Peace and Conflict Studies - Teaching Peace and Conflict Studies To The Military

Teaching Peace and Conflict Studies To The Military

One of the interesting developments within peace and conflict studies is the number of military personnel undertaking such studies. This poses some challenges, as the military is an institution overtly committed to combat. In the article "Teaching Peace to the Military", published in the journal Peace Review, James Page argues for five principles that ought to undergird this undertaking, namely, respect but do not privilege military experience, teach the just war theory, encourage students to be aware of the tradition and techniques of nonviolence, encourage students to deconstruct and demythologize, and recognize the importance of military virtue.

Read more about this topic:  Peace And Conflict Studies

Famous quotes containing the words teaching, peace, conflict, studies and/or military:

    It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child’s interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.
    Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)

    So in peace our tasks we ply,
    Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
    In our arts we find our bliss,
    I have mine and he has his.
    Unknown. Pangur Ban (l. 25–28)

    Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.
    Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)

    In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)