Shaping Peace in Kosovo
Shaping Peace in Kosovo

Author: Gëzim Visoka

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-04-05

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 3319510010

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This book explores the prospects and limits of international intervention in building peace and creating a new state in an ethnically divided society and fragmented international order. The book offers a critical account of the international missions in Kosovo and traces the effectiveness of fluid forms of interventionism. It also explores the co-optation of peace by ethno-nationalist groups and explores how their contradictory perception of peace produced an ungovernable peace, which has been manifested with intractable ethnic antagonisms, state capture, and ignorance of the root causes, drivers, and consequences of the conflict. Under these conditions, prospects for emancipatory peace have not come from external actors, ethno-nationalist elite, and critical resistance movements, but from local and everyday acts of peace formation and agnostic forms for reconciliation. The book proposes an emancipatory agenda for peace in Kosovo embedded on post-ethnic politics and joint commitments to peace, a comprehensive agenda for reconciliation, people-centred security, and peace-enabling external assistance.

Muhammad
Muhammad

Author: Juan Cole

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1568587821

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In the midst of the dramatic seventh-century war between two empires, Muhammad was a spiritual seeker in search of community and sanctuary. Many observers stereotype Islam and its scripture as inherently extreme or violent-a narrative that has overshadowed the truth of its roots. In this masterfully told account, preeminent Middle East expert Juan Cole takes us back to Islam's-and the Prophet Muhammad's-origin story. Cole shows how Muhammad came of age in an era of unparalleled violence. The eastern Roman Empire and the Sasanian Empire of Iran fought savagely throughout the Near East and Asia Minor. Muhammad's profound distress at the carnage of his times led him to envision an alternative movement, one firmly grounded in peace. The religion Muhammad founded, Islam, spread widely during his lifetime, relying on soft power instead of military might, and sought armistices even when militarily attacked. Cole sheds light on this forgotten history, reminding us that in the Qur'an, the legacy of that spiritual message endures. A vibrant history that brings to life the fascinating and complex world of the Prophet, Muhammad is the story of how peace is the rule and not the exception for one of the world's most practiced religions.

Nine Designs for Inner Peace
Nine Designs for Inner Peace

Author: Sarah Tomlinson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-12-13

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1620556111

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A complete guide to creating planetary yantras to access their healing and centering benefits • Provides easy-to-follow instructions to create the yantras • Serves as an introduction to active meditation, which focuses the mind while the body is engaged in a meditative activity The tantric art of drawing or painting the nine designs known as yantras is an ancient practice of active meditation that releases positive healing and centering effects. Each of the nine designs corresponds to one of the nine qualities of body and mind essential to well-being: radiance, nourishment, passion, intellect, expansion, bliss, organization, uniqueness, and spirituality. From the basic elements of the square, the circle, and the triangle, dynamic visual meditations unfold as the practitioner works clockwise from the outer elements inward toward the central point of stillness, or bindu, the source of happiness within. An accompanying mantra is recited while preparing each yantra to fully engage the senses in the meditative process. Creating the design that “speaks” most to the practitioner enables its unique healing quality to be transmitted. For example, working on the yantra named “Radiance” cultivates optimism and the self-confidence to succeed in one’s endeavors, while “radiating,” or imparting, one’s inner light to others. This workbook provides an important resource for active meditation, a practice revered for its effectiveness in revealing the spiritual underpinnings of everyday life. The active participation of the body in meditation while creating the nine planetary yantras raises to the level of spiritual ritual the practitioner’s intention toward wakefulness and gives access to profound states of healing integration.

Defining the Peace
Defining the Peace

Author: Jennifer E. Brooks

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-01-20

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0807875759

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In the aftermath of World War II, Georgia's veterans--black, white, liberal, reactionary, pro-union, and anti-union--all found that service in the war enhanced their sense of male, political, and racial identity, but often in contradictory ways. In Defining the Peace, Jennifer E. Brooks shows how veterans competed in a protracted and sometimes violent struggle to determine the complex character of Georgia's postwar future. Brooks finds that veterans shaped the key events of the era, including the gubernatorial campaigns of both Eugene Talmadge and Herman Talmadge, the defeat of entrenched political machines in Augusta and Savannah, the terrorism perpetrated against black citizens, the CIO's drive to organize the textile South, and the controversies that dominated the 1947 Georgia General Assembly. Progressive black and white veterans forged new grassroots networks to mobilize voters against racial and economic conservatives who opposed their vision of a democratic South. Most white veterans, however, opted to support candidates who favored a conservative program of modernization that aimed to alter the state's economic landscape while sustaining its anti-union and racial traditions. As Brooks demonstrates, World War II veterans played a pivotal role in shaping the war's political impact on the South, generating a politics of race, anti-unionism, and modernization that stood as the war's most lasting political legacy.

The Frontlines of Peace
The Frontlines of Peace

Author: Severine Autesserre

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0197530370

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At turns surprising, funny, and gut-wrenching, this is the hopeful story of the ordinary yet extraordinary people who have figured out how to build lasting peace in their communities The word "peacebuilding" evokes a story we've all heard over and over: violence breaks out, foreign nations are scandalized, peacekeepers and million-dollar donors come rushing in, warring parties sign a peace agreement and, sadly, within months the situation is back to where it started--sometimes worse. But what strategies have worked to build lasting peace in conflict zones, particularly for ordinary citizens on the ground? And why should other ordinary citizens, thousands of miles away, care? In The Frontlines of Peace, Séverine Autesserre, award-winning researcher and peacebuilder, examines the well-intentioned but inherently flawed peace industry. With examples drawn from across the globe, she reveals that peace can grow in the most unlikely circumstances. Contrary to what most politicians preach, building peace doesn't require billions in aid or massive international interventions. Real, lasting peace requires giving power to local citizens. Now including teaching and book club discussion guides, The Frontlines of Peace tells the stories of the ordinary yet extraordinary individuals and organizations that are confronting violence in their communities effectively. One thing is clear: successful examples of peacebuilding around the world, in countries at war or at peace, have involved innovative grassroots initiatives led by local people, at times supported by foreigners, often employing methods shunned by the international elite. By narrating success stories of this kind, Autesserre shows the radical changes we must take in our approach if we hope to build lasting peace around us--whether we live in Congo, the United States, or elsewhere.

The Distinction of Peace
The Distinction of Peace

Author: Catherine Goetze

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0472900765

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“Peacebuilding” serves as a catch-all term to describe efforts by an array of international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and agencies of foreign states to restore or construct a peaceful society in the wake—or even in the midst—of conflict. Despite this variety, practitioners consider themselves members of a global profession. In The Distinction of Peace, Catherine Goetze investigates the genesis of peacebuilding as a professional field of expertise since the 1960s, its increasing influence, and the ways it reflects global power structures. Goetze describes how the peacebuilding field came into being, how it defines who belongs to it and who does not, and what kind of group culture it has generated. Using an innovative methodology, she investigates the motivations of individuals who become peacebuilders, their professional trajectories and networks, and the “good peacebuilder” as an ideal. For many, working in peacebuilding in various ways—as an aid worker on the ground, as a lawyer at the United Nations, or as an academic in a think tank—has become not merely a livelihood, but also a form of participation in world politics. As a field, peacebuilding has developed techniques for incorporating and training new members, yet its internal politics also create the conditions of exclusion that often result in practical failures of the peacebuilding enterprise. By providing a critical account of the social mechanisms that make up the peacebuilding field, Goetze offers deep insights into the workings of Western domination and global inequalities.

Incredible Commitments
Incredible Commitments

Author: Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1108843220

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Even when they don't want peace, combatants seek out UN peacemaking for its unique tactical, material, and symbolic benefits.

A Violent Peace
A Violent Peace

Author: Carolyn N. Biltoft

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 022676642X

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"Confronted with the roiling changes of the post-WWI world--from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements--the League of Nations aimed to counteract dangerous conflicts between national interests and generate instead a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on truth and justice. Amid widespread anxiety over truth and falsehood, an army of League personnel produced streams of documents in the pursuit of "shaping global public opinion." Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace explores the power and the vulnerability of information systems while laying bare "the anatomy of fascism" in the interwar period. Carolyn Biltoft reopens the archives of the League to show how its attempt to operationalize information science in support of the post-WWI order proved ultimately pyrrhic as informational power struggles devolved into violence. A meditation on instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global and violent modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information--and all its attendant problems"--