offensive in June 1943. Ribbentrop is alleged to have proposed as a condition of peace that Russia's 'future frontier should run along the Dnieper', while Molotov would not consider anything less than the restoration of her original frontier. The discussion became hung up on the difficulty of bridging such a gap, and was broken off after a report that it had leaked out to the western powers. The problem about this nothing short of truly sensational informaI wish to express my gratitude to the advice of Dr Anton Hoch of the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich, and also to my son Roger W. J. Koch and my colleague W. J. D. Trythal who by their suggestions have helped to improve the presentation of this article.

The Irenic Potential of Religions

“Do religions that stress love as the prime condition of peace lend themselves more to supporting immediate peace, while prophetic religions (stressing justice as prerequisite for enduring peace) stand more willing to sacrifice immediate peace for the sake of a future peace they hope will be more lasting? These are interesting and important questions, but they are subsidiary. The point that is not subsidiary is that all the high religions have embedded within them a peace potential. … Are there principles that can guide us toward maximizing the peace potential in our several faiths?”

One World Versus an Iron Curtain World

T HE desire of western Europe and particularly the Anglo-Saxon world to transform these troublesome postwar years into a period of peace on earth has produced the concept of one world as the solution of solutions to the problems of mankind. But we must be extremely careful to recognize that this concept carries implications which for the most part can be fitted only into the Anglo-Saxon type of mentality. If we are to generalize, one world means to most Americans (and possibly to Englishmen also) a sort of world superstate controlled by an international police force which would cope with all power problems. Such a force would be directed by principles of emanating from a world organization which would come to decisions through discussion and the majority vote, all states being at all times willing to subordinate their particular welfare and needs to the general welfare. The basic theories involved in this reasoning are that war is a very unwelcome but an occasionally necessary break in the normal condition of peace; that all the peoples of the world will benefit by this scheme of collective security, which can be coupled with the ideals of the Anglo-Saxon type of democracy and justice for all; and that the world can be educated for one world by agreeing on these few fundamental principles. It is generally agreed that world government is the only alternative to world destruction. The goal, therefore, is seldom debated as an end in itself; strangely enough, however, the possibility of reaching it under existing conditions, in spite of its desirability, seems to recede further and further from the international horizon.

Human Rights as a Condition of Peace in the Far East

THE Charter of the United Nations which was formulated at San Francisco in 1945 was a great human achievement. But the greatest achievement was not the setting down on paper of the terms of agreement. Those terms were transient. They appeared to be workable when they were adopted. But in the future they may not be, and then they will have to be changed. However, the fact of agreement itself-the fact that fifty nations, representing perhaps fifty basic divergences of self-interest, could for once distill from those divergences the essence of fundamental accord, even in limited spheres-that was the truly great achievement of the Conference. That agreement could never have been reached if the nations represented at San Francisco, both great and small, had not been willing to sacrifice some portion of their prestige and self-interest for the sake of the greater interest of the whole world. In every line of the Charter there is implicit a concession by one or more of the fifty nations which created it.

The Musical Condition of Man

Perhaps the musical condition of man does not appear to be a matter of immense importance in these distracted days when material conditions have become such a gigantic problem. Yet what a wonderful answer the musical condition—the condition which is music—would, be to the prevailing distresses: it is the condition of peace and harmony, of benevolence and co-operation, of construction and preservation—the very condition which our wounded and hunted world is needing.

What About an International Office for Education?

invasion and the strength of the French determination to find security. Marshal Foch had commanded the armies in their great victory, but even the French ignored his pleas for security. In spite of this, many of us felt that the French were too vindictive, too unforgiving, too self-seeking. We had insufficient understanding of their fears and sufferings, and consequently no adequate substitute for the French proposals for permanently crippling German military strength or at least containing it within safe bounds. The result was that the French built their cordon sanitaire against Germany, and out of their own fears contributed to preventing central Europe from subsiding into a condition of peace.' At the same time, Great Britain feared a strong Germany, a strong France, and eventually a strong Russia. In self-defense it reverted to its traditional balance-of-power politics. It kept the pot boiling in this way with ill esults in Ethiopia and Spain, and eventually made possible the Soviet-German Pact of 1939. The United States had no substitute to offer the British. Our own desire to withdraw from the squabbles of Europe and the international politics of France and Britain was never understood abroad. Nor did we here appreciate the organic nature of the world of nations. As Walter Lippmann said:

With Whom are we at War?

Second in importance only to the question raised by the short editorial in the last number of Philosophy: Why are we at War? is that on which there is at present a lively discussion going on in The Times and elsewhere under the title of “German Rulers and People”: With Whom are we at War? On one point there is no difference of opinion: we are at war with the blood- and crimestained group that, with Hitler at their head, hold the reins of government. Difference begins when it is asked what share the people of Germany as a whole has in their crimes. On the one side are those who hold that, as you cannot, in historical words, “bring an indictment against a whole nation,” neither can you be at war with a whole people, and that the main problem we have before us is the discovery of the means to appeal to the intelligence and hearts of the mass of the nation in order to enlist it against its Government as a common enemy. On the other side are those who quote the equally historic words that “every nation gets the kind of government it deserves,” from which “it follows that it deserves no immunity for the acts of the Government by which it chooses, or allows itself, to be governed.” This argument is reinforced first by a general philosophy of war as the “natural” order of things from which man is only gradually emerging into an exceptional and precarious condition of peace; and secondly, with regard to Germany in particular, that “the lust for dominance through force is, and will be for generations, at the root of the German character.” The importance of the issue as thus stated requires no emphasis.