Community Of Peace

Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

This volume examines the many ways in which violence, domination, and oppression manifest themselves. This examination opens the way to creative suggestions for overcoming injustice. The authors in this volume also describe the features of a just community and inspire readers to implement peaceful transformation.

Exploring the formation, evolution and effectiveness of the regional security arrangements of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Nathan examines a number of vital and troubling questions: ∗ why has SADC struggled to establish a viable security regime? ∗ why has it been unable to engage in successful peacemaking?, and ∗ why has it defied the optimistic prognosis in the early 1990s that it would build a security community in Southern Africa? He argues that the answers to these questions lie in the absence of common values among member states, the weakness of these states and their unwillingness to surrender sovereignty to the regional organization. Paradoxically, the challenge of building a co-operative security regime lies more at the national level than at the regional level. The author's perspective is based on a unique mix of insider access, analytical rigour and accessible theory.

This book tells the story of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, an emblematic grassroots social movement of peasant farmers, who unusually declared themselves ‘neutral’ to Colombia’s internal armed conflict, in the north-west region of Urabá. It reveals two core narratives in the Community’s collective identity, which Burnyeat calls the ‘radical’ and the ‘organic’ narratives. These refer to the historically-constituted interpretative frameworks according to which they perceive respectively the Colombian state, and their relationship with their natural and social environments. Together, these two narratives form an ‘Alternative Community’ collective identity, comprising a distinctive conception of grassroots peace-building. This study, centered on the Community’s socio-economic cacao-farming project, offers an innovative way of approaching victims’ organizations and social movements through critical, post-modern politics and anthropology. It will become essential reading to Latin American ethnographers and historians, and all interested in conflict resolution and transitional justice. Read the author's blog drawing on the book here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2018/06/07/colombias-unsung-heroes/

"Beyond the principles of this handbook, the heart and themes of the book articulate the faithful pilgrimage of a community on mission." ?Jesse Sudirgo Tyndale professor and Director of the Church in the City, Masters of Divinity Program "This book offers the reader genuinely practical step-by-step advice on what it looks like to lead a community on mission.? ?Jared Siebert New Leaf Network Peace of the City: A Handbook for Missional Communities offers a selection of missional practices for any Christian, small group, or missional community seeking to love their community in the name of Jesus. Each missional practice proceeds from the heart of Scripture, the life of Jesus, real life experiences, and the history of the church, including Benedictine and Franciscan missional practice.

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. Thomas Merton 'The God of Peace', John Dear's classic theology of nonviolence, broke new ground when it was first published as a breakthrough toward a new understanding of scripture, theology, social concerns and churches issues--from the perspective of Gospel nonviolence, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. This ground-breaking study begins not just with the culture of violence, but the nonviolence of God, and the revolutionary nonviolence of Jesus. From the start, John Dear explores traditional areas of theology, such as Christology, Trinitarian Theology, anthropology, sin, redemption, theodicy, salvation, ecclesiology, eschatology, spirituality, liturgy, Catholic social teaching, the just war theory,, feminism, liberation theology and the consistent ethic of life. This text will help university and theology students pursuing the theology and spirituality of nonviolence, as well as ordinary Christians and activists interested in the crucial connection between war and violence, and God and nonviolence.

Offering a unique set of case studies that invites readers to question and reimagine the concept of community engagement, this collected work provides an overview and analysis of numerous, creative participatory research methods designed to improve well-being at both the individual and societal level. In a world where there are enormous differences in the wealth and health of people, it is increasingly recognized that sustainable peace requires both a broad--‐based public commitment to nonviolence combined with noticeable increments in the wellbeing of people who occupy the lowest socioeconomic strata of societies. This volume focuses on the latter-how to use qualitative research methods to improve well-being of research participants, and thus, the wider society. The participatory research examples described in these chapters are meant to encourage researchers, scholars, and practitioners to question assumed knowledge about community engagement research and practice, and to inspire social justice-oriented scholarship. The cases studies and methods portrayed are as varied as the situations and cultures in which they take place. In most of the case studies, the personal is linked to the political with a social justice imperative as participants from marginalized communities express an understanding of their own position within power hierarchies, deconstruct power relations, and experience a sense of agency. In other instances, the methods are no less participatory but the aim is more focused on inner and outer harmony, psychological wellbeing, conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation. In all the cases studies, there is a strong emphasis on methods in which community members are at the center of efforts to promote social change. The methods described include group storytelling, community arts, asset mapping, dialogues, creative writing, embroidery, filmmaking, Photovoice, “writing back” to power, and other means of engaging in emancipatory praxis and promoting personal wellbeing. Taken together, the chapters illustrate creative ways in which community members, embedded in disadvantaged contexts, can engage in a dynamic process that stimulates individual and collective agency. Ultimately, this volume will provide readers with a deeper understanding of a wide range of creative, qualitative research methods, and will encourage establishment of an effective social justice agenda essential to human wellbeing and sustainable peace.

"Based on extensive experience in classrooms, committees, and worshops, leading author and nurse educator Peggy Chinn illustrates how every participant in a group can be valued as a leader... Chinn advocates for a more equitable group model by using cooperative processes, and demonstrates how to overcome habits of exclusionary group interactions. This hands-on guide is the essential resource for faculty, community groups, and others seeking to promote greater integrity and cooperation in their groups and organizations"--