Weaving Peace

Weaving Peace: Essays on Peace, Governance and Conflict Transformation in the Great Lakes Region of Africa provides a unique and interdisciplinary perspective on issues of peace, governance, and conflict transformation by academics and practitioners from eight partner institutions of the United Nations Mandated-University for Peace in the Great Lakes region of Africa. It is an essential tool for scholars and policymakers seeking contextual clarity behind the headlines about the nature and extent of conflicts in the region and how to go about transforming the region. It provides a rather nuanced perspective of the complexity of the peace/conflict dynamics of the region and underscores the inescapable truth of the need for a more indigenous and context-based approach to understanding the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Weaving Relationships tells the remarkable, little-known story of a movement that transcends barriers of geography, language, culture, and economic disparity. The story begins in the early 1980s, when 200,000 Maya men, women, and children crossed the Guatemalan border into Mexico, fleeing genocide by the Guatemalan army and seeking refuge. A decade later, many of the refugees returned to their homeland along with 140 Canadians, members of “Project Accompaniment”. The Canadians were there, by their side, to provide companionship and, more significantly, as an act of solidarity. Weaving Relationships describes the historical roots of this solidarity focusing on the Maya in Guatemala. It relates the story of “Project Accompaniment” and two of its founders in Canada, the Christian Task Force on Central America and the Maritimes-Guatemala “Breaking the Silence” Network. It reveals solidarity’s impact on the Canadians and Guatemalans whose lives have been changed by the experience of relationships across borders. It presents solidarity not as a work of charity apart from or “for” them but as a bond of mutuality, of friendship and common struggle with those who are marginalized, excluded, and impoverished in this world. This book speaks of a spirituality based on community and justice, and challenges the church to move beyond its preoccupation with its own survival to solidarity with those who are suffering. It is a book about hope in the face of death and despair.

Throughout the mid-1800s, Coast and Interior Salish families arranged strategic cross-cultural marriages, and these alliances played a crucial role in regional settlement and spared Puget Sound's upper corner from the tragic conflicts other regions experienced. Although accounts of the men exist in a variety of records, the contributions of their native wives remain unacknowledged. Author Candace Wellman hopes to shatter stereotypes surrounding these relationships. The four women profiled--Caroline Davis Kavanaugh, Mary Fitzhugh Lear Phillips, Clara Tennant Selhameten, and Nellie Carr Lane--exhibited exceptional endurance, strength, and adaptability. Remembered as loving mothers and good neighbors, they ran successful farms, nursed and supported family members, served as midwives, and operated profitable businesses. They visited relatives and attended ancestral gatherings, often with their children. Each woman's story is uniquely her own, but together they and other intermarried women left lasting legacies. They were peace weavers.

References to weaving and binding are ubiquitous in Anglo-Saxon literature. Several hundred instances of such imagery occur in the poetic corpus, invoked in connection with objects, people, elemental forces, and complex abstract concepts. Weaving Words and Binding Bodies presents the first comprehensive study of weaving and binding imagery through intertextual analysis and close readings of Beowulf, riddles, the poetry of Cynewulf, and other key texts. Megan Cavell highlights the prominent use of weaving and binding in previously unrecognized formulas, collocations, and type-scenes, shedding light on important tropes such as the lord-retainer "bond" and the gendered role of "peace-weaving" in Anglo-Saxon society. Through the analysis of metrical, rhetorical, and linguistic features and canonical and neglected texts in a wide range of genres, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies makes an important contribution to the ongoing study of Anglo-Saxon poetics.

Weaving Peace: Essays on Peace, Governance and Conflict Transformation in the Great Lakes Region of Africa provides a unique and interdisciplinary perspective on issues of peace, governance, and conflict transformation by academics and practitioners from eight partner institutions of the United Nations Mandated-University for Peace in the Great Lakes region of Africa. It is an essential tool for scholars and policymakers seeking contextual clarity behind the headlines about the nature and extent of conflicts in the region and how to go about transforming the region. It provides a rather nuanced perspective of the complexity of the peace/conflict dynamics of the region and underscores the inescapable truth of the need for a more indigenous and context-based approach to understanding the Great Lakes region of Africa.

A celebration of some of the most positive developments in Canadian education regarding social justice, peace and environmental justice

A collection of stories passed down by storytellers about peace, hope, and justice.