Dieter Senghaas - The Civilizational Hexagon

The Civilizational Hexagon

Dieter Senghaas' "civilizational hexagon" joins load-bearing building blocks together for a stable maintenance of peace. This peacekeeping and its supervision of itself is regarded as a civilising project. The hexagon consists of six building blocks, which are all linked to each other, since they all depend on each other. A fundamental building block is the monopoly on the use of force, which means the de-privatisation of force and its authorization, that is, "disarmament of the citizens". The next building block, the rule of law, comprises the control of the monopoly of force, which has as a precondition that the public monopoly of force is not despotically abused. Since without a check on the monopoly of force, it would be nothing less than a dictatorship. The third building block, democratic participation, means democratic involvement of the public in elections and other decision making, since without this right of the people to contribute, they would not obey the professed laws. The trust of the people must also be secured by equal rights, so that they comply with such regulations. This occurs, among other things, through the building block of social justice, which provides for a just verdict from a neutral court when there is a violation of the law, but also takes care of safeguarding the basic necessities of every person. The next building block falls under the heading of constructive conflict culture, which describes the capability for tolerance in a multi-cultural society and a willingness for compromise-oriented conflict solution. The last building block of the hexagon is interdependencies and control of emotion. The purpose of this building block is the mutual dependency among people and their control of themselves in conflict situations. ( The Civilisation of Conflict: Constructive Pacifism as a Guiding Notion for Conflict Transformation in Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation)