Visual Peace

This book introduces a new research agenda for visual peace research, providing a political analysis of the relationship between visual representations and the politics of violence nationally and internationally. Using a range of genres, from photography to painting, it elaborates on how people can become agents of their own image.

This book introduces a new research agenda for visual peace research, providing a political analysis of the relationship between visual representations and the politics of violence nationally and internationally. Using a range of genres, from photography to painting, it elaborates on how people can become agents of their own image.

This study thinks with photography about peace. It asks how photography can represent peace, and how such representation can contribute to peace. The book offers an original critique of the almost exclusive focus on violence in recent work on visual culture and presents a completely new research agenda within the overall framework of visual peace research. Critically engaging with both photojournalism and art photography in light of peace theories, it looks for visual representations or anticipations of peace – peace or peace as a potentiality – in the work of selected photographers including Robert Capa and Richard Mosse, thus reinterpreting photography from the Spanish Civil War to current anti-migration politics in Europe. The book argues that peace photography is episodic, culturally specific, process-oriented and considerate of both the past and the future.

Can one visualize peace? Are there signs, symbols, and images that present a positive image of peace as opposed to receiving their meanings in opposition to war? Over several years of research, the Design2context Institute has intensively examined the representation and representability of peace and has compiled a comprehensive collection of images. In order to include a number of historical, cultural, and political perspectives, the archival aspect is supplemented by workshops in crisis regions. The encyclopedia--which, as new sociopolitical situations continue to arise and call for new pictures, must inevitably remain incomplete--provides a broad overview of the iconography of peace, and is also intended to assist in gaining an understanding of the concept. This book represents a significant contribution to future discussions on the need and desire for peace in political and social life.

This encyclopaedia provides a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to the study of peace and conflict across different humanities and social sciences disciplines. Peace and conflict studies (PCS) is one of the major sub-disciplines of international studies (including political science and international relations), and has emerged from a need to understand war, related systems and concepts and how to respond to it afterward. As a living reference work, easily discoverable and searchable, the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies offers solid material for understanding the foundational, historical, and contemporary themes, concepts, theories, events, organisations, and frameworks concerning peace, conflict, security, rights, institutions and development. The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Peace and Conflict Studies brings together leading and emerging scholars from different disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource on peace and conflict studies ever produced.

The Language of Peace: Communicating to Create Harmony offers practical insights for educators, students, researchers, peace activists, and all others interested in communication for peace. This book is a perfect text for courses in peace education, communications, media, culture, and other fields. Individuals concerned about violence, war, and peace will find this volume both crucial and informative. This book sheds light on peaceful versus destructive ways we use words, body language, and the language of visual images. Noted author and educator Rebecca L. Oxford guides us to use all these forms of language more positively and effectively, thereby generating greater possibilities for peace. Peace has many dimensions: inner, interpersonal, intergroup, international, intercultural, and ecological. The language of peace helps us resolve conflicts, avoid violence, and reduce bullying, misogyny, war, terrorism, genocide, circus journalism, political deception, cultural misunderstanding, and social and ecological injustice. Peace language, along with positive intention, enables us to find harmony inside ourselves and with people around us, attain greater peace in the wider world, and halt environmental destruction. This insightful book reveals why and how.

With existing literature focusing largely on Western perspectives of peace and their applications, a global understanding of peace is much needed. Spurred by more recent debates and discourses that criticize the dominant realist and liberal approaches for crises in contemporary state- and peace-building, the contributors to this handbook emphasize not only the need to solve this eternal conundrum of humanity, but also demand—with the rise of increasingly more violent conflicts in international relations—the development of a global interpretive framework for peace and security. To this end, the present handbook examines conceptual, institutional and normative interpretive approaches for making, building and promoting peace in the context of roles played by state and non-state actors within local, national, regional, and global units of analysis.