Holistic Peace

The Conceptualisation of Peace in the Zimbabwean Rural Water Sector

“…Overall, the results revealed that the participants conceptualised peace as harmony, although they acknowledged the conflicts prevalent in their community. The results support the idea of peace as coming through cooperation, reciprocity, and engagement in water resources management (Agrawal, 1999, 2001; Hansen, 2016). Similarly, Firchow and Mac Ginty’s (2017) study on local-level peace indicators, in South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, revealed one of the repeated peace indicators was community interdependence, although the context was post-conflict where negative peace was more pronounced.…”

“…The findings are in sync with suggestions that there should be deliberate efforts to tackle the regular conflicts through non-violent methods that attend to arising issues and increase respect amongst community members (Botes, 2003; van Tongeren, 2011). These results compare to Richmond’s (2013) findings on how local communities have the capacities to stabilise and maintain community peace with minimum interventions from “outsiders.” However, this finding is contrary to Hansen’s (2016) argument that resolving disputes might not usually be achievable, but they are broadly consistent with van Tongeren (2011) and Botes’s (2003) views. Overall, the study only limited samples to a single village population.…”

“…The study examines the views of rural community members on the concept of peace in the context of access to water. Peace can be measured over material conditions of people and hence the researchers’ choice of access to water in relation to peace and community structures and their effects on peace Views on peace and conflict (Anderson, 1985; Galtung, 1969, 1981; Haessly, 2011; Hansen, 2016; Naidu, 1986) reveal that they are felt and experienced—intra-person, inter-person, intra-group, or inter-group—so it is essential to have primary evidence from the community members themselves. In addition, evidence from previous literature has shown that local communities can coalesce and maintain peace, for example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the weak state emboldened local agency to create some sort of stability (Richmond, 2013).…”

State of knowledge: Four decades of victim‐offender mediation research and practice: The evidence

“…To this end, mediators engage with participants using dialogue, questioning, and examining their taken‐for‐granted life experiences more closely, in order to elicit participant strengths, discover peaceful meanings, and identify how those meanings could provide them with helpful goals, direction, and purpose in life. Hansen () states that meanings are peaceful when they exhibit “well‐informed caring” for ourselves, each other, and our world.…”

North America needs Youth, Peace and Security: young people shifting tides for positive peace

“…He defined negative peace as the absence of personal violence and positive peace as the absence of structural violence (Galtung, 1969, 183;Galtung and Fischer, 2013, 173). He largely equated the latter with social justice as he claimed that the concept was ever-changing and sought to positively define conditions for peace (Galtung, 1969;Hansen, 2016). This conceptualization of positive peace is the fundamental argument for the need for inwardslooking YPS policies in Canada and the United States.…”