Afterword. Reflection on the Cultural Causes of War. From the Perspective of Peace Studies
From Firenze University Press Book: East and West Entangled (17th-21st Centuries)
Guido Abbattista, University of Trieste, Italy
Cheng Liu, Nanjing University, China
Egon Spiegel, University of Vechta, Germany
The following pages present a dialogue with two authoritative exponents of peace studies, Liu Cheng, professor of British History and holder of the UNESCO Chair on Peace Studies at Nanjing University, and Prof. Dr Prof. h.c. Egon Spiegel, theologian and political scientist, holder of the Chair of Practical Theology at the University of Vechta, Germany, a former professor at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and titular professor at the University of Olsztyn, Poland, and now an adjunct professor to the Chair of Peace Studies at Nanjing University. Liu Cheng and Egon Spiegel are among the world’s leading exponents of contemporary peace studies and have devoted important initiatives and publications to illustrating the basic principles of peacebuilding methods, in particular the important bilingual synthesis Peacebuilding in a Globalized World: An Illustrated Introduction to Peace Studies (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2015). Their collaboration and engagement are in themselves a demonstration of both the effort of dialogue between East and West and that, at the heart of the issues of peace, its construction, its protection, and the need for it to be taught at every level of education, is the historical problem of diversity. The issue of diversity and the problem of coexistence with and understanding and governance of diversity has accompanied the entire course of human history and, after centuries of intolerance, conflict, oppression and violence, it still continues to represent the most difficult problem for humankind to solve. The problem of diversity undoubtedly arose within the small communities in which the original human beings were gathered, but it has taken on ever greater proportions as the interaction between human groups, their internal organisation, their cultural development, their capacity to construct identities, but also their ability to «think», to «conceptualise» the issue of diversity, have increased. The current world presents a paradox that has accompanied the phenomena of globalisation over a long period of time. On the one hand, we have the increasing intensification of relations, exchanges, and the worldwide dissemination and sharing of material and immaterial goods, and, on the other, the occurrence of defensive reactions of closure and hardening around the interests and identity profiles of individual groups, peoples and nations. This has led to the emergence of conflicting forces: one tending to bring closer together, if not to homogenise cultures, while the other distinguishes, strengthens and opposes political, cultural and religious particularities. The values and influence of universalism and relativism have constituted two of the major factors capable of orienting human action in every sector of associated life and have posed the question of the capacity of human beings to find a common basis for peaceful coexistence, or to surrender to the prospect of the inevitable opposition between interests and identities incapable of either finding a point of convergence or ensuring the fundamentals for peaceful coexistence in diversity. The problem has been addressed historically in both the political and speculative arenas through multiple efforts to build an international community peacefully governed by shared rules, and through the efforts of a noble intellectual tradition aimed at constructing utopian designs and committed to imagining the conditions for realising projects of «perpetual peace» in practice. That all this has come up against seemingly irresolvable contradictions has not diminished the importance of pursuing such goals.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0242–8.16
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/afterword-reflection-on-the-cultural-causes-of-war-from-the-perspective-of-peace-studies/14124
