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Speaking Vegetarian: Toward Nonspeciesist Language by George Jacobs

Speaking Vegetarian: Toward Nonspeciesist Language
Paper presented at the World Vegetarian Congress
8-14 November 2004
Florianopolis, Brazil
George Jacobs, Ph.D.
President, Vegetarian Society (Singapore)

Please see the paper on http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/JacobsNonspeciasistLanguage.pdf

Posted by Evelin at 12:48 AM | Comments (0)
Education, Conflict and Social Cohesion Edited by Sobhi Tawil and Alexandra Harley

Education, Conflict and Social Cohesion
Edited by Sobhi Tawil and Alexandra Harley
http://publishing.unesco.org/details.aspx?Code_Livre=4249
23,80 € €
Livre, 438 pages, maps, appendix, tables
Format: 24 x 17 cm
2004, 92-3-103962-8
UNESCO Publishing / IBE

Is schooling a potential catalyst for the outbreak of identity-based conflict? How can education contribute to social and civic reconstruction, particularly in societies emerging from violent internal conflict? Education, Conflict and Social Cohesion explores these questions and more in societies as diverse as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Guatemala, Lebanon and Mozambique, Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Sri Lanka. Using a common analytical framework, the studies assess changing conceptualizations of social cohesion as reflected in the shifting curriculum paradigms and rationales that have governed educational policy reform. In doing so, each of the studies examines the potent role of curriculum policy in reconstructing social and civic identities and the challenges that policy makers in each of these societies have been confronted with in terms of changing definitions of national citizenship. These challenges range from the determination of language policies in multilingual and multicultural societies, to the sensitive and sometimes contentious learning content related to the reinterpretation of national history, and the development of a sense of common citizenship and of shared destiny. Based on these experiences, Education, Conflict and Social Cohesion argues that in order to ensure that processes of education reform are meaningful contributions to reconciliation and peacebuilding, the subtle and complex relationships between schooling and conflict need to be explicitly recognised and examined.

Posted by Evelin at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)
E-Discussion on Gender and Conflict Prevention/Resolution

INSTRAW is pleased to invite you to participate in an e-discussion on gender and conflict prevention/resolution

Within the inter-connected fields of conflict prevention and conflict resolution, the crosscutting dimension of gender must be analysed, integrated and acted-up. Not only do gender-roles (femininities and masculinities) need to addressed, but women and girls must be included in all of the stages of conflict prevention and conflict resolution initiatives. Women have the fundamental right to participate in decision-making regarding their communities and countries; additionally, their inclusion is pivotal to ensuring accurate information and inclusive and sustainable programmes.

The central question of this e-discussion is: "How do we ensure the integration of gender and the inclusion of women and girls in conflict prevention/resolution?" Specifically, "What research and capacity-building needs to be developed?"

Purpose:- To share thoughts and resources.
- To strategically plan and coordinate efforts.
- To brainstorm research and capacity-building needs and potential case studies.

Logistics:
This discussion will be held in English (though we also encourage the contribution of resources in Spanish and French) and will be dynamically moderated with specific questions for discussion.

Who:
Academics, UN and NGO staff, government representatives: in short, people with expertise and interest in this broadly defined field.

When:
22 Nov-4 Dec 2004
RSVP by Monday 22 November 2004 !!!
To Kristin Valasek: kvalasek@un-instraw.org
Spread the News: Please forward this invite to others that might be interested.

Posted by Evelin at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)
Giving Credit As to Our Motto

Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies would like to give Shulamith Koenig and her Adlerian group the due recognition and appreciation for having forged the motto "breaking through the vicious cycle of humiliation"! For that purpose a team created by PDHRE is now developing an international dialogue between women and men about transforming the patriarchal system into a human rights system.

Since several decades, Shulamith Koenig has used the motto "breaking through the cycle of humiliation" which she developed with her Adlerian friends thirty years ago. She is proud of being the first to use this motto in this sense, and with more power and essence than the mere "breaking the cycle of humiliation." Her version is "breaking through the vicious cycle of humiliation." In her words, "you do not ''break a cycle,' you 'break through a cycle'... It is a vicious cycle...!"

Shulamith Koenig is the executive Director and Founder of PDHRE, The People's Movement for Human Rights Education. She spearheaded a worldwide human rights education advocacy and implementation campaign and the promotion of an implementation strategy - a Decade of Human Rights Education - with the UN Human Rights Center, the UN Commission on Human Rights, and at the Vienna Conference. Shulamith Koenig has initiated the development of Human Rights Cities and has worked in more then 60 countries for women and men to promote the holistic vision of human rights as a way of life and how to claim them. According to Shula, "Every human being knows when injustice is present, every human being wants to move away from humiliation."
On 10th of December 2003, Shulamith Koenig was awarded the UN Prize in the Field of Human Rights, which since 1968 is given to five people every five years. Previous awardees include Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and James Grant amongst others. More details can be found on www.pdhre.org.

Posted by Evelin at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
The Common Ground News Service, November 23, 2004

The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations.

Please note: The views expressed in the articles and in CGNews-PiH are those of the authors, not of CGNews or its affiliates.

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UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ALL ARTICLES ARE AVAILABLE FOR RE-PUBLICATION.

Article #1
Title: Silencing a modern Scheherazade
Author: Farzaneh Milani
Publication: The Christian Science Monitor
Date: November 17, 2004
Milani believes that "the time is ripe for a less homogenized, more diversified representation of the Iranian people." Concerned that U.S. views of Iran are based purely on the hostage crisis of 1979, and one-sided works such as "Not Without My Daugher", Milani believes that the voice of moderate, modern women in Iran, such as Nobel Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi, should not be silenced by the trade embargo.

Article #2
Title: Which way is west for Turkey?
Author: Soli Ozel
Publication: The Daily Star
Date: November 11, 2004
Ozel looks at Turkey's foreign policy "balancing act" between the EU and the U.S. particularly in light of the War on Iraq and with consideration to the large Kurdish populations in both Turkey and Iraq.

Article #3
Title: New surge of Americans studying in the Arab world
Author: Dan Murphy
Publication: The Christian Science Monitor
Date: November 10, 2004
Some of the over 480 Americans studying at the American Univeristy of Cairo explain why they decided to study in the Middle East, their experiences in the region, and how they are perceived by locals and fellow students both before and after 9/11.

Article #4
Title: Clash or Dialogue: Reality and perception
Author: Jason Erb and Noha Bakr
Publication: ~~Common Ground Series~~ in partnership with Al Hayat
Date:
Erb & Bakr's article is the third in a series on Arab/Muslim - Western Relations commissioned by Search for Common Ground that has been running in Middle Eastern publications over the last month. Arguing that inter-civilizational cooperation and coexistence is the norm rather than the exception, Erb and Bakr redefine Huntington's thesis as "a minority clash of fundamentalisms, whose followers exploit anxieties and frustration caused by genuine political conflicts to further their own ideological agendas."

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Article #1
Silencing a modern Scheherazade
Farzaneh Milani
(CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.)In the old and turbulent history of Iran, women have relied on words as their weapon of choice to struggle for peace and justice. Their foremother, Scheherazade, knew the futility of fighting injustice through violent means. For one thousand and one nights, under the looming threat of having her head chopped off, she resorted to storytelling to cure a serial killer, her husband King Shahriyar.

Recognizing the formidable power of words, Shirin Ebadi, the modern-day Scheherazade, has also resorted to words to fight for human rights and human dignity. Ms. Ebadi - a human rights lawyer and one of Iran's first women judges - is however, forbidden to publish her memoirs in the United States because of a trade embargo against three countries: Sudan, Cuba, and Iran. Coming from a land that has no exact equivalent for the term "to sue," the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate is suing the American government. Challenging the regulations imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ebadi calls the ban "a critical missed opportunity both for Americans to learn more about my country and its people from a variety of Iranian voices and for a better understanding to be achieved between our two countries."

Ebadi has a point. Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of new titles made available to the American reading public every year are translated works.

Furthermore, with no official relations with the Iranian government, with new prohibitions on direct access to the people, with travel and tourism virtually stopped, it is hard for Americans to see Iran beyond the headlines. Misunderstandings and misperceptions are rampant.

In spite of its long history of cooperation and friendship with the US, which was interrupted by the 1979 revolution, especially the hostage crisis, Iran is represented as an intractable enemy. Its dominant image
now is that of a country-turned-jailer; a country taking Americans, no less diplomats and emissaries, hostage.

Twenty-five years after the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, Iranians are held hostage by the image of their own hostage-taking. This image is deeply etched in the collective memory of Americans. And it is the basis of the most popular movies and books on Iran. Consider the New York Times bestseller list, which was started in 1931: Not a single book about Iran appeared on it in the first 50 years. But the hostage crisis quickly changed that. A slew of new books, responding to the concerns of the time, revolving around the theme of captivity were published - eight of them scaled the Times bestseller list, attracting unprecedented attention from mainstream
newspapers, radio, and television.

While scholarly works on Iran reach the hearts and minds of barely a few thousand Americans, "Not Without My Daughter," for instance, sold more than 12 million copies, to become the most popular book ever written about Iran in the US. The "true" story of Betty Mahmoody and her daughter imprisoned in Iran by her husband, it fully sensationalized the theme of hostage-taking. Bookjacket notes state:"Imagine yourself alone and vulnerable, trapped by a husband you thought you trusted, and held prisoner in his native Iran; a land where women have no rights and Americans are despised."

Fanning the flames of antagonism between the two peoples, the majority of these books are claustrophobic nightmares. They evoke images of Iranian women drifting zombie-like in their all-enveloping veils portrayed as prisons shrunk to the size of a woman's body. They depict countless chest-pounding men who burn effigies of American presidents, desecrate the American flag, scream "Death to America" in unison.

These politicized and polarizing accounts disregard the variety and complexity of perspectives inside the country and do not promote a better understanding between the two nations.

The time is ripe for a less homogenized, more diversified representation of the Iranian people. Ebadi - praised by President Bush for her efforts to fight for human rights - is no friend of extremism. Her memoirs almost certainly will portray how women are reorganizing the political and cultural landscape of Iran.

For well over a century, women have been a moderating, modernizing force in Iran with Shirin Ebadi as one of its most articulate and successful representatives. Her voice, like Scheherazade's, is a beacon of hope and temperance. It should not be silenced. It ought to be heard.

**Farzaneh Milani, a native of Iran, is director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Visit the website at: www.csmonitor.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
(c) Copyright 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright permission can be obtained by contacting lawrenced@csps.com.

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Article #2
Which way is west for Turkey?
Soli Ozel
When Turkey's Parliament voted in March 2003 against allowing American troops to open a northern front against Iraq, Turkey's traditional strategic partnership with the United States ended. The two countries still recognize many mutual interests, but now they manage these interests on a far different basis.

The vote shocked "old Europe" and the Arab world as much as the Bush administration. Europeans who considered Turkey a potential Trojan horse for America within the European Union were forced to reconsider. For many Arabs, the vote showed that Turkey was not an American lackey and would not cooperate with American imperial designs, despite close Turkish-Israeli relations.

Long-simmering disagreements between Turkey and the U.S. came to a boil with the emergence of the Kurds of northern Iraq as the Pentagon's main allies in the Iraq war. The American administration made it clear that military intervention by Turkey in Northern Iraq would not be tolerated.

That message was confirmed on July 4, 2003, when American forces arrested several Turkish Special Forces in the town of Sulaimaniya, humiliating them by putting sacks over their heads as they took them into custody. Only intervention by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney two-and-a-half days later secured the release of the soldiers, who were alleged to have been planning clandestine operations within the Kurdish zone.

Despite ongoing tensions, the Turkish government has been eager to mend relations with America, as it is anxious to have some influence over developments in Iraq. So the authorities responded quickly to the Bush administration's request for Turkish troops to join the coalition, although the idea was stillborn - rejected by both the Kurds and the American-appointed Governing Council in Iraq.

America has its own reasons to patch up the relationship. Turkey's secular, capitalistic, democratic order has become especially valuable to the Bush administration as it seeks to integrate the wider Middle East into the world system by liberalizing its economy and democratizing its polity. Thus, America trumpeted its continuing support for Turkish membership in the EU, notably in President Bush's speech in June at Istanbul's Galatasaray University - at a bridge that joins Asia and Europe.

But serious bilateral problems remain. The government is irritated by U.S. occupation forces' neglect of the northern Iraqi bases of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist insurgents who have fought a 15-year-war against Turkey. More broadly, the government regards the U.S. as too complacent vis-a-vis Kurdish political developments and unmoved by Turkey's concerns about Kurdish independence. The U.S., for its part, is unhappy with the government's objections to unrestricted American use of the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey, as well as by recent tensions with Israel.

In the meantime, Turkey is moving closer to the EU, with the government overcoming nationalistic objections in the Parliament to push through comprehensive reforms. Turkey also showed its good will over Cyprus, removing a nagging political obstacle to EU membership. These steps led to the European Commission's recent recommendation to begin accession negotiations with Turkey.

The EU accession process has also underpinned a shift in Turkish policy on Iraq. Previously, Turkey viewed Iraq solely in the context of its domestic Kurdish problem. But widespread European opposition to the war removed the possibility of Turkish military intervention, forcing the government to develop another vision of Turkey's interests.

At the same time, the Iraqi Kurds also appear to appreciate how much they need a friendly Turkey. The northern border with Turkey is their lifeline to the outside world. As a result, Turkey no longer considers a federalized Iraq a threat to its security, as long as each federal unit maintains a measure of ethnic diversity.

Of course, Turkey remains opposed to an independent Kurdistan. But now its concern is more closely tied to regional politics than to the Kurdish issue. Turkey has no desire to serve as a strategic counterweight to Iran and believes that only a territorially intact Iraq can continue to play that role. Furthermore, Turkey is concerned about the possibility of civil war in Kurdistan between the two largest Kurdish factions.

But, unlike either Iran or Syria, Turkey genuinely wishes to see a strong and representative government in Baghdad. Thanks to EU pressures, Turkey's domestic Kurdish problem is well on the way to being resolved democratically, with most Kurdish leaders in Turkey expressing their commitment to Turkish unity.

For Turkey to consider military intervention in Kurdistan, EU member states would first have to renege on their commitment to negotiate Turkish accession. Equally dramatic would be any attempt by the Kurds to forcibly change the demographic balance of the multiethnic city of Kirkuk.

Turkey would prefer that Kirkuk, with its large Turkmen population, be given special status in the forthcoming draft Iraqi constitution. The U.S. also shows signs of understanding the importance of maintaining a multiethnic Kirkuk and is putting pressure on its Kurdish allies.

Turkish diplomacy has thus become a well-calibrated balancing act, moving closer to European positions in the Middle East, but eager to maintain close relations with the U.S. If this approach succeeds, Europe's bridge to Asia may also become its bridge to America.

**Soli Ozel teaches in Bilgi University's Department of International Relations and is a columnist for the Turkish daily newspaper Sabah. This article was first published in the Daily Star in cooperation with Project Syndicate.
Source: The Daily Star
Website: www.dailystar.com.lb
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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Article #3
New surge of Americans studying in the Arab world
Dan Murphy
(CAIRO)Growing up in an observant Jewish family outside Boston, Mimi Asnes was always interested in the Middle East. Not surprisingly, her focus was on Israel, a topic of almost daily conversation at the Jewish day school she attended until the ninth grade.

But as a sophomore at Harvard, the diminutive Ms. Asnes struck up a friendship with a Palestinian-American woman who shared her love of hiking and the outdoors. That bond - and her friend's different perspective on Israel - sparked an interest in the broader Middle East. "I'd never met anyone who I liked and respected who had any animosity toward Israel,'' says Asnes. "I began to question the assumptions I grew up with."

Today, Asnes is one of a record number of Americans studying Arabic and the Arab world. They are on the leading edge of an educational boom that has seen the initial shock and anger at the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks feed a greater engagement with a region long neglected by US students and universities.

This fall about 480 Americans are studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo (AUC), more than double the pre-9/11 enrollment. A Modern Language Association survey from fall 2002 found that 10,600 American students were studying Arabic, up from 5,500 in 1998. Educators say that number has continued to rise, with dozens of universities adding Arabic to their curricula.

Interest even pre-9/11
The numbers are still modest when compared to the estimated 350,000 US students studying German. The surge in interest now mirrors the numbers of Americans who studied Russian during the cold war. But even before
Sept. 11, the absence of Arab students reflected an American blind spot, given the Arab World's long history of conflict, vast oil reserves, and its 280 million people. In testimony to Congress this year, Edward Djerejian, a former ambassador to Israel and Syria, said the State Department has only five diplomats with Arabic strong enough
to defend US policies on Arab TV.

While many of the more advanced students like Asnes began their studies before Sept. 11, almost all say the increased US focus on the region has deepened the incentive to learn, with a surging number of job opportunities back home for people with proficiency in the language. "I just found myself really drawn to the language,'' says Khalid Wulfsberg, a rangy grad student from Murfreesboro, Tenn., who prefers his Arab first name to his given name, Paul, which sounds like an unpleasant bodily function in Arabic. "But as an American, the context of the war is inescapable."

Asnes also says her interest in the language has little to do with Sept. 11 or the war in Iraq. She says that after a year spent working at a Palestinian women's shelter in Nazarath, she came to see language as crucial to understanding. "We've seen the importance of words in spinning the Middle East conflicts,'' she says. "I want to be in control of my own spin, and that puts less distance between me and what's happening. When I was in Nazareth, just after a year of Arabic, I was able to make connections with people that would have been totally different if I only spoke Hebrew."

Zeinab Taha, director of the AUC's elite Center for Arabic Studies Abroad, or CASA, says that not only have the numbers of students risen, but so has their overall standard. "Five years ago, half of our applicants couldn't finish the entrance exam,'' she says. "This year, every single question was answered in Arabic. Long responses in
complete paragraphs."

CASA, funded by the US government, is an advanced course that gives a full ride to students who already have some proficiency in Arabic, and this year it has 40 students, up from about 15 before 9/11.

The students in Cairo represent the broad spectrum of American
education. Many of the students at CASA are working toward advanced
degrees in Middle Eastern studies with an eye toward jobs in academia
or with development organizations. Some speak of working for the CIA or
the US defense establishment.

Nora Cundy, a CASA student from Paris, Maine, who worked in rural
Jordan after graduating from college, says her interest in the region
grew after working at a peace camp for Palestinian and Israeli children
near her hometown in Maine. "What I came to understand in Jordan was
that language was the most important root to understanding this region."

US undergraduates - there are about 300 spending a semester or a year here - are typically less certain about what they will do in the future, but almost all say they expect the region to remain a focus of US interest for decades to come.

Trae Stephens, a junior at Georgetown's school of foreign service, is spending the fall in Cairo before hustling back to Washington for classes and the start of the spring ultimate-frisbee season. He says he hopes to work for US intelligence when he graduates and recalls a guest lecture to his class by former CIA Director George Tenet as a pivotal moment. "It was very clear to me that this man knew a lot more than we know, and that seemed a good thing. It was sort of the epiphany,'' he says. "As globalization grows, our national security is more at risk every day. I want to be one of those people helping to make policy recommendations that can keep us out of international messes."

For some, their engagement is already yielding broader perspectives. Mr. Wulfsberg was living with a Palestinian-Jordanian family on Sept. 11, when a news broadcast interrupted an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. "Everyone was immediately denying that Muslims could have been involved, though this quickly moved to a lecture on US foreign policy," he says. But that evening he also visited another Jordanian family who seemed personally overwhelmed by the tragedy. "They were crying and distraught. Until the invasion of Afghanistan started, I couldn't get in a cab without the driver apologizing for what had happened at home."

Khalid the Norwegian?
Wulfsberg tries to limit his time with other foreigners, socializing with Egyptian and Afghani friends who study at Al Azhar, the ancient university that draws Muslim students from more than 90 countries. He tells people on the streets that he's Norwegian, mostly so people don't try to practice their English with him, but also because he's grown tired of becoming a stand-in for the US government.

"Sometimes I feel a little guilty about it, because I could be making a dent in some people's impressions of the US,'' he says. "You know, here's this American guy, and he's interested in learning about Islam and our culture."

**Dan Murphy is a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Visit the website at: www.csmonitor.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
(c) Copyright 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright permission can be obtained by contacting lawrenced@csps.com.

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Article #4
Clash or Dialogue: Reality and perception
Jason Erb and Noha Bakr
After 9/11, Americans showed a renewed interest in Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." In it Huntington argues that future wars will be fought not on ideological or even interest-based lines, but due to cultural and 'civilizational' differences and affinities.

To look at the rhetoric of militant extremist groups like al-Qai'da is to wonder if Huntington and his supporters might be right. There are many examples of Muslim preachers who teach that there can be no reconciling between the 'world of Islam' and the 'world of unbelief.' Muslim extremists do indeed take verses of the Quran and sayings of Muhammad to justify atrocities against non-Muslims.

There are also less well-known preachers of hate. For example, the United States has its share of 'holy men' who claim that Muslims are evil and that morality has no place in a war against an evil enemy. Christian preachers of hate claim they are in the midst of an apocalyptic and existential war between good and evil, and so violence against non-Christians is a Biblical imperative.

Over the centuries Christians and Muslims have indeed fought each other on numerous fronts. They have also cooperated and coexisted on countless others. We are not facing a clash of civilizations, where religious and ethnic identities determine the fault lines. We are facing a minority clash of fundamentalisms, whose followers exploit anxieties and frustration caused by genuine political conflicts to further their own ideological agendas.

Coexistence and cooperation among civilizations is not just possible, it is by far the historical norm. Historically, large Christian and Jewish communities prospered and were crucial actors in the economic and social life of places like Baghdad, Damascus and Istanbul; Muslims, Jews and Christians coexisted for centuries in Bosnia and Spain; Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and animists lived together peacefully in South East Asia, as they generally do now throughout the world; art forms, cuisine, language, music and institutions of one 'civilization' frequently bear the direct influence of another civilization. The degree of modern international trade and commerce shows that, despite conflicts and differences, different people still build cooperative, mutually beneficial and peaceful relations.

Efforts at promoting the benefits that derive from a dialogue of civilizations have long gone beyond the needs of basic survival and material concerns. Prior to 9/11, the United Nations declared the year 2001 to be the year of dialogue among civilizations, and in May 2002 1,350 representatives of over 1,000 civil society organizations from more than 100 countries gathered to build upon a common vision of coexistence.

Even with oft-publicized rants from preachers of hate, interfaith organizations and initiatives regularly bring different people together to discuss ways to help ease the suffering of the underprivileged, build peaceful societies and solve conflict. The World Conference of Religions for Peace, for example, regularly meets to pool the resources and develop the capacity of religious leaders to address these common humanitarian concerns.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks American Christians formed protective cordons around American mosques and some even wore headscarves in solidarity with conservative American Muslim women; Iraqi Muslims condemned extremists who recently attacked Iraqi Christian churches and vow to protect this unique and vital part of their community; and Jewish and Palestinian activists still work together to protect the human rights of all residents of the Holy Land.

Most Americans are aware of Christian and Jewish involvement in nonviolent movements in America. Many, however, would be surprised to learn that Muslims have been active and crucial participants in pluralistic nonviolent civil resistance movements with Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, Blacks in South Africa and other religions in Indonesia and sub-Saharan Africa.

There is indeed a growing divide in the world, but it is not a timeless, intractable or divinely inspired conflict. It is a conflict driven by xenophobes based on anxieties and existential fears generated in a rapidly changing world. Proponents of clash theories make sense of their basic alienation by making the 'Other' the focus of all that is wrong with the world. So while there are differences in values, perspective and opinion on many issues, that has not taken away from the existence of common human desires, needs and values of our shared humanity, nor does it mean that current political differences are beyond human capacity to solve.

Dialogue and communication for understanding are among the first steps towards peace and such dialogue efforts are crucial bridges between cultures. When conflict exists, it is easy to dismiss the Christian imperative to 'turn the other cheek,' the Muslim imperative to 'repel evil with good,' or the Jewish imperative to 'love thy neighbor as thyself.' Most people, however, continue to live by these rules and see the value of continuing the dialogue of civilizations.

Dialogue and cooperation occurs despite the differences between peoples and the tug of fear-induced xenophobia or fundamentalism. In this time of growing insecurity, however, we must redouble our efforts to listen to what the other side is in fact saying, to really understand what the other side means. We need to continue building the global civic-fabric of our world to increase opportunities for relationships of trust and dialogue of respect. We need to push new audiences to get to know the Other from the Other, to learn about each other's differences and similarities on a firsthand basis.

Through increased dialogue and understanding we will strengthen and develop ties that allow for open communication. Such dialogue and communication can lessen the chances that our fears will take over and that these perceived differences will result in violence or conflict. This is a wellspring of peace and where our real security rests.

**Jason Erb and Noha Bakr are International Affairs Representatives for Quaker Service-AFSC and are currently based in Amman, Jordan. Quaker Service-AFSC is an international peacebuilding and development organization that seeks to promote reconciliation, sustainable development and non-violence.
Source: This article is part of a series of views on the relationship between the Islamic/Arabic world and the West, published in partnership with the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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About CGNews-PiH
The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. This service is one result of a set of working meetings held in partnership with His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal in June 2003.

Every two weeks, CGNews-PiH will distribute 2-5 news articles, op-eds, features, and analyses that aid in developing and analyzing the current and future relationship of the West and Arab/Muslim world. Articles will be chosen based on accuracy, balance, and their ability to improve understanding and communication across borders and regions. They will also reflect the need for constructive dialogue around issues of global importance. Selections will be authored by local and international experts and leaders who will analyze and discuss a broad range of relevant issues. We invite you to submit any articles you feel are compatible with the goals of this news service.

We look forward to hearing from you, and welcome any questions, concerns, or comments you may have about this service. Please forward this message to colleagues and friends who may also wish to subscribe to the service. To subscribe, send an email to subscribe-cgnewspih@sfcg.org with subscribe in the subject line.

If you are a member of the media, please join us in promoting constructive dialogue to improve understanding and perceptions. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If you choose to republish any of the articles, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org

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E-mail: cgnewspih@sfcg.org
Editors:
Emad Khalil
Amman Editor

Oussama Safa
Rabat Editor

Juliette Schmidt
& Elyte Baykun
Washington Editors
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Posted by Evelin at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Newsletter from the Human Rights House Network, November 23. 2004

NEWSLETTER FROM THE HUMAN RIGHTS HOUSE NETWORK

1 Widespread use of forced labour in Northern Uganda
Forced labour is rampant in the three northernmost districts of Uganda. It is deployed by the Ugandan Army. A local human rights NGO, Human Rights Focus, last week declared its intention to go to court in an effort to stop the use of forced labour.

2 Isolation of Belarus is not a strategic policy
An open dialogue with Belarus is a threat to President Lukashenko´s dictatorship. Sanctions and isolation will strengthen the status quo, said representatives of the Belarusian opposition when they visited the Human Rights House in Oslo last week.

3 IHF Appeal to EU: - Impunity in Chechnya
- The second phase of the armed conflict in the Chechen Republic, defined by the Russian Federation as a “counter-terrorist operation” has lasted five years. Civilians represent the primary victims of this conflict, and blatant violations of human rights and humanitarian law have been pervasive. The climate of impunity dominates the situation in and around Chechnya, reads an appeal from the International Helsinki Federation to the EU.

4 Moroccan authorities pursued to hand back passport to Daddach
Human rights activists in Western Sahara have launched a campaign to pursue Moroccan authorities to hand back the passport to the 2002 Rafto Laureate Sidi Mohammed Daddach. The campaign has been initiated by a newly established human rights organisation in Western Sahara.

5 Court decision against Azerbaijani opposition leaders maintained
Last week the Azerbaijani Court of Grave Crimes decided to maintain its decision of imprisonment against seven opposition leaders accused of participating in demonstrations after the elections in October 2003.

6 Condemns closure of Azerbaijani daily
International organisations condemn the Azerbaijani authorities´ freezing of the assets of "Yeni Musavat", the country´s main opposition daily, on 16 November 2004. The move has forced the paper to cease publishing. The decision was taken on the grounds that the newspaper failed to pay fines and damages totalling some 125,000 euros.

7 Poland: Controversies around Equality March in Poznan
On 17-21 November, the Days of Equality and Tolerance was held in Poznan. The culminating point of the event was going to be the Equality March planned for 20 November. The City Mayor issued the permit to organise the march. However, the right wing local government activists protested, claiming that the march is an "endorsement of homosexuality".

8 No hope for dialogue with Mugabe, says opposition leader
-There´s no hope for an open dialogue with President Robert Mugabe, said Morgan Tsvangirai, Leader of ´Movement for Democratic Change´ (MDC) last Friday. Mr Tsvangirai leads the most important opposition party in Zimbabwe and visited the Human Rights House in Oslo.

9 A tribute to Rebiya Kadeer
On November 7th the 2004 Rafto laureate, Rebiya Kadeer, was celebrated in Bergen, Norway. The ceremony was accompanied by artistic performances, as a tribute to Kadeer’s struggle for the Uyghurs’ basic human rights in the Chinese Xinjiang province. Kadeers daughter Akida expressed gratitude on behalf of her mother on a telephone line from the USA.

10 Norwegian Minister of Justice wants policy on defenders
- Haven't we done so, we should do it, said Norwegian Minister of Justice Odd Einar Dørum when confronted with the fact that Norway, unlike the EU, has not yet developed a transparent, comprehensive policy on human rights defenders.

11 Ebadi wants a human rights house in Iran
- Human rights defenders are central in the dialogue between civilizations, said Shirin Ebadi at the opening of a conference in Oslo 13 October hosted by the Human Rights House Foundation. The Iranian Nobel Laureate expressed the need for a Human Rights House in Iran where defenders can come together. Read Ebadi's and other speeches at the HRH conference


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Posted by Evelin at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)
The Composer Who Cried, a Story Told by Carlos Sluzki

A Story of the Composer Who Cried
Embedded in the multi-story 1942 Julien Duvivier movie “Tales of Manhattan”
© Carlos E. Sluzki
2004

A young, struggling composer – long, unkempt hair, bumbling, and all – has submitted a symphonic piece of his own in a national contest. He receives notification that not only his piece has been selected and will be premiered in a concert of the city’s prestigious symphony orchestra, but also that he is being invited to conduct his composition, as part of a full concert the rest of which under the baton of the orchestra’s stable conductor.

Stretching his last reserves, he barely manages to buy a second-hand tailcoat at a pawn shop. His wife does the best she can to remodel the jacket, obviously tailored for a thinner man than the rather rotund composer.

When the day comes, he arrives to the concert hall, and the stable conductor of the Symphony cordially ushers him to the podium. The orchestra begins the concert, under the rather impassionate conduction of the composer. All goes well until, as he gesticulates vigorously, his tailcoat begins to disintegrate at the seams. The audience is first surprised, then giggles, and finally laughs aloud. The composer continues while obviously distressed, not understanding what is going on, until the first violin approaches him and whisper in his ear what is happening. The composer, startled, reaches to his own back, only to confirm that the sleeves of the tailcoat have detached. While the audience continues to laugh, he tears off his tailcoat, sits on the podium, and, hiding his face in his hands, cries. The audience shifts progressively from laughter to a rather silent embarrassment. Then, a steady applause is heard: from a balcony, standing up, his own tailcoat off, the revered stable conductor of the symphony orchestra is applauding. Slowly but steadily, all the men in the audience take their jackets and begin to clap. The steady applause of the whole audience, and of the orchestra, brings back the composer to the podium, who continues directing what is his triumphal debut.

Three issues merit comment in this moving story:
I. What the composer expresses is shame and not humiliation – it is clearly internalized embarrassment, no anger at the audience but only at himself;

II. the public display of shame – an emotion generally enacted only in an intimate space, if at all – greatly increases the audience’s ability to identify with their target (it makes him human) and explains their progressive discomfort if not guilt about the effect of their own prior behavior; and

III. the noble enactment of the orchestra director acted as catalytic agent, modeling a reparative behavior than, when made collective, reversed the shame. Before that enactment, the audience didn’t know what to do and may have done nothing. This last scene illustrates the powerful impact of a (in this case benevolent) leader on a disconcerted crowd.

Yours,
Carlos

Posted by Evelin at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
GandhiServe Foundation - Newsletter

Newsletter No.5, October - December 2004
For a World of Peace and Nonviolence !

Dear Reader,

As it is very inspiring to learn about the various activities remembering and promoting Gandhi's life and works allover, we introduce with this newsletter the "Gandhian News from Around the World". Please keep sending us your feedback so that we can steadily improve our newsletter. Thank you!

New on Website: Gandhi's Diary of 1916/17 !
With great care we scanned the fragile original personal diary of Mahatma Gandhi of the year 1916/17. Now it is fully displayed in our Online Image Archive (Documents > Gandhis Diary > 1916-17). The diary covers the period between October 27, 1916 and November 14, 1917. It includes Gandhi's first satyagraha campaign in India in favour of the indigo farmers in Bihar. Gandhi's daily notes - in Gujarati - are brief and legible. We would appreciate the help of a volunteer to translate the diary into English.
More: http://www.gandhiserve.org/cgi-bin/if/imageFolio.cgi?direct=Documents/Gandhis%20Diary/1916-17

Events in Fall 2004
http://www.gandhiserve.org/activities/events/events_2004.html

Our next Group Tours to India and South Africa
http://www.gandhiserve.org/travel/travelindex.html

Gandhian News from Around the World
> Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, Arun Gandhi, on a mission in Palestine and Israel to preach unarmed, peaceful struggle:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3593726.stm
> Gandhi's photographer, Henry Cartier-Bresson dies at 95:
http://www.columbiatribune.com/2004/Aug/20040805News025.asp
> Nelson Mandela: "You sent us Gandhi, we sent back a Mahatma.":
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=36290
> Narayan Desai presents Gandhi Festival in Ahmedabad:
http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=93941
> Animation Film on Mahatma Gandhi shown at International Film Festivals:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/807529.cms
> New book on the Gandhi-Mirabehn relationship:
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IE420040930035813&Page=4&Title=Features+-+People+%26+Lifestyle&Topic=0
> Gandhi one of the 'greatest 100 South Africans':
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow/864912.cms
> Prisoners appear for an examination on the life and works of Mahatma Gandhi:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/861654.cms
> Patti Smith pays tribute to Mahatma Gandhi:
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=6272791

May Peace Prevail on Earth!


Peter Rühe
Founder - Chairperson


Please share this newsletter with likeminded people. Thank you!
Read previous issues of the newsletter: http://www.gandhiserve.org/newsletter/newsletter.html
If you have a likeminded web site we would appreciate a reciprocal link exchange. Please list our site as "GandhiServe Foundation - Mahatma Gandhi Research and Media Service, http://www.gandhiserve.org/index.html", and let us know your URL.
Make a donation to GandhiServe Foundation: http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/donations.html Thank you!
To subscribe the newsletter send a blank email to: newsletter@gandhimail.org?subject=subscribe
If you don't want to receive the newsletter please send a blank email to: newsletter@gandhimail.org?subject=unsubscribe Mind that your email address must be the same on which you received the newsletter.

Impressum: GandhiServe Foundation, Rathausstrasse 51a, 12105 Berlin, Germany, Tel: +49.30.70206374
Fax: +49.30.70206373/7054054, E-mail: mail at gandhimail.org, http://www.gandhiserve.org

Posted by Evelin at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)
Training Course “Human Rights and Peace Education in Europe” 2004-2006

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear friends!

It is an honour and a pleasure for me to provide you again with the latest news on the First UNESCO/EURED In-Service Teacher Training Course “Human Rights and Peace Education in Europe” 2004-2006.

After a successful first seminar in Gernika/Spain in July 2004, we are now preparing the next step:
SEMINAR 2 in Magdeburg/Germany, 26th of February to 2nd of March, 2005
Please, find the seminar folder, including detailed information on the programme, the experts and the main topics, attached.
You are very warmly welcome to distribute the folder to whoever you think is interested. Thank you very much in advance for your kind support!

By the way, our website www.aspr.ac.at/eured.htm got re-mastered. You are welcome to have a look!


Hoping that we will keep going this successful way together, please receive my best wishes from Vienna!

In peace,
Ursula Gamauf


* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Mag. Ursula E. Gamauf, M.A.
UNESCO/EURED Course Co-ordinator
ÖSFK - Office Vienna
Wiedner Gürtel 10
A-1040 Wien
Tel/Fax: 0043/ 1/ 796 57 11
Mobile: 0043/ 676/ 782 02 18
eMail: gamauf@aspr.ac.at
Website: www.aspr.ac.at/eured.htm

Posted by Evelin at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)
New Material at the Classical Adlerian Psychology Web Site

New Material at the Classical Adlerian Psychology Web Site:

1. Mind Map of Classical Adlerian Psychology
A new "Mind Map" offering a global view of Classical Adlerian
philosophy, theory, and practice, has been posted at
http://go.ourworld.nu/hstein/. It illustrates how these many facets
integrate into an elegant, coherent whole. This pdf file requires
Acrobat Reader, free from Adobe at
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

2. Discussion Forum Threads at Behavior OnLine
Two primary discussion threads have evolved in the last four months:
we have generated informative, scholarly exchanges covering seventeen
of Adler's early journal articles (1898-1908) from "The Collected
Clinical Works of Alfred Adler," Volume 2; and started a thread titled
"Adler From the Ground Up," a gradual introduction to Adler's ideas.
Whatever your background, we have something to enrich your knowledge
of Classical Adlerian psychology. Join us for an extraordinary
opportunity to learn from, question, or challenge the opinions of an
astute group of experienced Adlerians from all over the world. To
visit or participate, go to
http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/forumdisplay.php?f=6.

3. Certification as a Classical Adlerian Training Analyst:
A new, Advanced Level of Certification is now being offered to become
a Classical Adlerian Training Analyst, capable of teaching Classical
Adlerian Theory and Practice, as well as conducting a Study-Analysis
and Individual Case Supervision. Information about this Advanced
Certification may be found online at
http://go.ourworld.nu/hstein/dist-tra.htm. After reading the
material, if you have any questions, send an e-mail to
htstein@att.net, or call me at (360) 647-5670. Please note that state
or other local licensing in psychotherapy, as well as our Basic
Certification, are prerequisites for engaging in the Advanced
Certification program.
=======================================
Henry T. Stein, Ph.D., Director
Alfred Adler Institutes of San Francisco & Northwestern Washington
Distance Training in Classical Adlerian Psychotherapy
Web site: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hstein/
E-mail: HTStein@att.net
Tel: (360) 647-5670

Posted by Evelin at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
New Book by Ruth Lister on Poverty

For people who live in poverty, the stigma they face and the shame it creates can be as devastating as the economic consequences

Ruth Lister is professor of social policy at Loughborough University; her new book, Poverty, is published by Polity Press

Please see a review of her new book in the Guardian on November 17 2004.

The first four lines of the text are as follows:

No more of 'the poor'
Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin sang about it; politicians pontificate about it; "the poor" are denied it. Respect - or rather disrespect - is key to understanding what poverty means to those experiencing it...

Read the entire article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1352913,00.html.

Posted by Evelin at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
Humiliation, Helplessness Propel Outbreak of Suicide Bomber Attacks by Ronald S. Kraybill

Humiliation, Helplessness Propel Outbreak of Suicide Bomber Attacks
Reprinted with permission from Vital Theology, September 30, 2004

A critical challenge in developing strategies capable of bringing true security is understanding those who appear to threaten us. Below is an interview I recently did with Vital Theology that touches on things few Americans seem to know or understand. This ignorance causes responses that fuel the problem rather than diminish it. The decline of American and global security will be rapid so long as this ignorance continues.

Ron


Humiliation, Helplessness Propel Outbreak of Suicide Bomber Attacks
Reprinted with permission from Vital Theology, September 30, 2004

“Al-Qaida Cannot Succeed Without Our Help”

The reports of suicide bombers have been so frequent and widespread in recent weeks that the dates, places and casualty counts begin to blur. Here is a brief recap:

Aug. 24: Chechen women are the suspected suicide bombers in two plane crashes in Russia that kill 90 people;
Aug. 31: 10 people are killed in a suicide bombing near a Moscow subway station;
Aug. 31: 16 people are killed in simultaneous car bombings in southern Israel;
Sept. 14: a Palestinian suicide bomber attacks an Israeli army patrol near a West Bank checkpoint wounding two people;
Sept. 17: a suicide car bomber kills three people and wounds 23 in Baghdad;
Sept. 18: a suicide car bomber kills 23 people in Kirkuk, Iraq.

Whether the attackers are described as Chechen rebels, Hamas militants or Iraqi insurgents, there are commonalities among the people who deliberately sacrifice their lives for a cause, said Ronald S. Kraybill, professor of conflict studies at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va.

Kraybill formerly served as training director at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in South Africa and as director of Mennonite Conciliation Service in the United States. He has developed training programs at conflict resolution centers throughout Africa and North America and has led training seminars in Europe and Asia.

Terrorism is a phenomenon that is here to stay, he said, and people feeling humiliation and helplessness that result in irrational rage cause suicide bombings.

He likens the quest to understand suicide bombers with medicine’s struggle to differentiate between the symptoms and causes of malaria. While early efforts focused on treating headaches or fever, neither treatment helped reduce outbreaks of malaria. Over centuries, however, medical researchers began to figure out the underlying causes and to start to treat them.

“Suicide bombers are a symptom of an underlying disease,” said Kraybill. “Unfortunately, our ability to understand conflicts at this moment in history is probably as limited as our ability to understand disease was a century or two ago. We have leadership and broad populations investing enormous energy responding at the level of the symptoms who are totally clueless about the causes.”

The war on terrorism is an example of responding to symptoms rather than causes, he said.

“Responding to symptoms while ignoring causes prolongs the suffering. But if we get to an understanding of what the problem is that drives suicide bombers,” he said, “then we have a chance, at least, to avoid escalating the problems. We can actually contribute to the healing of our world.”

Suicide bombers are not people who one day decide to hate President Bush or President Clinton or whoever is in power, he said. They develop when humiliation and desperation fester over time.

Humiliation can result from a number of causes, including severe poverty, abuses of human rights, or a sense that one’s community is being blocked and defeated.

“It’s not just because one person feels he’s not rich enough or that he’s having a hard time in life,” said Kraybill. “It’s rather that all the things that give people meaning and a sense of coherency in the world are bound up in this. When people have that huge sense that their core community is under threat, then the notion of taking one’s own life is not so ridiculous as it may seem. There is the sense that the giving up of their own life is actually contributing to the giving of true life to many, many others and to a whole community through the cause that they’re connected to.”

Another contributing factor is a sense of helplessness. People who chronically feel humiliation may believe there is nothing they can do to improve their situation, he said.

The combination of humiliation and helplessness can result in a profound sense of rage that supersedes what others might consider rational thinking, he said. Suicide bombers believe that their humanity and values are so diminished that they will do anything to strike back.

Security measures are important, but the doctrine of security that has emerged from the American experience is focused on eliminating enemies, he said. That approach worked well when two oceans protected the country, when international travel was limited and when the most powerful weapons were monopolized by nation states.

But the world has changed and the doctrine of security held by U.S. leaders and most of the population is half a century out of date, he said.

Guerrilla warriors know they cannot militarily defeat a powerful enemy, but that’s not what they are trying to do. Instead, they are trying to provoke an attack against them that will, in turn, anger a larger population they hope to mobilize.

“So we see al-Qaida, which is seeking to stir up angry retaliation by the United States in order to bring backlash at the level of the Muslim masses,” said Kraybill. “Al-Qaida cannot succeed at that strategy without our help.”

Until recently, terrorist groups lived at the margins of their communities, but “we have played into their hands at every step of the way by giving them exactly what they want, namely overwhelming, invasive, military response. The thousands, and probably millions (of people), that we’ve driven into their arms is the real danger for our long-term security. And the danger is probably more to our children and our grandchildren than to us in the immediate moment.”

Kraybill believes that technical advances in bio-weaponry during the next couple of decades will put the power to destroy all humanity within the hands of a few individuals.

The only chance for humanity to survive is to “drain the swamps of human misery that breed the crocodiles of terror,” he said. “Right now, we’re all worried about killing crocodiles. The strategies that we’re using are going to multiply the crocodiles over the long term. There’s no way we can destroy all the people who resent us enough at this point to act as terrorists against us.”

Many of the swamp-draining steps Kraybill proposes are highly conventional. They include economic development, health care, education, employment and housing.

He does not advise against protective measures, but he estimates that 99 percent of current U.S. strategies are for protection and 1 percent are for rooting out the causes of terrorism. A plan that brings those strategies into balance is a reasonable goal, he said.

While some of the 9/11 terrorists were not particularly devout Muslims, it is possible to see a spiritual aspect to their acts when spirituality is defined as the structures that give meaning to life. Some may have been motivated by extremist views of religion, said Kraybill, but for others there was simply a religious community with which they identified.

Kraybill is currently working in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers, a separatist group, have been responsible for 60,000 deaths over 30 years, including 200 suicide bombings. The Tigers think of themselves as a clearly defined ethnic group and most are followers of Hinduism, but religion does not play a strong role in their identity.

The notion that the teachings of Islam command Iraqi insurgents to commit violence reflects a limited understanding, said Kraybill.

There are Islamic imams who speak in the name of religion and issue fatwas that instruct certain followers to engage in suicide missions, he said, but that’s the equivalent of Christian pastors endorsing certain wars. Individual leaders who may be Muslims or Christians choose to use their religion on behalf of projects they think are important, but that does not mean that the religion itself does.

Islam emphasizes conformity to authority, he said, so followers of extremist leaders may be vulnerable to excesses.

Kraybill acknowledges a dark side in all religions. “There are passages in the scriptures of Jews and Christians that are blood curdling. Great numbers of been killed with the support of leaders in both religions,” he said.

But all religions, including Islam, also have texts that encourage justice, mercy and care for enemies.

“We need to look at both the light and the darkness that’s present in all religions,” he said, “and we bear a responsibility to function in the here and now with a deep and thoughtful ethical analysis that asks what response to our current situation is appropriate in light of the guidance we receive from tradition.”

In addition, the United States’ exclusive backing of Israel in its complex dispute with Palestine has angered and humiliated many nations in the Middle East, he said. An evenhanded approach would go a long way toward restoring the confidence of other nations.

“Israeli handling of the Palestinians is a towering factor aggravating many Islamic extremists,” he said. “Huge errors have been made on both sides. I’m not sure that most American Christians have any clue about this.”

Cozy ties with other Middle East governments that are noted for human rights abuses have forced the U.S. to look the other way when violations occur, he said. His prescription calls for the United States to forcefully condemn human rights abuses wherever they occur.

“My Arabic students over the last couple of years just roll their eyes about all the fuss that was made about Saddam Hussein,” he said. “They say, yes, of course he’s a dictator and a bad guy, but so are the governments of many of the other regimes in the region.”

Hollywood also has played a major role in the humiliation of the Muslim world by invading their communities with displays of sex and infidelity that are offensive to believers, he said.

American soap operas play on television in virtually all the major cities of the world. These shows present a daily fantasy that the global community takes to be the reality of American life, he said, and this perception exists even among sophisticated, well-educated Muslims.

“If someone had set out to devise a strategy to totally discredit a nation in the global community, they could not come up with anything better than what is pumped abroad from Hollywood every day of the year,” said Kraybill. Because the Muslim community is extremely conservative with regard to the human body and sexuality, “they think that this is a land of perfidy and sin,” he said.

“Many Americans see that TV erodes traditional values,” he said, “but almost no one seems to recognize that it is also a massive force in eroding our security because it destroys our credibility in the eyes of the world.”

While international relations are often laid at the feet of government officials, there are many things that religious communities can do to help, said Kraybill.

“The Bible is explicit in its rejection of trust in weapons as a source of security. From a biblical perspective, there’s no room for fear as the primary motivator of our response to the world. The prophets say again and again, the worship God wants from us is to feed the poor, pay just wages, respect the stranger, care for those in need. When we do this, the prophets say, God will enable us to flourish. So we need to hear from our leaders that draining the swamps of misery is the first requirement of faith, the most elementary strategy for survival. The connection between generous care for the world and worship of God often seems to be ignored in churches,” he said. “The consequence is that we go along quietly as our nation invests almost exclusively in weapons for security, and we trust in something that has no values other than self-protection.”

Churches also need to build human understandings between Christianity and Muslims.

“There is something powerful when people sit in each other’s living rooms or when people get to know each other as human beings,” he said. “That’s a huge task that we’ve barely begun between Christianity and Islam.”

For information about Vital Theology, visit www.vitaltheology.com


Posted by Evelin at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
New Legal Scholarship Network Abstracting Journal

The Social Science Research Network and the Working Group On
Property, Citizenship, and Social Entrepreneurism (PCSE) at Syracuse
University College of Law <http://www.law.syr.edu/pcse> are pleased
to announce the creation of a new Legal Scholarship Network
abstracting journal, Property, Citizenship, and Social
Entrepreneurism Abstracts.

PROPERTY, CITIZENSHIP, AND SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURISM is edited by Prof.
Robin Paul Malloy, E.I. White Chair and Distinguished Professor of
Law at Syracuse University College of Law.

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
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<http://www.ssrn.com/link/property-citizenship-entrepreneur.html>

PROPERTY, CITIZENSHIP, AND SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURISM is an
interdisciplinary journal dedicated to exploring the core principle
that a just and accessible property law system is the basis for both
good citizenship and successful socio-legal development. The Journal
is primarily concerned with matters of property as they relate to the
human process of exchange, the fostering of democratic institutions,
the building of sustainable communities, the stewardship of the
global environment and its natural resources, the promotion of
citizenship, and the development of market institutions that respond
to and promote a worthy social mission. Our approach to socio-legal
development is therefore from the perspective of social
entrepreneurism rather than wealth maximization.

Our goal is to explore the legal infrastructure of property in broad
terms: encompassing concerns for real, personal, intangible, and
intellectual property, as well as looking at property related
financial markets (including real estate mortgages, personal
property, security interests, licensing, and securitization).

Making reference to specific examples of property (in its various
forms) we will address the following types of issues.

1) To what extent do property rights reduce or eliminate the need for
government regulation (particularly command and control-regulation)
while enhancing the environment for open market approaches to
economic development and globalization? This includes consideration
of the way in which property rights actually reduce transaction
costs, correct for problems raised by the tragedy of the commons, and
organize society in a way that fosters efficient economic development.

2) What is the role of privatization of State controlled property in
the transformation process? How should privatization be approached
and what distinctions need to be made between public, private, and
state property? This includes discussion of necessary support
infrastructure for successful privatization, and consideration of the
need for government control over private companies dealing with
public utilities, natural resources, and transportation systems.

3) To what extent do property rights enhance citizenship and advance
democratic institutions? What role does private property play in
creating political elites and the structures needed for controlled
development and social transformation? How can property rights be
used to make the rule of law more tangible, and to promote civic
participation and inclusion? How are property rights related to
citizenship issues respecting matters of race, gender, ethnicity,
urban or rural location, and other factors?

4) To what extent do property rights promote entrepreneurism,
including social entrepreneurism focusing on values other than mere
maximization of economic wealth and efficiency? How can property
rights fuel economic development while helping to reduce poverty?

5) In a world of global financial institutions such as the European
Development Bank, The World Bank, and the IMF, with the power to
influence indirect or quasi-law making, how are global property law
systems to develop and become institutionalized? How do these
institutions facilitate problems related to globalization and
harmonization, and what are the socio-legal implications from such
activity?

SSRN eLIBRARY
SSRN's searchable electronic library contains abstracts, full
bibliographic data, and author contact information for more than
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professional directory of scholars in law, economics, finance,
accounting and management. Contact information for authors including
email, postal, and telephone and fax information is available there.

OTHER LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP NETWORK JOURNALS The Legal Scholarship
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LSN Subject Matter Journals:
Administrative Law
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Constitutional Law
Contracts & Commercial Law
Corporate Law: Corporate & Takeover Law
Corporate Law: Corporate Governance Law
Corporate Law: Law & Finance
Corporate Law: Partnerships and Unincorporated Business Entities (Forthcoming)
Corporate Law: Practitioner (Forthcoming)
Corporate Law: Securities Law
Criminal Law & Procedure
Cyberspace Law
Discrimination, Law & Justice
Employee Benefits, Compensation & Pension Law
Employment & Labor Law Abstracts
English & Commonwealth Law (Forthcoming)
Environmental Law & Policy
European Law: EU Law
European Law: National Law
Evidence & Evidentiary Procedure
Experimental & Empirical Studies
Family & Children's Law
Forensic Economics
Health Law & Policy
Immigration, Refugee & Citizenship Law
Intellectual Property Law
International Law & Trade
Jurisprudence & Legal Philosophy
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Law & Humanities
Law, Institutions & Development
Legal Education
Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility
Legal History
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National Security Law
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Regulation of Financial Institutions
Tax Law: International & Comparative Tax
Tax Law: Practitioner Series
Tax Law: Tax Law & Policy
Telecommunications & Regulated Industries
Torts, Product Liability & Insurance Law
Young Scholars Law Abstracts

LSN Full Text Journals:
American Journal of Comparative Law (Forthcoming)
Delaware Journal of Corporate Law Full Text
Iowa Law Review Full Text
Journal of Corporation Law
Journal of Korean Law Full Text
LSN Blackwell Publishers Full Text Journals
Blackwell: Bioethics
Blackwell: European Law Journal
Blackwell: Howard Journal of Criminal Justice
Blackwell: Journal of Law & Society
Blackwell: Journal of Politics
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Virginia Law Review Full Text

The Legal Scholarship Network also hosts Research Paper Series in the
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Each series announces scholarship by authors affiliated with the
series sponsor. Sponsors include almost all of the major law schools
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You can view our Research Paper Series and subscribe to them at no
cost, at: .

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Posted by Evelin at 04:20 AM | Comments (0)
Accord Notice of Publication: Engaging Armed Groups

NEW Accord workshop report

Conciliation Resources' Accord programme has just published a report of the 2004 joint analysis workshop:

Engaging armed groups in peace processes

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE FULL TEXT IS AVAILABLE FREE ON LINE
(http://www.c-r.org/accord/ansa/index.shtml) OR CAN BE ORDERED IN PRINT FROM CR (See below)

The report presents some of the challenges presented by engaging armed groups, and a series of recommendations for future work, including the need to:

better understand armed groups and how they make choices;
improve how we articulate the case for engagement;
consider engagement within the wider context of peace and conflict;
counter the state-actor bias of the international system in peace processes; and
improve the track one / track two relationship in the process of engaging armed groups

As a result there is a need to continue the dialogue on this matter from all the different perspectives; to develop new mechanisms and approaches for better understanding armed groups; to collect, organise and disseminate helpful resources for intermediaries and armed groups on engaging in political dialogue and to ensure engagement strategies are responsive to the needs and views expressed by the local communities affected.

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL OFFER

Conciliation Resources’ Accord programme publishes the internationally acclaimed series Accord: an international review of peace initiatives that provides measured and detailed documentation of peace processes.

Each edition offers the reader an introduction to a specific conflict and a careful examination of the many initiatives that combined to reach a peaceful settlement, or have so far paved the way towards agreement. For many readers, Accord is already a valued resource for education and training programmes, academic research, conflict policy-making and general reference purposes. The publications contain a range of articles by individuals with first hand experience, covering:

background to the conflict
peace initiatives to date
profiles of main actors
chronologies
key texts from peace processes
guidance for further reading

– to introduce you to the series Accord: an international review of peace initiatives we offer you a full set of 15 back issues at the discounted price of, £195 / $333 (ordinary price £230 / $392). Please quote the reference ‘November promotion’ when ordering.

To order a hard copy of the report or other issues of Accord please visit our website http://www.c-r.org/accord or e-mail us on accord@c-r.org

"I have been really impressed with the quality of the whole series....these books are very helpful for our students, many of whom come from experiences in conflict zones and aim precisely to reflect on the conceptual issues which comparisons can raise."
Jenny Pearce, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford (UK)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PLEASE NOTE: Geneva Call, one of the organizations participating in this workshop, has also just released a new report on a related theme:
WOMEN IN ARMED OPPOSITION GROUPS SPEAK ON WAR, PROTECTION AND OBLIGATIONS UNDER INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN AND HUMAN RIGHTS LAW
For further information please visit the Geneva Call website www.genevacall.org or contact info@genevacall.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conciliation Resources | 173 Upper street | London N1 1RG | UK
Tel +44 (0)20 7 359 7728 | Fax +44 (0)20 7359 4081

Posted by Evelin at 03:46 AM | Comments (0)
Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II

Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II

Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II
by Mona Sue Weissmark (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=2296416&s=96632915)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=2296371&s=96632915)
In 1992 Weissmark brought together 22 Jews and Germans for a four-day meeting at Harvard University. They were sons and daughters of concentration camp survivors and sons and daughters of Nazis. Weissmark, a psychologist and the child of Holocaust survivors, undertook a study to examine how injustice influences interpersonal behavior as the participants tried to come to terms with the past and with each other. Drawing on interviews and the conference findings, the book uncovers a complex story and reveals how unjust, painful events of years ago continue to shape the legacies of both survivors' and Nazis' children. Weissmark explores the question, "Can good people pursue heinous acts?"; reviews research concerning the psychology of injustice; analyzes research concerning people's experience of injustice; and provides a framework for understanding how emotions and cognitions follow the perception of injustice. The book is a major contribution to the study of the descendants of survivors and perpetrators. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description:
Springing from an unprecedented meeting between the sons and daughters of the Holocaust and the children of Nazis, Justice Matters:Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II examines the psychology of hatred and ethnic resentments passed from generation to generation. Weissmark, a social psychologist and the child of Holocaust survivors, argues that justice is quite naturally shaped by emotional responses. In the face of unjust treatment, the natural response is resentment and deep anger-and a desire for revenge. While legal systems offer a structured means for redressing injustice, it often does not redress the emotional pain, which, left unresolved, is then passed along to the next generation-leading to entrenched ethnic tension and group conflict. Examining the legacy of the Holocaust, the burden of confronting unresolved injustices was passed to another generation, as, clearly, the there has been no reconcilation between Nazis and survivors. Thus, coming to terms with their parents' past shaped the lives of Nazis' children and survivors' children. How would the offspring of Nazis and survivors react to the idea of reestablishing a relationship? Could children of survivors and Nazis talk to each other about the Holocaust and World War II and understand the anxieties of each about the other as a gateway to reestablishing a relationship? Could they face the others' passions and points of view? To address these question, Weissmark embarked on a study of children of survivors and Nazis, and how they come to terms with the past and each other. Part of the study included an unprecedented meeting between the children of survifors and Nazis. Although more than half a century has passed, recollections of the Holocaust and WWII still sear the lives of survivors, their children and grandchildren. Weissmark discovered that central to keeping the cycle of ethnic and religious strife alive is story-telling, with each side recounting the injustice it suffered and the valor shown by avenging its own group. She describes how these stories or "legacies" transmit moral values, beliefs and emotions and thus preserve the past, and thus, based on the microcosm of their parents' personal experiences, each group maintains an understanding of themselves as the legitimate victims. Ultimately, Weissmark argues that coming to terms with their parents' past requires both parties not just agree to talk, but to agree to moderate their emotions and dispense with the notion that they are the most aggrieved. While focused on the experience of the Holocaust,Justice Matters provides insights into ethnic conflicts around the world, such as those in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The stories of how the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of Nazis struggle to come to terms with the past has universal applications for any society riven with resentment, and benefits our understanding of the emotional pain of injustice.

See all Editorial Reviews (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=2296331&s=96632915)

Product Details:
Hardcover: 198 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press (January 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0195157575
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces. (View shipping rates and policies (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=2296335&s=96632915))
Average Customer Review: based on 4 reviews.
Amazon.com Sales Rank in Books (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=2296347&s=96632915): #27,792
(Publishers and authors: improve your sales (http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=2296348&s=96632915))

Posted by Evelin at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
The Law of Dignity

The Program on Law and Social Thought at Harvard Law School
and Women's Studies at Duke University,
in collaboration with
the Northeastern University School of Law1

announce a two-day series of conference entitled

The Law of Dignity / The Politics of Shame: An Inquiry into the State of Our Art on Sex, Sexuality, Gender and the Family
Fri-Sat, November 19-20, 2004

Preliminary Program and Prospectus

Herewith a Preliminary Program, along with the conference Prospectus. Please see the other attachments for a Registration form and a list of area hotels. A conference Reader has been sent out to all registrants for whom we had addresses; if you were not in that circulation, please pick up your Reader at the conference itself, or from Terry Cyr (Hauser 406). If you have questions, let Janet Halley, Libby Adler, Robyn Wiegman or Terry Cyr know: jhalley@law.harvard.edu, l.adler@neu.edu, rwiegman@duke.edu, tcyr@law.harvard.edu.

Preliminary Program
Friday, November 19

3-5 pm Workshop
The Powers of Dignity
Convenor: Brenda Cossman
HLS, Pound 335

Janet Halley, Introduction
Maria Rosaria Marella, “The NON Subversive Function of European Private Law: The Case of Harmonization of Family Law”
Kendall Thomas, “Our Brown?: Lawrence and the ‘Interest Divervence’ Dilemma”
Martha McCluskey, “Dignity, Disability, Dependence and Difference”
Prabha Kotiswaran, ‘Fallen Angels’: The Many Lives of Dignity Amongst Indian Sex Workers”
Rashmi Dyal-Chand, “Dignity as Collateral”
Jeannie Suk, “Battered Windows: Crime at Home”

6-8 pm Seminar
Screening of “Secretary”
HLS, Hauser 104; light snacks will be served.

8-10 pm Seminar, continued ...
HLS, Hauser 105; dinner will be served
Convenor: Janet Halley

Saturday, November 20

8:30 am Coffee will be served in Pound 334

9-12 am Workshop
The Productivities and Deployments of Shame
Convenor: Janet Halley

Legal Deployments of Shame
Brenda Cossman: “Obscenity, Disgust, Hip Hop and Extreme Sex"
Kate Sutherland: “Teenagers, Freak Dancing, School Regulation and Self-Regulation”
Lucy Williams, “Welfare, Subjectivity and Distribution”
Aeyal Gross, “Gender Outlaw Meets the Law”
Kevin Haynes, “Hotel America; or, Why We Depend on The Law and Politics of Strangers”
Aaron Belkin, “Stoicism, Shame and Male/Male Violence in the Military”
David Kennedy, “Military Genders”

The Politics of Shame
Andy Parker, “Throwing Voice”
Bernard Harcourt, “Reflecting on Some Queer Politics”
Robyn Wiegman, “Towards Something”
Noa Ben Asher, “The Legal Management of Intersexuality”
Richard Rambuss, “Male Masculinity”
Michael Warner, “Pleasures and Dangers of Shame”


12-2 pm Roundtable
The Poetics of Shame
Launched by: Dan Danielsen, Andrew Parker, Jules Owen, Hani Sayed, Robyn Wiegman
This will be an opportunity for everyone to participate in a general discussion of the selections from The Scarlet Letter and Portnoy’s Complaint included in the Reader.
HLS, John Chipman Grey Room, Pound 213
Lunch will be served

2:30-4:30 Workshop
pm Rationality, Irrationality and the Shame of Critique
Convenor: Libby Adler
HLS, Pound 335

Libby Adler, “Dignity, Shame and the Specter of Fascism”
Tracy Higgins, “Rationality and the Regulatory Impulse”
Philomila Tsoukala, “Shame and the Nation, Shaming the Nation”
Nathaniel Berman, “Abjection: Opposition from Within in the Age of Empire”
Duncan Kennedy, “The Shames in Critique”


4:30-5 pm Plenary Discussion
Future Directions
HLS, Pound 335

7-10:30 PARTY!
Chez Janet; a buffet dinner will be served.

Prospectus

This conference begins from the hypothesis that legal regimes have profound effects on human subjectivity: that our sense of ourselves as human, as humans with affective, psychic, erotic, spiritual lives, is produced in part by the legal orders in whose shadows we do all the things that we do. We will be thinking about the reach of legal systems from the most visible and public institutional forms to the most intimate, never-spoken moments of psychic interiority, the most delicate calibrations of the self. We will hold up for examination a particular polarity dividing human personhood, one that seems to be gaining new signification in various legal orders at the moment – dignity and shame. This is but an example of our broader concern with the ways in which legal theory and the study of particular legal regimes can help us to see legal thought and practice as a human science.

Dignity and shame sometimes seem like opposites: if you have one, you won’t have the other. But there is no necessity to this, and each term can be taken through a myriad variations that, subtly or strikingly, change its social circulation and legal possibilities: dignity, honor, pride, sanctity, the power of the “public servant”; shame, humiliation, loss of face, degradation, humility, submission, deference, abjection. We do discursive work, and legal work, in the web of meanings enabled by all these terms. What was a shameful disability can be transformed, through the institutionalization of disability rights, into a “different ability,” a shift with profound implications for selfhood and for the antidiscrimination regime. What is at stake when the action that is understood as a crime of honor in one legal regime is managed as a crime of passion in another? What happens when the gap between these different understandings begins to close, as it might, for instance, in the globalization of one or the other mode of legal thought?
Dignity is on the march in rights discourse: the right to dignity is gathering new specificity. In these new articulations an immemorial paradox of dignity is being repeated. In that paradox, dignity can indicate an intrinsic attribute of “the human” and it can be an exceptional trait: virtue. Is this an outright contradiction, or do the new rights to dignity mediate these quite different senses of the term in ways that we could call “regulatory”? Do “rights to dignity” say: “We are all dignified, and so we are all entitled to some social good” or “If you are virtuous you are dignified; and you have rights only if you are both”? Or does the instability arising from the ever-present possibility that rights to dignity will toggle between these forms constitute part of their power? What social goods have been distributed in a dignity regime, and what social goods have been recalcitrant to the call of dignity? If dignity is about virtue even some of the time, dignity regimes will surely distribute shame – shame in the form of social derogation, and shame in the form of excruciatingly acrid self-regard. Would we understand the resulting regulatory dynamic better if we: thought of it as spiritual order and read Augustine; thought of it as a humanistic moral project and read Kant; thought of it as a status regime and read Weber; thought of it as a psychic system and read Freud; thought of it as a discourse producing the human as its effect and read Foucault?

Dignity and shame are also deeply political. Black Pride; Gay Pride; Queer Nation. Social movement politics advocating change for subordinated groups manage shame in a highly equivocal way: they denounce the shame of subordination as an invidious fiction, while ratifying that it is a sustained, highly intimate, harm. Did legal regimes of various kinds help to create the need for this contradictory practice; and how were they in turn shaped by it? Political struggle understood as war – the relation of enemy to enemy – is waged with dignity, won with pride and lost in ritualized shame. The conduct of conflict and its resolution are (let’s hypothesize) processes in which legal actors manage shame and dignity. From the fall of Baghdad to the outpouring of national shame in the Unitedstatesean response to the photos issuing from Abu Graeb – from the denunciatory ambitions of war crimes tribunals to the conciliatory ones of Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals, shame is under constant management, constant political deployment. Cui bono?

Dignity as a right, or the justifying principle for a right, has new constitutional bite in Germany, South Africa, the United States, the European Union and wherever a robust human rights vocabulary is spoken. We are hoping to learn more about its rapid ascendency in widely different legal regimes: how does it travel? What elements of existing legal regimes does it strengthen; what elements does it weaken? The contingency of dignity and the calamity of shame are managed by many disparate parts of any legal system: criminal punishment, reputational and emotional-distress torts, informational privacy regimes, zero-tolerance domestic violence regimes, the geographies and archetectonics of privacy, welfare-to-work schemes – all of these elements of the legal system, and more, decide again and again what human dignity (for all) requires, and who gets to have it.

Progressive thinkers and activists, arguing for “inclusiveness,” have often attributed dignity to citizenship, membership and belonging. This kind of argument takes the risk of playing with a double-edged sword: after all, the idea of national character and racial dignity has had breathtaking social effects over the course of the last century, not all of them good. What does this legacy mean for current deployments of dignity? A legal realist might remind progressive thought that citizenship can be understood not only as a treasured form of human membership but as a regime for the geographical distribution of bodies, in which the very good of citizenship requires that there also be its opposites – the alien, the refugee, and the stateless person. Does the dignity of the former allocate something like shame to the latter? Query whether the left-multicultural celebration of “inclusiveness” has a dark side.

Dignity and shame cross sex, sexuality, gender and the family in extremely noticeable ways with consequences for the legal shape of a wide array of institutions. We can ask whether marriage has been built into social life differently if the prevailing idea about sexuality is that it is shameful than it is when sex is imagined as dignified, or when particular kinds of sex are deemed to be dignified at the expense of others. The shame attached to some intimacies, some genders, might actually increase their social value and vitalize the legal forms that grow around them. The allocation of some genders, some sexualities to the market and others to the family might be importantly indexed to the status implications of shame and dignity (and their many correlates). We are particularly interested in the shame associated with embodiment and with femininity: how does the practice of “not speaking” one’s “mother tongue,” or of living down the body’s involuntary life (the unwilling blush, the seeming fixity of one’s place and date of birth, the idea that men and women must be separated at certain bodily moments) ramify in social and legal life? Are these shames always detrimental to those who feel them? How do the social and legal orders of dignity organize and intensify them?

And finally, liberalism seems to carry two contradictory ideas about the relationship between rationality and dignity. On one hand human reason is the reason for and the sublime mode of human dignity; on the other certain intrinsic or fundamental values – these are the values of human dignity – cannot be deduced with reason and must be posited a priori, must be protected as fundamental. In the first mode, law cannot justify its power unless it can wield power rationally; in the second, law must respect the intrinsic value – the irrational, a priori value – of certain human goods and withhold them from the domains of rationality (the market, the agora) which are deemed unsuited to their dignity. Shame is never far from the surface of this paradox in liberalism: for power to show its face directly is for it to undergo the disgrace of illegitimacy; and for law to yield certain human goods up to market rationality, political allocation or critical deconstruction is to subject them to an absolute degradation. Can we come to a better understanding of the ways in which dignity and shame inflect the dangerously supplementary relation of reason and unreason, knowingness and not-knowing, “merit” and “demerit,” assertion and critique, in our continuing struggle to articulate the terms of legal thought?

Posted by Evelin at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)
New Book: At War With the City

My Dear Evelin;
I would be grateful if you could kindly post the following announcement in the Website. I believe it is an extremely important book for our WAED project and the Humiliation Studies Group in general. Please find the announcement below. I seize this opportunity to introduce to Professor Nicholas Wilkinson at Eastern Mediterranean University, School of Architecture, and the Chief Editor of Open House International and the owner of Urban International Press, the publisher of this book.
With warm wishes
Ashraf

AT WAR WITH THE CITY
edited by Paola Somma

This collection of essays, which is neither an instant book nor a catalogue of disasters, investigates the relationships between war and city. It aims at going beyond the case study logic and strives to improve our ability to look at and interpret future scenarios.
War as a means to accelerate the introduction of a market economy, the relaxation of landuse planning rules and the intentional exacerbation of hostility between groups of different ethnic and /or religious composition are all interwoven with eachother. In addition we get the increasing ghettoization of the post war urban landscape and the incorporation of war into the planning discourse. These are problems whose relevance goes beyond the cities examined in this volume.
Attention is also paid to the challenge and ambiguity of reconstruction. Designs, which follow the principles of sustainability, are being drawn up for war torn cities and their buildings and infrastructures sited in areas razed by war are conveniently referred to as “re-construction plans”.

PAOLA SOMMA
Introduction

PETER GOTSCH
Saigon South: Parallel City in the South. On the production and typology of neo-liberal urbanism

KELLY SHANNON
Back to the future. Vinh, Hue and Cantho, Vietnam

DIJANA ALIC
Ascribing significance to sites of memory. The Sarajevo’s Town Hall

ESTHER CHARLESWORTH
Beirut. City as hearth? Questioning the metaphor

SRDJAN JOVANOVIC WEISS
War on Turbo Architecture

LISA BORNSTEIN
City fragments and displaced plans in war-torn Mozambique

FRANÇOIS L’ECUYER
Commodification of life and community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa

MAGED ABU RAHMA AND FERNANDO MURILLO
Strategic urban planning in Gaza Strip. When the roads are blocked

FERNANDO MURÝLLO AND EUDES KAYUMBA
Refugee dwelling project in Nyamirambo, Kigali, Rwanda. Utopia or reintegration?

TIGRAN HASIC
The reconstruction business: economic agendas and regional strategy in post-conflict
Bosnia and Herzegovina

AJMAL MAIWANDI AND ANTHONY FONTENOT
Waiting for Kabul

__________________________________________________________________
ORDER DETAILS
Book Title: AT WAR WITH THE CITY
Publisher: The Urban International Press
ISBN: 1-872811-06-X Dimensions: 20 x 22 cms, Price:19.95 gbp or 35 US$,
Pages: 310pp, soft cover including 13 full page colour plates & 106 black & white photos.
Order Address: The Urban International Press, P.O Box 74, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, NE9 5UZ, UK.
Or e-mail Carol Nicholson Carol.Nicholson@theNBS.com
__________________________________________________________________
ORDER FORM
Quantity @ 19.95 or 35$ = Total Cost:
__________________________________________________________________
Please send cheque payable to: Urban International Press, P.O Box 47, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear NE9 5UZ, Great Britain.
Alternatively pay by direct telegraphic transfer to: Urban International Press,
HSBC Plc, 110 Grey Street, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, NE1 6JG, Great Britain.
Account Numbers: 91385429 (Sterling) 39072712 (US Dollar) Bank Sort Code 40 - 34 ­ 18
FURTHER INFORMATION: Carol.Nicholson@theNBS.com and more at: www.openhouse-int.com

Posted by Evelin at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)
Call for contributions: IPRA Newsletter

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: International Peace Research Association (IPRA)
Newsletter


DUE: 5 December

SEND TO: Olivier Urbain and Bernedette Muthien (co-Editors) at:
HYPERLINK "mailto:olivierurbain@yahoo.com"olivierurbain@yahoo.com (send
to this email only).

Articles and other submissions should preferably not exceed 1,000 words.

Contributions can include articles, conference reports, announcements,
and creative writing or black line art (that is easily reproducible),
etc. Please distribute this email widely.

This edition of the newsletter will focus on the 20th anniversary IPRA
conference, held in Sopron, Hungary, 5-9 July 2004. Theme: Peace and
Conflict in a time of Globalisation. More information available on:
HYPERLINK http://www.human.mie-u.ac.jp/~peace/IPRA2004.htm

IPRA NEWSLETTER FORMAT
December 2004
Message from the outgoing Secretary General, Katsuya Kodama (2000 -
2004)
Message from the new Secretary General, Luc Reychler
Welcome by the Editors, Editorial Committee
Activity Reports: Council, Commissions, Regional Groups
Reports about Sopron: Plenary Papers, Events
Visions of Calgary: proposals for 2006 conference in Canada
Membership News: what are IPRA members doing all over the world?
Publications: papers by members (?)
Gallery: cartoons, photos, paintings, poetry, music

IPRA NEWSLETTER TEAM
Co-editors: Bernedette Muthien and Olivier Urbain
Advisory Committee:
Elise Boulding
Regine Mehl,
Unto Vesa,
Maria Eugenia Villarreal.

Editorial Committee:
George Kent,
Jeannie Lum,
William Nelson,
Ralph Summy,
Senthil Ram.

New volunteers always very welcome...

Posted by Evelin at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)
Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence and the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life

Information from the Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence and the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life

•Master's Program in Coexistence and Conflict Accepting Applications for 2005
•Program Manager Position Open for The Coexistence Initiative at Brandeis

Want to become a leader in Coexistence and Conflict work?
Brandeis University has a Master's Program that may interest you.

This master's program gives students a solid grounding in both the theories of Coexistence and Conflict work and the professional skills to design and implement successful interventions that enable communities to live together more equitably, respectfully, and peacefully.

The program takes place at Brandeis University near Boston, under the direction of Mari Fitzduff, Professor and Director of the program.

Who is it for?

The program is designed for early and mid-career professionals who work, or aspire to work, within governments, international agencies, or business. It also helps professionals working in related fields such as security and diplomacy, aid and development, human rights, education, and the promotion of democracy and civil society. The program takes 16 months. It involves an academic year in residence at Brandeis (September - May), followed by a three-month field placement and completion of a master's paper by December.

What does it give?

* Provides a solid grounding for participants in contemporary and developing theories on the causes of intercommunal conflicts, from the local to the global.
* Emphasizes the skills needed to design strategic interventions that prevent, mitigate, or resolve intercommunal conflicts and violence.
* Focuses on mainstreaming coexistence and conflict knowledge and skills within governments and security, international, and inter-governmental organizations.
* Includes a master's field project in an area of conflict, or with an organization involved in coexistence and conflict interventions.
* Teaches dialogue and mediation skills designed for work in intercommunal conflict situations.
* Introduces students to evaluation skills to help them to assess the success of conflict interventions.
* Helps students develop partnership skills in delivering coexistence work through democracy, security, legislative, mediative, human rights, political, equity, and development work.
* Offers a wide choice of electives, including language courses that are relevant to participants' career interests.

For further information please look at:

http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/Slifka/

or contact :

Masters Program in Coexistence and Conflict.
Brandeis University
PO Box 549110
Mailstop 086
Waltham, Massachusetts 02454-9110

Tel: 1-781-736-5001
Fax: 1-781-736-8561
masterscoex@brandeis.edu


Program Manager Position Open for The Coexistence Initiative at Brandeis

The Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence (http://www.brandeis.edu/ethics/coexistence_initiative/index.html) at Brandeis University seeks a program manager to support and invigorate The Coexistence Initiative at Brandeis, an emerging international network of coexistence and conflict transformation advocates and practitioners. The network seeks to empower them to promote positive social change in their communities by creating opportunities for those advocates and practitioners to learn, grow, and act more effectively together.
The responsibilities include coordinating regional and international events that bring together and empower network members and others through workshops, seminars, and other gatherings; managing the Initiative's web site to increase the network's reach and effectiveness; managing the flow of events and information between staff, network participants, the Brandeis community, and the advisory board. Additional responsibilities include building and sustaining relationships with existing network partners, and identifying and connecting with potential network partners; assisting, with advisory board member input, in evaluating the effectiveness of activities, and adjusting strategic plan accordingly; serving as a logistical and information resource to network members coordinating the work of interns, work-study students, and consultants.
For information on past activities of The Coexistence Initiative (previously based in New York City), please see the web site at http://www.coexistence.net/. (The web site does not yet reflect the new home of the Initiative at Brandeis University.)
Qualifications include a B.A. degree and 3-5 years experience in project and/or event management, with a record of increasing responsibility. Candidates should have experience in coexistence, diversity, conflict transformation, bridge-building, cross-community, peacebuilding and/or cross-cultural work working with people of different cultural, national, and linguistic backgrounds. Candidates must be creative, energetic, and entrepreneurial, have experience operating or coordinating networks or coalitions, managing events have experience with financial management and possess good reporting skills; i.e., the ability to quickly and accurately synthesize spoken information into a written report.
Skills include the ability to use the web strategically, detail-orientation and initiative, ability to work individually and as part of a team, flexibility and ability to work under stress and the pressure of deadlines. Travel will be included and the ability to report to and work closely with the advisory board is necessary.
To apply for this position, and for more information about working at Brandeis University, please go to http://www.brandeis.edu/humanresources/currentjobs.html. Applications are due by December 14.

This message was sent by The International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02454-9110.

Posted by Evelin at 03:21 AM | Comments (0)
2005 Student Peace Conference - Call for Papers

The University of Notre Dame’s annual Student Peace Conference will take place on April 1-2, 2005. The conference is officially sponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and is planned and directed entirely by undergraduate students of the University. Students from universities and colleges across the United States and abroad will participate.

In the spirit of hope for increased global cooperation and transnational dialogue, the theme for this year’s conference is “Crossing Boundaries in the Name of Peace.”

Hal Culbertson
Associate Director, Kroc Institute


2005 Annual Student Peace Conference
“Crossing Boundaries in the Name of Peace”
April 1-2, 2005

Call for Papers


The two-day conference will feature a variety of seminars, lectures, artistic performances, exhibits, and a keynote speaker. We welcome undergraduate and graduate peace visionaries of all majors to submit proposals for presentations. We encourage presentations of peace in all forms and from all disciplines and perspectives.

The Peace Conference Committee invites papers, panel proposals, performances, audio-visual presentations, interactive sessions or workshops that explore transnational and cross-cultural approaches to peace. These presentations may involve completed research, research in-progress, or case studies, especially those reflecting innovative practice. Each presenter will have 10 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.

Submission themes could focus on, but are not limited to:

* Transnationalism and peace
* Peace in a post-9/11 society
* International law
* International, cross-cultural, or inter-religious dialogue
* The role of the mediator
* Effects of propaganda
* Technology and global politics
* Changing scholarly and popular conceptions of war and peace
* International organizations and non-governmental organizations
* Role of the media in war making and peacekeeping
* Strengths and weaknesses of existing peace movements
* Changing nature of warfare
* Women and/or children and peace
* Peace in contemporary literature
* Economics of peace

Submissions and/or questions may be made via email to Joseph Tan (peacecon@nd.edu). Submissions will be acknowledged within 3 days. Notification of acceptance of proposals will be sent as soon as the reviewing process is completed, not later than early March 2005.

Each submission should include a separate title page, contact information, and a brief 100 word summary of the presentation.

The tentative deadline for proposals is late February 2005.

************************************
Hal Culbertson, Associate Director
Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
112 Hesburgh Center for International Studies
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

(574) 631-8832 (phone)
(574) 631-6973 (fax)

Visit the Kroc Institute website at <http://kroc.nd.edu>

************************************

Posted by Evelin at 03:14 AM | Comments (0)
Newsletter from the Human Rights House Network, November 12, 2004

Newsletter from the Human Rights House Network, November 12, 2004

1 Belarus: Ballots found in garbage cans
62 filled referendum ballots were found in a garbage can in the city of Barysaw. The activist of the United Civil Party, former candidate to deputies in Barysaw village circuit Viktar Harbachow says that a member of his initiative group found them in the garbage can near secondary school #24 of Barysaw, where polling station #42 was situated.

2 Belarus: Mikhail Marynich is left in jail for another month
On 28 September KGB decided to leave Mikhail Marynich in custody for 30 more days "for the interests of investigation. This will be the sixths month of jail for the ex-minister, who has been kept there since 26 April.

3 The north of Uganda remains an emergency out of hand
This week, the independent national Ugandan daily the Monitor emphasized that the mortality rate in northern Uganda is an ´emergency out of control´. Among the organisations claiming this, is the international medical relief organisations Médecins Sans Frontières.

4 Russia: Soldiers' Mothers peace-making initiative
The Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees, member organization of the Russian Reaserch Center for Human Rights, proposed to negotiate with the commanders of Chechen separatists.

5 EU judges rule against protection of journalists' sources
Index on Censorship reports on a EU ruling which jeopardises a journalist´s right to protect sources.

6 Shirin Ebadi sues the US Government
The Iranian Nobel Laureate of 2003, Shirin Ebadi, has filed a lawsuit against the US Treasury Department for preventing her from publishing her autobiography in the United States, reports PEN American Center (PEN). The law suit follows Ebadi´s participation at the Human Rights House Network´s conference ´Activists under Attack. Defending the Right to be a Human Rights Defender,´ held in Oslo mid-October, during which Ebadi met the Norwegian PEN centre, a member of the Oslo Human Rights House,
and announced her intentions to sue the US government.

7 Turkey: Mass grave found in the north of Diyarbakir
Recently, a mass grave was found in the north of Diyarbakir, the Kurdish newspaper, Welat, reports. According to the newspaper, this is not done by Saddam, but by the Turkish Army, maybe only ten years ago. It is claimed that the corpses belong to the villagers who were taken under custody during an operation which was hold by Turkish Army in 1993.


8 Poland: Minorities Act finally ready
On 4th of November the Polish Sejm passed the Act on National Minorities, which had been in the making for 11 years. The act contains a catalogue of the rights of the people belonging to minorities, which are already guaranteed by other Polish legal acts. The right to use a minority language as a auxiliary language at offices of administration, which has been the aim of the exertions of minority circle members in Poland, was not included in the act.

9 Mines still threatening Croatia
Croatia will not be cleared of mines until 2010, the deadline defined by the Ottawa Convention and prescribed by the National Program For Counter-Mine Effect. Solution of one of the most important humanitarian problems in Croatia is postponed once again.

10 UN seriously doubts Burma's democratic intentions
The United Nations human rights envoy for Burma says he doubts the country will undergo the political reform necessary to achieve democracy. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said Monday it would be, in his words, a "miracle" if the country´s leaders implement the so-called "road map" to democracy unveiled by Burma´s military government last year.

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Free of charge news and background service from the Human
Rights House Network, an international forum of cooperation between
independent human rights houses. It works to strengthen cooperation and
improve the security and capacity of the 70 human rights organizations in
the Network. The Human Rights House Foundation in Oslo is the
secretariat.

To subscribe, please send an email to:
newsletter-subscribe@humanrightshouse.org

More news and background on www.humanrightshouse.org
******************************************************************Sent by:
Borghild T. Krokan
Project Manager/Editor
The Human Rights House Foundation
Address: Tordenskioldsgate 6b, 0160 Oslo, Norway
Tel: (+47) 22 47 92 47, Direct: (+47) 22 47 92 44,
Fax: (+47) 22 47 92 01
Website: http://www.humanrightshouse.org,
http://www.menneskerettigheter.no

Posted by Evelin at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)
Contemplative Practices and Education, February 11-13, 2005

Contemplative Practices and Education: Feb. 11-13, 2005

We must make peace in ourselves if we are to make peace in the world.--The Dalai Lama

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to invite you to participate in a national conference on Contemplative Practices and Education: Making Peace in Ourselves and in the World. The conference will be held at Teachers College, Columbia University, February 11-13, 2005. It promises to be a remarkable event and we hope that you will be able to join us.

Here are some conference highlights:

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are and Full Catastrophe Living, will provide the keynote presentation

Workshops by leading educators on how they have integrated contemplative practices into their own classrooms

Guided meditations drawn from diverse traditions around the world (these meditations are integrated into the conference program to demonstrate how they can be used to transform the environment in which communication takes place)

Artistic performances grounded in diverse contemplative practices
(his schedule permitting, Robert Thurman, former Buddhist monk and close friend of the Dalai Lama, will introduce the performances and explore the relations between the arts and contemplative practices)

Representing the Peace Education Center at Teachers College, we will explore how contemplative practices can be more effectively integrated into peace education. Of special concern is how these practices can be used to sustain mindfulness among those who work for peace as they address issues of war, violence, and social justice in a highly charged political context.

For more information on the conference program and registration, please visit the three centers that support the conference:

The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
www.contemplativemind.org/programs/academic/conference

The Peace Education Center, Teachers College
www.tc.edu/peaceed/contemplative-practices.htm

The Center for Educational Outreach and Innovation at Teachers College
www.tc.edu/ceoi

The last two centers provide information about how to register for a 1-credit course connected to the conference in which students explore various materials on the relations between contemplative practices and peace education. If you have further questions about registration, please contact Jocelyn Smith at jsmith@tc.columbia.edu

We look forward to welcoming you to Teachers College in February.
Janet Gerson, Clifford Hill, Tony Jenkins
Conference Coordinators
Peace Education Center
Teachers College - Box 171
Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
tel: (212) 678-8116 fax: (212) 678-8237
web: www.tc.edu/PeaceEd

Posted by Evelin at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)
UN/NGO Committee on Mental Health-Meeting

THE NGO COMMITTEE ON MENTAL HEALTH
Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations (CONGO) in Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council

Theme:
“Emerging Complex Emergencies”
Thursday, 18 November 2004
1:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: Lecture Hall F, NYU School of Medicine
Entrance is on the North side of 30th Street, East of 1st Avenue

MODERATOR
Nancy Wallace - Chair, NGO Committee on Mental Health;
UN Main Representative, World Federation for Mental Health

INTRODUCTION
Richard Alderslade - Senior External Relations Officer, World Health Organization (WHO)
“Overview of Complex Emergencies and Mental Health”

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
Jan Egeland
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs
& Emergency Relief Coordinator
“Emerging Global Emergencies: Defining the Human Consequences”

SPEAKERS
Jack Saul - Director, International Trauma Studies Program, New York University;
Co-Convenor, NGO CMH Working Group on Trauma
“Large Scale Interventions: A Comprehensive Clinical & Community
Mental Health Approach”

Petra Miczaika - Senior Stress Counselor, Office of the UN Security Coordinator (UNSECOORD)
“Providing Mental Health Services on the Ground”

GROUP DISCUSSION
We would like to acknowledge NYU/Bellevue Hospital Center Department of Psychiatry for their support.

RSVP Required for Security Purposes by Tuesday, 16 November
Please submit your name and phone number to: newallace@earthlink.net or call 917-842-4733
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Planning Committee Members: Richard Alderslade - Senior External Relations Officer, WHO Office in New York; Kathleen Schmalz - Senior Advisor, WHO Office in New York; Nancy Wallace - Chair, NGO CMH; Representative, World Federation for Mental Health; Janice Wetzel - Vice Chair, NGO CMH, Representative, International Association of Schools of Social Work; Harold Cook - Member-at-Large, NGO CMH; Representative, American Psychological Association, International Union of Psychological Science, Co-Convenor, CMH WG on Children & Mental Health; Elizabeth Carll - Convenor, CMH Working Group on ICT & Mental Health, Representative, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies; Nora Pharaon - Co-Convenor, CMH Working Group on Trauma; Representative, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; Margrit Rustow – Convenor, CMH Working Group on Refugees; Jack Saul – Co-Convenor, CMH Working Group on Trauma; Director, International Trauma Studies Program, New York University; Yee-Ching Lee – Member, NGO CMH, Representative, Art of Living Foundation; Mercedes Peters – Member, NGO CMH; Lorraine Walla – Member, NGO CMH, Representative, World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation; Stacy Cutler - Student Intern, IASSW - For more information on the NGO Committee on Mental Health, visit the CONGO Web-Site at http://www.ngocongo.org/ngosubs/mentalhealth.htm & the Calendar of Events.

Posted by Evelin at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)
The Common Ground News Service, November 9, 2004

The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations.

Please note: The views expressed in the articles and in CGNews-PiH are those of the authors, not of CGNews or its affiliates.


**********

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ALL ARTICLES ARE AVAILABLE FOR RE-PUBLICATION.

Article #1
Title: Arab view dims on Iraq rebels
Author:Dan Murphy and Nicholas Blanford
Publication: Christian Science Monitor
Date: November 2, 2004
Murphy and Banford illustrate that "clear lines are being drawn in people's minds between what is seen as 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' resistance" in Iraq. Looking at newspaper articles and speaking with intellectuals, politicians and ordinary people across the Arab world, they demonstrate a growing criticism of violent actions committed in the name of Islam.

Article #2
Title: Fear dominant in Arab psyche
Author: Youssef M. Ibrahim
Publication: Middle East Times
Date: October 26, 2004
In a change from the many articles that focus primarily on Western "fear", Ibrahim explains how fear affects the Arab psyche. Looking at the implications of this concept, he arges that if Arab writers and pundits cannot analyze and address Arab fear, "we cannot even being to reform...And if we cannot reform, what is left of Arab civilization wll evaporate making place for a new agenda set by someone else."

Article #3
Title: Why the U.S. should engage moderate Muslims everywhere
Author: Radwan A. Masmoudi
Publication: The Daily Star
Date: October 26, 2004
"To win the war on terror, the U.S. needs the support of the majority of the 1.4 billion Muslims around the globe." In this article, Masmoudi makes four recommendations to the United States on how to reach this goal.

Article #4
Title: Why is the legacy of confrontation so strong?
Author: Rami G. Khouri
Publication: ~~Common Ground Series~~ in partnership with Al Hayat
Date: October 3, 2004
Khouri's article is the second in a series on Arab/Muslim - Western Relations commissioned by Search for Common Ground that has been running in Middle Eastern publications over the last month. His article explains why it is too simple to consider the relationship between the Arab/Muslim world and the West as "a worsening cycle of war, threats, fears, and savage killings."


*********

Article #1
Arab view dims on Iraq rebels
Dan Murphy and Nicholas Blanford
(CAIRO AND BEIRUT)More than a year and a half after the US invasion of Iraq, popular support in the Arab world for the insurgents is softening - somewhat.
With images of civilian casualties from US airstrikes set against insurgent slayings of unarmed Iraqi police and civilians, Arabs and the Arab media are increasingly struggling with the question of how far to support an insurgency that sometimes uses tactics they feel are immoral.
Conversations with ordinary people, intellectuals, and politicians illustrate that clearer lines are being drawn in people's minds between what is seen as "legitimate" and "illegitimate" resistance.
"People are coming ... to grips with complicated realities,'' says Abdel Moneim Said, director of Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "We can't deal with the emergence of groups like the ones who bombed Taba here in Egypt until we understand that some of these so-called resistance groups are intrinsically evil."
Egyptian militants killed 34 people in attacks on Taba, popular with Israeli tourists, and a nearby campsite on Oct. 7.
Mr. Said says that while most still see the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in stark terms, there is a growing number of regional thinkers who are also looking at the chaos of postinvasion Iraq as a partial consequence of Saddam Hussein's divide-and-rule policies and seeing some of the problems of pre-invasion Iraq reflected in their own societies.
"After three, four decades of independence we're coming to see that not all of our problems are generated from the outside," says Said. "Gradually Arab countries see it's not only independence versus occupation, it's also freedom, development, and progress or the lack of progress. We can see our societies are not what we'd like them to be."
When the US invasion began, a fairly one-dimensional view of the war's actors was held by most in the region, with its history of interventions by Western powers. Like an American western with a Mesopotamian twist, the Arab media scripted the war as the checkered headscarves of the insurgents (the white hats) against the Kevlar helmets of US airborne, infantry, and Marines (the black).
But among the events that have created doubts in some Arab minds have been the videotaped beheadings of a number of foreign contractors, the executions of 49 unarmed Iraqi military trainees last week, and the kidnapping of aid-worker Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi citizen and critic of the US invasion.
Doubts about the 'good guys'
The US remains the principal "bad guy," but the realities of an ugly war are leading to a more ambivalent attitudes towards the insurgency.
Even Lebanon's Hizbullah, a Shiite Islamist group that Washington says is a terrorist organization, has criticized the extremists. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's secretary-general, said recently: "Indiscriminate and arbitrary acts are not resistance. The true resistance should protect its people and not kill them."
"In general the Arab people are with the Iraqi resistance,'' says Ahmed Sheikh, editor in chief of Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel that has often been criticized by US officials. "But the feedback we get is that people are very opposed to attacks like the killings of the 49 Iraqis. People know they're trying to feed their families and say it's haram [forbidden]. Attacks on US forces, though, are seen differently."
In Lebanon and Syria, among the most vocal opponents of the invasion, anger at the US remains high but is tempered by a growing sense of disgust at the brutal tactics of some insurgent groups.
"Arabs are differentiating between the legitimate resistance against foreign military occupation troops and unacceptable terrorism that is killing Iraqis or innocent foreigners," says Rami Khouri, executive editor of Beirut's English-language Daily Star newspaper. "The differentiation is very clear and very vocal."
"We abhor taking hostages, particularly women and children, and we abhor killing hostages. It's against our values, whether we are Muslims or Christians," says Mohammed Aziz Shucri, professor of international law at Damascus University. Professor Shucri says resistance attacks should be confined only to foreign troops. "Attacking civilians is not resistance against occupation."
Chibli Mallat, professor of international law at Beirut's St. Joseph University, says that public perception of the resistance in Iraq "has always been nuanced between supporting genuine acts of resistance as opposed to the killing of civilians." But recently, and somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Mallat says this distinction has come to be made by stridently anti-American groups. "Some of them have been on record recently saying this is totally unacceptable," he says.

US critics also rethink
One of them is Salim Hoss, a former Lebanese prime minister, who is a staunch critic of US Mideast policy.
On Tuesday he wrote in Lebanon's leading daily An-Nahar that some militants in Iraq are defiling the name of Islam. "Islam is a religion of forgiveness," Mr. Hoss wrote. "People should not kill others in the name of Islam because they don't know how much it hurts all Muslims."
"America is an illegal occupier, but I abhor the inhuman tactics some of these groups use," he said in a phone interview.
To be sure, there are still almost daily pictures of injured Iraqi women and children hurt in US bombings, and for many, those imagines trump any excesses by groups like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad.

Images on TV
And while big regional newspapers like Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and Al-Hayat were careful to point out that the 49 young Iraqi soldiers were unarmed and executed, much of the daily press in Egypt, for instance, created the impression that they were killed in a shootout.
"Many Saudis pretend that Zarqawi is an imaginary figure because they don't like a lot of what's attributed to him,'' says Mshari al-Thaidi, who writes for Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, which is published in London. "They don't want to pollute the image of the resistance, so they pretend he doesn't exist. They claim he's a figure created by the C.I.A."
"It's painful for people,'' says Al-Ahram's Said. "Even in the Ramadan evening talks among my family, there's a kind of annoyance and denunciation of the brutality, but they want to go over it quickly and get to talking about Palestine and America's failings in Iraq."
And though public opinion is drifting in a more critical direction, few expect it to have any impact on car bombings and kidnappings inside Iraq any time soon.
Radical Islamists in Iraq "are not in the game of winning popular approval for their actions," says the Daily Star's Mr. Khouri. "These are not people after audience share. They don't expect to get elected to office. The reality is that they don't care and they are operating on a different plane from the rest of the society."
**Reporter Faiza Saleh Ambah contributed from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Visit the website at: www.csmonitor.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

**********

Article #2
Fear dominant in Arab psyche
Youssef M. Ibrahim
Fear is deeply ingrained in the Arab psyche, a gene implanted in the Arab mind. There is fear of speaking, writing, reading, or even hearing the truth. It is so contagious that it affects Arab immigrants who carry this homegrown fear with them to their new domiciles, hiding behind it to avoid melting into the societies they have taken refuge in. Such fear hangs in the air, blocking oxygen to the Arab mind, dominating thinking processes, surfacing in a self-censored media, in nervous jokes, and in absurd commentary that wastes hours describing black as white.
No one is born this way, of course. Fear is an environmentally acquired characteristic. In the Arab world it is a product of unilateral rule, hereditary power in republics as well as monarchial systems, rejection of democratic culture, dominance of the male persona which eliminates women as equal partners, and a demeaning embrace of hand-kissing instead of merit as a way to climb the social ladder.
For the immigrant Arab community, these fears have become more complicated since September 11, 2001, thanks to the Western adoption of systematic persecution and singling out of Arabs and Muslims as potential terrorists, deepening racism and the treatment of others as second-class citizens.
In America today, an Arab American community of some 3 million to 4 million people has no voice because it is afraid. Having a voice means attracting attention, perhaps trouble, most Arabs will tell you, which is a total failure in the understanding of how democracies function.
In Europe, where some 35 million Arabs live, most have crawled back into cultural caves - speaking Arabic, wearing the hijab, eating Arabic, and thinking Arabic instead of opening up to the societies that had embraced them.
But fear of change is not convenient nowadays. The Arab and Muslim worlds are undergoing massive transformations that demand massive adjustments. Hordes of enemies are poised at the gates, and huge internal pressure for change lies within. Our governments, our schools, our social systems, our economies, and our very sense of ethical conduct are all failed models whose shelf life is over.
If Arab writers and pundits cannot say this, document it, and analyze it without fear, we cannot even begin to reform. And if we cannot reform, what is left of Arab civilization will evaporate making place for a new agenda set by someone else. This is happening in Iraq, and it will happen to every society that blocks the oxygen from its people.
Even when they digest news, Arab media filter it through the prism of fear, disguised as political correctness, politeness, and information ministry rules, so much so that facts become fairy tales.
The whole world, for example, has heard about an ongoing intense political crisis in Lebanon and the UN Security Council pressures on Syria to get out of there. But the official Arab media, anxious not to offend "Arab brothers," will tell you there is no crisis there, that both Lebanon and Syria are blessed with "fraternal" relations, and the whole debacle is manufactured by France and the United States who are "meddling" in internal Lebanese-Syrian affairs. Never mind that the Lebanese constitution has been altered to allow for the first time a Lebanese president to stay in office beyond his term, joining the broad ranks of Arab presidents-for-life, or that a very prominent Lebanese prime minister, none less than Rafiq Al Hariri, has resigned in protest.
The French have an expression, langue de bois, or wooden tongue, to describe this condition. It accurately profiles Arab-speak.
How many times have you read about "honor killings," which is meant to describe acts of bloody mayhem by emotionally-deformed males who murder their wives, sisters, or distant female relatives often on the whim of a rumor about misbehaving or not marrying someone the family had designated? One fails to see the origin of the word "honor" where cowardice is more appropriate. We say of countries where women are not allowed to vote, choose their future partners in life, drive, travel, or run for office, that they are preserving "Arab and Islamic tradition" when they are flagrantly violating the human rights of half of their populations.
Arab media has been very good in dishing out criticism of American double standards, which are many. We talk of bias toward and against Muslims, and all that is correct. But let us not lose perspective here. America is a robust democracy with a bad president on top, and a poor candidate challenging him. But this very same America and its pundits have described both Bush and Kerry as liars, failures, flip-flops, double-dealers, and elitists. Bush has no magical powers. He is here today but will be gone this year or in four years. Criticizing him is ordinary. Nobody goes to jail for it. There will be no midnight visitors. Can we say as much for the Arab order?
**Youssef M. Ibrahim is managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group.
Source: Middle East Times
Website: www.metimes.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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Article #3
Why the U.S. should engage moderate Muslims everywhere
Radwan A. Masmoudi
On Sept. 11, 2001, a group of 19 terrorists who called themselves Muslim but whose actions and behavior were anything but Islamic, committed a terrible crime by attacking and killing 3,000 innocent American civilians in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Since that tragic day, Americans and honorable human beings everywhere have been engaged in a struggle to stop terrorism from spreading or threatening the lives, security, peace, or freedom of people around the globe. Since that fateful event, terrorist attacks have been waged from Indonesia to Morocco and from Madrid to Istanbul. The world, it seems, is on the verge of a major confrontation between the U.S. and a group of ignorant thugs and criminals who are trying to hijack Islam, the second largest and fastest-growing religion on earth.
To defeat the terrorists, the United States must avoid even the appearance that this is a war against Islam. Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of Muslims (secular and religious, moderate and extremists) are now convinced that the "war on terror" has become a "war on Islam and Muslims." This is an extremely dangerous development that, if unchecked, will feed the extremist and radical groups with the moral and financial support they need to continue spreading fear and bloodshed. A war between the United States (or the West) and the Islamic world as a whole is exactly what Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda hoped to achieve when they planned and committed the attacks of Sept. 11. To win the war on terror, the U.S. needs the support of the majority of the 1.4 billion Muslims around the globe. It must convince them that it holds neither ill feelings nor designs towards Islam or Muslims. Doing so requires:
a. reaching out to moderate Muslim leaders everywhere, establishing trust, engaging them in a dialogue, and understanding their issues and concerns,
b. supporting moderate Muslim leaders (both religious and secular) who are calling for a modern, tolerant, peaceful and democratic interpretation of Islam,
c. exerting political, diplomatic and economic pressure on current regimes in the Arab and Muslim world to establish a truly democratic form of government, thus giving millions of people hope for a better future,
d. Showing the United States as a bastion of freedom, tolerance and democracy where people of all faiths, including and especially Muslims, can live and thrive in peace, respect and harmony within a multi-religious, multi-ethnic society.
The need for Americans to understand Islam, and the need for Muslims to understand America, has never been greater. In both camps, voices of ignorance, prejudice and stereotypes are growing stronger and creating hatred and fear. Moderate and peace-loving Christians, Muslims and Jews must bond together to work for justice, peace, harmony and respect in our shrinking global village. Nonviolent struggle for justice, freedom and equality, combined with dialogue and understanding, are the only way to address grievances, resolve disputes, or establish peace on earth.
This is where someone like Tariq Ramadan comes in. Prof. Ramadan is one of the best-known and most popular Islamic scholars and leaders on the planet today. Few other leaders connect to the disaffected Muslim youth of America, Europe and the Middle East like he does. He offers them hope and a vision for living as Muslims in the 21st century, for being true to their Islamic heritage, culture and faith while embracing modern, progressive and democratic values and ideals. If somebody like Tariq Ramadan did not exist, the U.S. would have needed to invent him. Fortunately, he exists and is more than willing to come to the United States, engage with the American public and institutions in a serious, deep and sincere dialogue that can pave the way for a greater understanding and cooperation between the United States and the Muslim world.
Last year, Prof. Tariq Ramadan was invited by the University of Notre Dame to teach Islamic history, theology and politics beginning in the fall of 2004. After accepting the offer and resigning his position at the University of Friburg in Switzerland, registering his children in a public school in Indiana, and shipping his furniture and belongings, Prof. Ramadan was informed by the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland, a few days before his departure, that his visa had been revoked. He is now stuck, bewildered, with his family, in an empty apartment in Switzerland.
Muslims around the world are watching this saga with great concern, and some are ascribing this bizarre development to anti-Islamic conspiracies. This decision was one of the most reckless and counter-productive decisions made by the Department of Homeland Security since its inception. In the interest of the United States, it should be reversed without delay.
For us to win the post-Sept. 11 ideological struggle within Islam and bridge the gulf between the West and much of the Muslim Ummah (community), we desperately need the help of people like Professor Ramadan.
Radwan A. Masmoudi is president of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID) in Washington and a regular contributor to THE DAILY STAR. The views expressed here are entirely the author's and not necessarily those of CSID or its board of directors.
Source: Middle East Times
Visit the website at: www.metimes.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained from the author for publication.

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Article #4
Why is the legacy of confrontation so strong?
Rami G. Khouri
Today's day-to-day news reports suggest that the overall relationship between Arab/Muslim societies and the West, especially the United States, is a worsening cycle of war, threats, fears, and savage killings. The reality is more complex, with confrontations at several levels counterbalanced by underlying compatibilities that provide potential common ground for a healthier relationship in the future. The present, however, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, is defined by warfare and angry confrontation, and many reasons explain this grim reality.
Yet it is probably worth keeping in mind that the vast majorities of people in both camps would not willingly choose and probably do not enthusiastically support the military invasions, terrorism, and other forms of violent confrontation that define many aspects of Arab/Islamic-Western ties today. The fighting is the work of relatively small minorities - but it happens because of a wider and deeper enabling environment in which older perceptions and stronger tensions persist on both sides.
If we take American-Arab or American-Middle Eastern relations as the core of the wider Islamic-Western relationship, we can identify several significant reasons why so many parties on both sides have clashed in recent years. Modern history is probably the single most important backdrop to the tensions, represented by the prevalent Middle Eastern suspicion of Western armies coming into the region to occupy, exploit, or redefine its people and countries.
Arab memories even of the Crusades, more than eight centuries earlier, remain real and politically relevant. In the past two centuries since Napoleon's armies invaded Egypt and launched the modern European colonial era in the Middle East, local public opinion remains deeply resentful of Western political and military intervention. This has been manifested again in widespread Middle Eastern opposition to the American-led war to change the Iraqi regime and redraw the political map of the region.
The bitter historical legacy of the region is compounded by four powerful associated contemporary issues: economic distress, brisk social change, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the sustained tradition of Arab autocracy and dictatorship. The combination of these factors has created an Arab/Islamic landscape that is generally suspicious of Western motives, and often critical of existing indigenous regimes and elites that are seen to be created and supported by the West. In recent years, this restive, indignant, often humiliated public mood has also spawned small bands of militants who have used terror against their own regimes and the West.
The common, chronic foundation for this confrontational mindset among the average Arab or Iranian is the sense that Europeans and Americans view the Middle East purely in selfish utilitarian terms - as lands to be exploited for their mineral or commercial assets, or their strategic value in wider global contests (during the Cold War and now in the "war on terror"). The common perception across the Middle East is that Western powers for two centuries have routinely used their diplomatic power and sent their armies to occupy our lands, remove nationalist or anti-Western regimes they dislike, preserve conservative regimes and dictators they are comfortable with, maintain access to oil, or ensure Israel's superiority over all neighboring countries.
For half a century during the Cold War and the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the West broadly promoted autocratic and authoritarian Arab, Turkish, and Iranian regimes because this served the West's and Israel's purposes - without any concern for the sentiments, rights, or aspirations of ordinary citizens in this region. This has been coupled since the mid-1980s by two other factors that have increased popular opposition to the local elites and regimes and to their Western supporters. Economic stagnation, even regression in some countries, has become a volatile political force, fuelling calls to deal with the indignities of corruption, abuse of power, and widening disparities. At the same time, many in the Middle East feel that their basic cultural and religious values - let alone their national and political rights - are vulnerable to a Western-led onslaught couched in the dynamics of globalization, the communications revolution, and free trade.
This combination of historical anxiety, economic stress, and the vulnerability of one's most basic social, national, and religious identity has created masses of distressed people who have not found an outlet for their concerns in domestic political change, and thus often direct their anger - and recently their bombs - at the West.
So as indigenous Islamist, nationalist, or leftist movements emerged in recent decades, and challenged local regimes, Israel, and the US, they usually found a deep groundswell of public acclaim. Support for Nasser, Khomeini, the Palestinian resistance, Hizbollah, Mossadegh, Saddam Hussein, or even Osama Bin Laden today reflects this deep legacy of anti-Western and anti-Israeli bitterness, resentment, and indignity in Middle Eastern public opinion.
Therefore few in the Middle East believe that an American or European who talks of promoting peace, prosperity, or democracy in our region does so out of a sense that Arabs and Iranians deserve this right. Not only do many Westerners and Middle Easterners now clash military, but those who seek to work together for democracy, justice and reform are often hindered by the debilitating legacy of fear, suspicion, and anger.
The only good news in this otherwise gloomy picture is that global and regional public opinion surveys (especially the Global Values Survey) routinely confirm that Arabs/Muslims and Americans/Westerners share most of the basic values related to good governance, such as participation, accountability, justice, and equality. There is a fertile, enduring foundation of positive personal and public values that can be exploited to bring Arabs/Muslims and the West into a more constructive new relationship. But these values that provide a powerful common ground for a new relationship remain crushed under the weight of confrontation, war, and terrorism that dominate the scene today. Until the constraints of modern history are addressed and redressed, the potential for a mutually more beneficial Arab/Islamic-Western relationship will remain dormant in most spheres of life.
**Rami G. Khouri is the Executive Editor, the Daily Star newspaper, Beirut, Lebanon.
Source: This article is part of a series of views on the relationship between the Islamic/Arabic world and the West, published in partnership with the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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About CGNews-PiH
The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. This service is one result of a set of working meetings held in partnership with His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal in June 2003.
Every two weeks, CGNews-PiH will distribute 2-5 news articles, op-eds, features, and analyses that aid in developing and analyzing the current and future relationship of the West and Arab/Muslim world. Articles will be chosen based on accuracy, balance, and their ability to improve understanding and communication across borders and regions. They will also reflect the need for constructive dialogue around issues of global importance. Selections will be authored by local and international experts and leaders who will analyze and discuss a broad range of relevant issues. We invite you to submit any articles you feel are compatible with the goals of this news service.
We look forward to hearing from you, and welcome any questions, concerns, or comments you may have about this service. Please forward this message to colleagues and friends who may also wish to subscribe to the service. To subscribe, send an email to subscribe-cgnewspih@sfcg.org with subscribe in the subject line.
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Washington Editors
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Posted by Evelin at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)
Peace Journalism

Peace Journalism in the Holy Land - new video
A message from Hawthorn Press Ltd

Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick are experienced professional journalists. They also lecture in peace journalism. They run the Oxford thinktank Reporting the World and have led journalist training programmes in many countries.

They have produced a video 'News from the Holy Land'. This video offers a hard-hitting introduction to peace journalism and conflict analysis for journalists, civil society activists, and educators in media studies, politics and journalism. It includes:

¨ An overview of peace journalism and conflict analysis.
¨ Two versions of a report about a suicide bombing in Jerusalem - one War Journalism,
the other Peace Journalism
¨ Over 36 interview clips with commentary
¨ Useful teaching notes, with case studies, exercises, discussion topics and questions

‘A really excellent and extraordinary achievement.’
Professor Greg Philo, Glasgow University Media Group

‘…shows how journalists can improve their coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict…The film stresses that it is the lack of context in mainstream reporting of the conflict that leads to a process of polarisation. This is partly because the media are only interested in violence. As veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery points out in the film, “…if you don’t kill somebody, you’re not news.”

Victor Kattan, The Electronic Intifada

'It was a very good idea to suggest how better to cover and report than just do another critique, and Jake and Annabel did it excellently.'

Tim Llewellyn, former BBC Middle East Correspondent

To order copies of this video please contact:

Booksource, 32 Finlas Street, Glasgow, Scotland, G22 5DU.
Tel: 08702 402182, Fax: 0141 557 0189, Email orders@booksource.net, order on-line at www.hawthornpress.com, open the attached document or click here for an order form.

If you need any further information please contact:

Hawthorn Press Ltd, Hawthorn House, 1 Lansdown Lane, Stroud, Glos, GL5 1BJ, ENGLAND
Tel: 01453 757040, Fax: 01453 751138, Email info@hawthornpress.com

Kindest Regards
Hawthorn Press Ltd

Posted by Evelin at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace Web Site November 7, 2004

Additions to Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace web site November 7, 2004

Update to interested people about current additions to the Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace web site.

Upcoming Events http://www.peace.ca/upcoming.htm :
We are hosting 3 major upcoming events (now starting only one week away):
Peace and Leadership 3-day workshop November 15 - 17, 2004 http://www.peace.ca/leadershipworkshop.htm ,
Third Annual Peace Education Conference in Canada November 18 - 22, 2004 http://www.peace.ca/CanadianAgenda2004.htm , followed by a
National Culture of Peace Program Symposium November 23 - 25, 2004 http://www.peace.ca/nationalcultureofpeace2004.htm .
All at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

These are the most significant Peace Education, Peace Leadership and National Culture of Peace Program Conferences in North America. We also host a large Trade Fair with many booths showcasing Peace Programs and Resources, disseminating information, creating new networks, etc. Please come, and bring a friend. Our program provides excellent value for your money, time and effort - it will help you make more of a difference with your peace work.


Problem Identification Topics http://www.peace.ca/problem.htm :

Uninspiring and Shocking Quotes http://www.peace.ca/uninspiringquotes.htm :

"It would be an oxymoron to call opinion balanced." Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? By Daniel Okrent. New York Times. Week in Review, Sunday, July 25, 2004. Backup. http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/okrent01bk.htm

"Chalmers Johnson ... wrote Blowback and recently The Sorrows of Empire. I highly recommend Sorrows of Empire as it is an out standing historic presentation of the development of U.S. militarism and what it looks like today. In that book, he provides some interesting statistics from the first Gulf war. At that time, the U.S. had over 600,000 troops serving in the gulf. There were approximately 500-700 deaths which include battle deaths, friendly fire, and accidents. The interesting part is that the U.S. Veterans Administration subsequently classified approximately 200,000 of those troops as disabled. Approximately, one third of all troops serving; probably the highest casualty rate of any war. Much of which is termed the Gulf War Syndrome and related to spent uranium munitions. These munitions are manufactured at Lake City Arsenal in Kansas City. It is my understanding that all the millers of the bullets wear special masks to filter out any dust particles." Richard J. Scheerer



Who's Who (World Level) http://www.peace.ca/whoswho.htm :

The Citizens' Circle for Accountability (CCA) is a non-profit organization created as a prime resource on the concept, meaning and importance of public accountability. The CCA is also a resource for citizens on strategies for holding fairly to account, and is a forum for the exchange of ideas and strategies through the Journal of Public Accountability on the CCA's website. The connection of public accountability to peace is clear: since peace is a function of citizens, governments and corporations being fair to others, citizens must engage levers that give them a "proper understanding of matters" and at the same time exert a self-regulating influence on those in authority responsible for bringing about peace. As citizens, we have yet to demand that the authorities whose intentions and actions are key to peace (largely the directing minds of executive governments and corporations) tell us, fully, fairly and publicly, what they specifically intend as outcomes, for whom, and why they intend it. They must also tell us their own performance standards for their responsibilities. Since the public answering obligation is central to democracy, the demand for this public answering is unassailable. The CCA website links to the comprehensive book on public accountability by Henry E. McCandless, A Citizen's Guide to Public Accountability: Changing the Relationship Between Citizens and Authorities (CCA and Trafford Publishing, 2002). For more info: Citizens' Circle for Accountability, www.accountabilitycircle.org 877 Newport Ave., Victoria, BC, Canada, V8S 5C8; telephone 250-370-5954; fax 250-370-5958; email: henrymccandless@accountabilitycircle.org

The International Art Partnership "Peace Tree" is a non-governmental organisations that aim to promote arts education. Welcome to visit http://www.iap-peacetree.org . About the IAP peaceful activity is well-known in the UNESCO and in many countries of the world. More than 1000 children and adults from 46 countries have already taken part in our Origami Peace Tree art festivals (Russia-2000,2001,2002; Korea-2004, USA-2004). The 5th Peace Tree festival was just now finished in Pasadena, CA, USA. More than hundred people from 16 countries have taken part in building of the Origami Peace Tree US 2004. All the pictures will be dispayed on the IAP site at the beginning of November, 2004. http://www.iap-peacetree.org/opt/history.html . There was a beautiful Peace through Art forum that has demonstrated again the art of Origami is the best and easiest way of the communication between all nations. Our next festivals will be organized in Germany-2005, Japan-2005, India-2006: http://www.iap-peacetree.org/opt/main.html. For more information: Alexander Levashov, President, IAP "Peace Tree", P.O.Box 248, Novorossiysk, 353907, Russia.

Psychologists for the Promotion of World Peace is an Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society. It's members are Psychologists who are concerned about the prevalence of war and confict in our world and are interested in applying their professional skills to issues related to promoting peace and preventing war.
PPOWP's educational resources are used in schools and justice departments, workplaces and refugee camps. We produce the children's picture book Wise Ways to Win, a touring pantomime based on the book, and a popular series of posters detailing strategies for such things as Creating Cultures of Peace, Rebuilding Relationships after Hurtful Conflict, Handling Anger Wisely, and Creating Peaceful Families. I invite you to visit our website at http://www.psychology.org.au/units/interest%5Fgroups/peace/ for a closer look at our resources and at our activites. Contact: Tamsin Whaley, Administrator, Psychologists for the Promotion of World Peace, The Australian Psychological Society, P.O. Box 38, Flinders Lane Post Office, Melbourne 8009, Victoria, Australia; email tnt@gcom.net.au
Transparency International, the only international non-governmental organisation devoted to combating corruption, brings civil society, business, and governments together in a powerful global coalition. TI, through its International Secretariat and more than 85 independent national chapters around the world, works at both the national and international level to curb both the supply and demand of corruption. In the international arena, TI raises awareness about the damaging effects of corruption, advocates policy reform, works towards the implementation of multilateral conventions and subsequently monitors compliance by governments, corporations and banks. At the national level, chapters work to increase levels of accountability and transparency, monitoring the performance of key institutions and pressing for necessary reforms in a non-party political manner. TI does not expose individual cases (that is the work of journalists, many of whom are members of TI chapters). Rather, in an effort to make long-term gains against corruption, TI focuses on prevention and reforming systems. A principal tool in the fight against corruption is access to information. It is in this spirit that we offer this web site to everybody with an interest in the fight against corruption. We hope it will make a valuable contribution to assessing the gains made in recent years, and to contemplating the challenges that still lie ahead. For more information: Peter Eigen, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Transparency International (TI) - Otto-Suhr-Allee 97 - 99 - 10585 Berlin, Germany - Phone :+49-30-343 8200 - Fax :+49-30-3470 3912 - email: ti@transparency.org ; web site http://www.transparency.org/index.html


World Love Inc. is dedicated to present and past world citizens who are now suffering and who have suffered . MISSION STATEMENT: To promote love, education, understanding, giving, compassion and togetherness between citizens and cultures of the world. To Contact World Love: Web site http://www.worldloveinc.us/ ; Email - pres@worldloveinc.us ; World Love Inc., 5115 N. Dysart Rd., STE-202 PMB 129, Litchfield Park, AZ. 85340


Who's Who (Community Level) http://www.peace.ca/whoswhocomm.htm :

Joie de Vivre Joyful Living Workshops - In association with Paul McKenna, and the Interfaith Desk of SCARBORO MISSIONS, I have recently begun to facilitate a very new and profound workshop -- created by Scarboro Missions -- entitled the "Golden Rule Creative/Meditative Workshop". In this regard, I would like to invite you to visit the webpage which beautifully illustrates and describes this workshop (as well as other related endeavours) in greater detail: www.carrot.com/events/joiedevivre/ . Using the visually striking multifaith Golden Rule poster as one of the "tools", this workshop is ideal for generating greater compassion, tolerance, global unity, social justice, moral ethics, and PEACE. Please feel free to contact me, either by email or telephone, if you need any further info: Roslyn Rus, email joiederoz@yahoo.ca ; tel (416) 465-3948

Information Resources (World Level) http://www.peace.ca/info.htm :

Breaking Rank: A citizen's review of Canadian Military Spending, by Steven Staples, Director, Polaris Institute (available online at http://www.polarisinstitute.org/polaris_project/corp_security_state/publications_articles/breaking_rank.pdf ) 5 Star Must Reading

The Impact of Militarism on the Environment: An Overview of Direct & Indirect Effects, by Abeer Majeed. A research report written for Physicians for Global Survival (Canada). Available online at http://www.pgs.ca/updir/militarism_environment_web.pdf . 5 Start Must Reading.

Peace Psychology Links - http://www.socialpsychology.org/peace.htm

Microwave Gun to be Used by US Troops on Iraq Rioters – (News Telegraph– September 19, 2004) Microwave weapons that cause pain without lasting injury are to be issued to American troops in Iraq for the first time as concern mounts over the growing number of civilians killed in fighting. The non-lethal weapons, which use high-powered electromagnetic beams, will be fitted to vehicles already in Iraq, which will allow the system to be introduced as early as next year. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wirq319.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/19/ixworld.html

Slavery Is Not Dead, Just Less Recognizable – (The Christian Science Monitor – September 1, 2004) Today, 27 million people throughout the world are enslaved, more than at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Although now banned in every country, slavery has boomed in the past 50 years as the global population has exploded. A billion people scrape by on $1 a day. That extreme poverty combined with local government corruption and a global economy that leaps national boundaries has produced a surge in the number of slaves - even though in the developed world, that word conjures up the 19th century rather than the evening news. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0901/p16s01-wogi.html

Dark Matter Surround Dark Energy – (PRWeb – August 30, 2004) The American military is pursuing new types of exotic bombs - including a new class of isomeric gamma ray weapons. Unlike conventional atomic and hydrogen bombs, the new weapons would trigger the release of energy by absorbing radiation, and respond by re-emitting a far more powerful radiation. In this new category of gamma-ray weapons, a nuclear isomer absorbs x-rays and re-emits higher frequency gamma rays. The emitted gamma radiation has been reported to release 60 times the energy of the x-rays that trigger the effect. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/8/prwebxml153446.php

Extreme Weather Will Kill Millions – (Common Dreams News Center – September 7, 2004) Millions of people across the globe are set to die early due to extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves caused by climate change, said a British scientist. Professor Mike Pilling cited the heat wave in Europe last year that killed thousands of people from a combination of heat exhaustion and an increase in atmospheric pollution. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0907-05.htm

Global to Local – (LocusOnline – September 10, 2004) "I wanted to know about the quality of life in the future. I wanted to know about our political life; the scope of our freedom. I wanted to know what it was going to be like on a daily basis for my son and my grandson — I wanted to know if perhaps my son would do better to have no children at all. Those are general yearnings, more than specific questions. The questions I came up with still seem too general, and approximate." http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Features/09_ShirleySocialFuture.html

Proposals/Solutions http://www.peace.ca/proposal.htm :

POLITICS COULD BE GOOD FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH - Families worried about their children's futures should get them engaged in election issues, says a University of Michigan professor. Young people who are highly aware about social issues may be less likely to engage in risky behaviors such as using drugs or becoming violent, according to research psychologist Marc Zimmerman. They are also more likely to feel better about themselves and to help their communities. Talking to youngsters about important civic issues--and demonstrating civic commitment by voting--is a good way to show them that they have a say in their own futures, he suggests. "We find that adolescents, especially high school aged kids, are very important because they're soon going to be in that 18- to 24-year range," Zimmerman notes. "And if you don't instill some interest in voting, civic duty, civic pride, and engagement in the world before they get there, you've lost them." Involvement in civic and extracurricular activities also makes children less likely to be depressed and more likely to feel better about themselves and to develop critical thinking skills. DETAILS: University of Michigan Health System, http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2004/hmvoter.htm

Inspiring Quotes http://www.peace.ca/inspiringquotations.htm :

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles." Anne Frank (1929-1945)

"the crux of democracy, a people who want, think through, and vote for a better future" http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/leftright12.htm

List Servers http://www.peace.ca/usergroup.htm :

The Canadian International Policy site http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/cip-pic/menu-en.asp is designed to provide information, views, and analysis on the key issues that touch on Canada’s role in the international community. It describes the foundations of Canada's international policy and provides you with insights into new policy thinking. To subscribe to the newsletter, click on http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/cip-pic/about/subscription-en.asp


Curricula http://www.peace.ca/curricula.htm :

Curriculum Resource for Ontario Grade 12 "Canadian and World Politics" Course - During 2003-04 Project Ploughshares partnered with Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, Ontario and EnviroGlobe Consultants to produce comprehensive support materials for the Ontario Grade 12 "Canadian and World Politics" course. With funding assistance from the Global Classrooms Initiative program of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the joint project has compiled a full set of lesson plans and resources in different media formats - including role play text, graphics, photographs, and movie clips - to support students and teachers through the
pre-university course on a lesson-by-lesson basis. The curriculum materials draw on the "Armed Conflicts Report" and other Ploughshares resources as well as the information and expertise of a host of civil society groups and government agencies. The full set of the Grade 12 course material is available by clicking on the "World Politics Resources" item on the Cameron Heights website homepage at http://chci.wrdsb.edu.on.ca/ . Educators are also welcome to order a free copy of: the 22"x34" poster of Project Ploughshares' Armed Conflicts Report from plough@ploughshares.ca for classroom use; and the CD-ROM version of all course materials from
enviroglobe@sympatico.ca .

Stanford Peace Project for kids (http://credibility.stanford.edu/peace). We are currently (Nov 2004) recruiting children around age 10 from different countries to participate in a field trial of some new software. Additional information for children and parents is available at: http://credibility.stanford.edu/peace/info . Here is a short introduction to our project. I hope that your goals align with ours and that you might consider helping us find some children to participate. A number of Stanford University School of Education students are working with the Stanford Peace Project for Kids. Our goal is to bring about global harmony within our lifetime, by connecting children of the world through technology. Can you help us? We are looking for 5th graders from around the world who would like to participate in the early stages of an exciting new program. We are especially interested in working with international participants. Each participant will be connected to a global network of friends to collaborate, share, and discover their commonalities. They will use a new application developed to make connecting over the internet easy, safe, and fun. To participate, children should be about 10 years old, speak conversational English, and have access to a Windows PC with an internet connection. If you know any kids in other countries who would like to be involved, or if you would like more information about this program please contact Meri Mohr at mjmohr@stanford.edu

See the following new reports posted on our web site:
WORLD-WIDE COMPETITION
OVER $1,000,000,000,000
IN TAX-FREE PRIZES
http://www.peace.ca/competition.htm

Leadership and a Culture of Violence, by Bob Stewart http://www.peace.ca/leadershipandacultureofviolence.htm

A NATIONAL CULTURE OF PEACE PROGRAM by Robert Stewart http://www.peace.ca/nationalcopp.htm

Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee article, "A CANADIAN ACTION AGENDA ON CONFLICT PREVENTION: Some Key Points proposed by Canadian Civil Society", October 31, 2004 http://www.peace.ca/canadianconflictpreventionagenda.htm

Funding for the Canadian Military: FUBAR - by Bob Stewart. Currently, the discussion and politics is driven by a military lobby comprised of retired generals, security think tanks, academics, and corporations that benefit from military contracts. Together, we can take back this important issue and help give it due process. It is clear that this dialogue on military and foreign affairs policy and spending must be taken beyond Parliamentary committee rooms, university campuses, and newsrooms. http://www.peace.ca/militaryfunding.htm

"Where do I start?" http://www.peace.ca/wheredoistart.htm

standard letter that I have on tips for things you can do to start http://www.peace.ca/tipsonpeaceeducation.htm

The origin of the quote "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed." http://www.peace.ca/faq.htm

"Are there any recommendations that you could make concerning the topic 'The Strength of Media as a Peace Building Tool'?" http://www.peace.ca/faq.htm

Questions? contact Bob Stewart at stewartr@peace.ca

Posted by Evelin at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)
The Grassroots Good News, November 2004 Edition

GGN November 2004 / Table of Contents:

1) Curitiba - an innovative green City
2) Reconciliation Work in Southern Africa
3) Children’s university for human rights

1) Curitiba - an innovative green City

Residents of Curitiba, Brazil, think they live in the best city in the world, and a lot of outsiders agree. Curibita has 17 new parks, 90 miles of bike paths, trees everywhere, and traffic and garbage systems that officials from other cities come to study. Curibita's mayor for twelve years, Jaime Lerner, has a 92 per cent approval rating.

There is nothing special about Curitiba's history, location or population. Like all
Latin American cities, the city has grown enormously - from 150,000 people in the 1950s to 1.6 million now. It has its share of squatter settlements, where fewer than half the people are literate. Curibita's secret, insofar that it has one, seems to be simple willingness from the people at the top to get their kicks from solving problems.

Those people at the top started in the 1960s with a group of young architects who were not impressed by the urban fashion of borrowing money for big highways, massive buildings, shopping malls and other showy projects. They were thinking about the environment and about human needs. They approached Curibita's mayor, pointed to the rapid growth of the city and made a case for better planning.

The mayor sponsored a contest for a Curibita master plan. He circulated the best entries, debated them with the citizens, and then turned the people's comments over to the upstart architects, asking them to develop and implement a final plan.

Jaime Lerner was one of these architects. In 1971 he was appointed mayor by the then military government of Brazil.

Given Brazil's economic situation, Lerner had to think small, cheap and participatory - which was how he was thinking anyway. He provided 1.5 million tree seedlings to neighbourhoods for them to plant and care for. ('There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree,' says Lerner.)

He solved the city's flood problems by diverting water from lowlands into lakes in the new parks. He hired teenagers to keep the parks clean.

He met resistance from shopkeepers when he proposed turning the downtown shopping district into a pedestrian zone, so he suggested a thirty-day trial. The zone was so popular that shopkeepers on the other streets asked to be included. Now one pedestrian street, the Rua das Flores, is lined with gardens tended by street children.

Orphaned or abandoned street children are a problem all over Brazil. Lerner got each industry, shop and institution to 'adopt' a few children, providing them with a daily meal and a small wage in exchange for simple maintenance gardening or office chores.

Another Lerner innovation was to organise the street vendors into a mobile, open-air fair that circulates through the city's neighbourhoods.

Concentric circles of local bus lines connect to five lines that radiate from the centre of the city in a spider web pattern. On the radial lines, triple-compartment buses in their own traffic lanes carry three hundred passengers each. They go as fast as subway cars, but at one-eightieth the construction cost.

The buses stop at Plexiglas tube stations designed by Lerner. Passengers pay their fares, enter through one end of the tube, and exit from the other end. This system eliminates paying on board, and allows faster loading and unloading, less idling and air pollution, and a sheltered place for waiting - though the system is so efficient that there isn't much waiting. There isn't much littering either. There isn't time.

Curitiba's citizens separate their trash into just two categories, organic and inorganic, for pick-up by two kinds of trucks. Poor families in squatter settlements that are unreachable by trucks bring their trash bags to neighbourhood centres, where they can exchange them for bus tickets or for eggs, milk, oranges and potatoes, all bought from outlying farms.

The trash goes to a plant (itself built of recycled materials) that employs people to separate bottles from cans from plastic. The workers are handicapped people, recent immigrants, alcoholics.

Recovered materials are sold to local industries. Styrofoam is shredded to stuff quilt for the poor. The recycling programme costs no more than the old landfill, but the city is cleaner, there are more jobs, farmers are supported and the poor get food and transportation. Curitiba recycles two-thirds of it garbage - one of the highest rates of any city, north or south.

Curitiba builders get a tax break if their projects include green areas.

Jaime Lerner says, 'There is no endeavour more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream. When a city accepts as a mandate its quality of life; when it respects he people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for uture generations, the people share the responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream.'

Summarised from an article by Donella Meadows entitled 'The city of first priorities' in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1995). See also the article about Curitiba on page 183, The Book of Visions (Institute for Social Inventions, 1992).


2) Reconciliation Work in Southern Africa
Within the Bremen Peace Award 2003 the following proposal has been shortlisted:
Sinani has been committed to the victims and survivors of violence in South Africa for over 10 years. It combines trauma and peace work on the one hand and community development and small projects which ge-nerate income on the other, thereby creating new prospects for the lives of those left traumatised. To this end Sinani holds stress and trauma workshops which help young people develop their personality, for instance, through small community projects. Women are another of Sinani’s target groups: they receive help to over-come the consequences of violence in their families and to (re)gain dignity and respect in a society marked by ongoing violence.

Siegfried Schroeder (“Weltfriedensdienst“[World Peace Service] Berlin) wites:
“SINANI“ is the Zulu for “we are with you.“ And this is the agenda of the organisation which has been there for the victims/survivors of violence for over 10 years. The project was started at the beginning of the nineties in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Following the first democratic elections of 1994, there was a significant decrease in politically motivated violence. However, the traumatic experience of violence remained with a large part of the population. Levels of intra-societal violence in the province are also still extremely high. The violence no longer occurs along political power lines, but rather it takes the form of “acts of revenge” and family feuds. In particular, however, personal experience of violence, humiliation and dehumanisation from the apartheid era and the civil war have led to a substantial increase in domestic violence, child abuse and rape.

It is in this environment that the NGO SINANI/PSV operates with two offices in Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The 23 members of staff work in many more than 20 partner communities in townships, informal and semi-rural settlements. SINANI only works at the concrete request of the individual communities. A “community intervention“ is intended to reach all three target groups ­ children, young people and adults.

Every week contacts from the organisation meet up with different groups of men, women and young people who fought as child soldiers or in militias or who have been severely traumatised in other ways as a result of the civil war. Part of this involves talking about their own experience of violence. It is also a question, however, of helping the young people develop their personality, rebuild personal relationships in the community and develop prospects for themselves for instance. In this respect SINANI/PSV has learnt over the years that it is crucial to combine effective trauma work with “income-generating projects” and “community development.“ SINANI/PSV also works with groups of ex-combatants, who were integrated back into society following democratisation. Addressing their social plight and simple ways of restoring their dignity (a birthday cake, for example) are successful first steps towards breaking the cycle of violence.

Besides young people, women are SINANI/PSV’s primary target group. Many of them, wives and mothers, had to bury their closest relatives during apartheid and civil war. In the “reconciliation gestures” performed ritually by SINANI between two previously hostile communities, it is mostly the women who initiate and make these gestures.

Set against the background of increasing domestic violence, abuse and rape, it is the women’s groups supported by SINANI that are now trying to re-establish values such as dignity and respect in the communities, and make public the link between violence against women and HIV/Aids.

To conclude, SINANI/PSV organises an annual “leadership forum“, in which “traditional leaders“, councillors and community leaders come together for two weeks to discuss democratic and participating community structures.
Contact: www.survivors.org.z


3) Children’s university for human rights
In 1991 a peace school was established in Novorossiysk offering subjects that are not offered at regular schools, for example, philosophy, management and alternative history lessons. Following on from this experience, a new "Children’s University for Human Rights" was founded in 2002. This is not an official educational establishment. The children stay at home, receive their materials and assignments by email, communicate with each other on the Internet and sit a final exam by email. The pupils meet up twice a year, exchange ideas and talk to adult human rights activists. The peace school and the human rights university are supported by the "Peace School" foundation in Novorossiysk (http://sp.nvrsk.ru). In addition to the two educational institutions, the foundation also offers legal and psychological help to children and young people, working in particular with children from socially deprived families. It is also developing a project to promote tolerance education. Since 1999 young volunteers, who are trained by the foundation, have also been operating a helpline for young people in he city. Where necessary, callers are offered an appointment with a psychologist or lawyer. The foundation also holds lessons for minors in a local remand centre once a week. Finally, the foundation has launched the "Tolerance Football" project in the city’s secondary schools. The teams are deliberately made up of pupils from different schools, classes and ethnic backgrounds. Girls and boys play together in mixed teams, but only goals scored by girls count. Based on a report in: Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte (hg): Russland auf dem Weg zum Rechtsstaat? [German Institute for Human Rights (hg):
Russia on the way to becoming a constitutional state?], 2003, see 202-204 (www.institutfuer-menschenrechte.de)
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Posted by Evelin at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)
Jean-Damascène Gasanabo

Dear All,
Please meet Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, Member of our Core Team, who has just been awarded his PhD in Education at the University of Geneva. He is born in 1961, has Swiss and Rwandan nationality, and is an xperienced multilingual researcher, trainer and academic. He is a specialist in the teaching of history, genocide, primary education, health and other post-conflict issues with wide experience in Europe and Africa.

Jean-Damas has earned his PhD in Education on Memories and History Textbooks: The Case of Rwanda from 1962 to 1994 on October 26, 2004 (en français: Mémoires et histoire scolaire: le cas du Rwanda de 1962 à 1994).

Please contact him at jeandamas@hotmail.com. After earning his Ph.D. is now free to begin his career wherever in the world, in Switzerland, in Europe, in America or in Africa.
I would be most grateful for your support to Jean-Damas. Please consider that this is one of the most dedicated young men, I have ever met.
Most warmly!
Evelin

Posted by Evelin at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
Donald Klein on Power

Dear Don!
Thanks so much for your wonderful reflections as to how we can use energy as power!
I find your reflections to be wonderful food for thought for our November 17 informal meeting!
May I therefore share your message with the others, dear Don?
As to your brilliant book on Power , thanks so much for offering a special price to us!
You write:
"The book can be purchased from Sea Otter Press for $24.95. I'll be happy to discount it to members of the Human Dignity and Humiliation network for $15.00, including postage."
Thanks, dear Don!
Most fondly, to ALL!
Evelin

At 00:42 01.11.2004, Don Klein wrote:
The energy model of power has three basic components, all based on the
definition of power as energy put to use and directed to a purpose. The
assumption is that the energy that we draw on is universal life energy and
is, therefore, abundant. The first component of the theory has to do with
we transform universal life energy into usable form: (1) We do so
intellectually by selecting the goal or purpose to which the energy is to be
put; (2) we do so emotionally by mobilizing our emotions with a strong
enough sense of purpose to commit ourselves to working towards that goal or
purpose; (3) we do so physically by preparing ourselves with the ability to
act (i.e., to behave) in such a way as to do what's needed to achieve the
goal or purpose.

The second component of the energy model of power has to do with the ways in
which we can exchange energy with others so as to influence them to commit
themselves to working with us towards a common goal of purpose. There are
only seven such energy exchange channels: (1) the authority or other role
relationships that enable us to lay claim to others' energy: (2) coercion:
i.e., our ability to force others to do what we want them to do; even here,
however, there is an "exchange" of energy. That is, if the otheres refuse
to be forced, even at the cost of their lives, we aren't able to lay claim
to their energy. (3) Charisma: the quality of the energy we bring to the
relationship, such that the other party(ies) are drawn to us, find us
especially impressive or likable, and, therefore, choose to work with us.
(4) Reward: our ability to provide or withhold something that the other
party needs or wants, up to and including friendship, love, and gratitude.
(5) Knowledge: we have abilities and/or knowledge that the other party can
use. (6) Group Solidarity: the cohesive sense that some groups achieve where
every member is committed to working towards a shared goal. (7) Networking:
the web of personal and professional connections that we can choose to call
upon when and if needed in order to achieve our objectives.

My experience indicates that hardly anyone allows themselves to use all
seven of the exchange channels. Almost everyone favors only one or two.
The usual combination is authority and, if that doesn't work, coercion (some
form of threat of reprisal.) Almost everyone also tends to reject one or
two of the possible channels. The rejection of networking, for example, is
often expressed by the complaint, "In this organization it isn't what you
know; it's who you know." Rejection of the reward channel is often
expressed as the dismissal of "bribery."
In my view, each of the seven channels is value neutral; on the one hand, it
can be used effectively and without self-sacrifice or disparagement of
others; on the other hand, it can be used manipulatively in such a way as to
diminish one feels about oneself or others.

The third component of the energy model has to do with the equitable
exchange of energy via one or more of the above seven channels. That is,
both parties to the transaction must feel sufficiently satisfied with what
they're getting from the exchange. Equitability doesn't mecessarily mean
"equal." It's clear that very often people who feel oppressed or victimized
will put up with unqual exchange of energy because they feel that what
they're receiving is "good enough" or because the likely penalties for withd
rawing from the exchange aren't worth what might be gained.

The energy model of power is more fully presented in the book "Power: the
Infinite Game" by Michael Broom and myself. In the book we also discuss the
empowerment of oneself and others, and include a chapter on how racial
oppression and other forms of discrimination can be understood in terms of
the model. The book can be purchased from Sea Otter Press (wnicn is the
press I have established. for $24.95. I'll be happy to discount it to
members of the Human Dignity and Humiliation network for $15.00, including
postage.

Finally, thank you so much for your warm and affectionate comments regarding
my efforts to awaken the capacity for appreciative being in others.
Love,
Don

Posted by Evelin at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)
The First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

The First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

The website www.qi2005.org now accepts submissions for the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry which will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from May 5-7, 2005. You are all welcome to visit our site and submit your abstracts for both papers and sessions.

Half-day (morning and afternoon) pre-conference workshops (May 5), will precede the two-day Congress (May 6-7) which will consist of plenary, spotlight, regular, and poster sessions. There will also be an opening reception with hors d'oeuvres and cash bar, and a closing reception with cash bar and a barbecue-cookout.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS AND WORKSHOP FACILITATORS INCLUDE:
Arthur Bochner • Liora Bresler • Nick Burbules • Kathy Charmaz • Clifford Christians • CL Cole • Norman Denzin • Carolyn Ellis • Alice Filmer • Stephen Hartnett •Rodney Hodson • Stafford Hood • Ernest House • Valerie Janesick • Patti Lather • Yvonna Lincoln • Ernest Lockridge • Cameron McCarthy • Kathryn Bell McKenzie • Luis Miron • Jan Morse • Susaan Nofke • Virginia Olesen • Cele Otnes • Larry Parker • Ron Pelias • Wanda Pillow • Laure Richardson • Fazal Rizvi • Katherine Ryan •James Scheurich • Linda Tuhiwai Smith • Robert Stake • Bettie St. Pierre • Noreen Sugrue • Angharad Valdivia • Mary Weems

THEME
The theme of the First International Congress of Qualitative Research focuses on "Qualitative Inquiry in a Time of Global Uncertainty." We call on the international community of interpretive scholars to gather together in common purpose to address the implications of the recent attempts by federal governments and their agencies to define what is 'good science',
and what constitutes 'good scholarship'. Around the globe governments are attempting to regulate interpretive inquiry by enforcing bio-medical, evidence-based models of research.

These regulatory activities raise basic philosophical, epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. Their effects are interdisciplinary. They cut across the fields of educational and policy research, the humanities, communications, health and social science, social welfare, business and law.

In the United States, the evidence-based experimental science movement, with accompanying federal legislation (Leave No Child Behind), threatens to deny advances in critical qualitative inquiry, including rigorous criticisms of positivist research. This legislation marginalizes indigenous, border, feminist, race, queer,
and ethnic studies. The international community of qualitative researchers must come together to debate and discuss the implications of these new developments.

The mission of the First International Congress is to provide a forum for these critical conversations, to build and expand the already robust tradition of
Qualitative Inquiry. This congress gathers together vibrant strands of qualitative research to produce innovative futures. We seek to generate lively, critical debate, foster contacts and the exchange ideas, and draw inspiration from each other. We encourage international participation from different countries, disciplines and cultural backgrounds, as well as from a wide range of research areas, including the humanities, medical and health care scholars.

We invite your submission of paper and session proposals. To learn more about the First International Congress and how to participate, please visit our website <www.QI2005.org>.

Session and paper submissions will be accepted online only from October 1 until December 1, 2004. (There is a limit of two paper submissions per delegate)

It is assumed that the topics listed below will in one way or another be taken up in the sessions and in pre-conference workshops, but please feel free to nominate your own topic. (Please note that we are not soliciting workshop submissions)
Conference and workshop registration will begin Dec. 1, 2004.

Norman K. Denzin , Chair of the Organizing Committee

SUGGESTED CONFERENCESESSION TOPICS
• Autoethnography & Performance Studies
• Critical Ethnography as Performance
• Critical Pedagogy
• Critical Race Theory & Moral Activism
• Cultural Policy
• Cultural Studies, Education & Pedagogy
• Decolonizing Neo-colonial Methodologies
• Decolonizing the Academy
• Democratic Methodologies
• Developments in Participatory Action Research
• Discourse Analysis
• Ethics, IRBs & Academic Freedom
• Ethnicity & Race
• Evaluating Inquiry
• Feminist Qualitative Research in the new Century
• Foucault's Methodologies
• Funded Qualitative Research
• Global Ethnography
• Globalization & Transnationalism
• Governmental Regimes of Truth
• Grounded Theory & Social Justice Research
• Human Rights
• Human Subject Research
• Indigenous Approaches to Creating Knowledge
• Indigenous Policy Studies
• Investigative Poetry
• Mixed-methods designs & inquiry in Global Studies
• Nationhood & Nationalism
• New developments with focus groups
• New Media & Information Technology
• Participatory Action Inquiry
• Postcolonial Methodologies
• Qualitative Evaluation & Social Policy
• Social Policy Formation
• The Active Interview
• The Audit Culture & Neoliberalism
• The Global Consumer Culture
• The Science Wars
• Video, Dance & Performance Technologies
• Working with Multi-cultural Populations

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS (May 5, 2005)
1. Focus Groups: New Developments (TBA)
2. Case Study: Access and Intrusion (Robert Stake and Brinda Jegatheesan)
3. Performance Ethnography (Norman K Denzin)
4. Feminist Qualitative Research in the new Century (Virginia Olesen)
5. Foucault's Methodologies (James Scheurich (TBA) and Kathryn Bell McKenzie)
6. Grounded Theory Methodologies for Social Justice Projects (Kathy Charmaz)
7. Ethics, Human Subject Review Board & Qualitative Inquiry (Clifford Christians)
8. Interpreting. Writing Up & Evaluating Qualitative Materials (Robin Jarrett)
9. Investigative and Ethno-Poetics (Stephen Hartnett)
10. Autoethnography (Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner)
11. Democratic Evaluation (Ernest House and Katherine Ryan)

For more information contact info@QI2005.org
Visit our web site at http://www.QI2005.org

Deadline Extended: The First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Due to the growing interest in new conference panels and increasing volume of requests for submission deadline extension, the deadline for submissions of open-panel session proposals and all papers to the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry is now extended to January 15, 2005, while the previous deadline of December 1, 2004 still holds effect for closed-panel session proposals. Notification of the acceptance of closed-panel proposals will be given by December 15, 2004. Please continue to visit our conference website www.qi2005.org for more information, and take advantage of this extension to work on your proposal and papers.

The First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from May 5-7, 2005. The theme of the First International Congress of Qualitative Research focuses on "Qualitative Inquiry in a Time of Global Uncertainty." The mission of the conference is to provide a forum for conversations on the interdisciplinary implications
of positivist legislation and academia for critical qualitative scholarship especially in indigenous, border, feminist, race, queer, and ethnic studies, and to build and expand the already robust tradition of Qualitative Inquiry.

Following topics are supposed to be taken up in the conference
• Autoethnography & Performance Studies
• Critical Ethnography as Performance
• Critical Pedagogy
• Cultural Policy
• Cultural Studies, Education & Pedagogy
• Decolonizing Neo-colonial Methodologies
• Developments in Participatory Action Research
• Ethics, IRBs & Academic Freedom
• Ethnicity & Race
• Feminist Qualitative Research in the new Century
• Foucault's Methodologies
• Global Ethnography
• Grounded Theory & Social Justice Research
• Human Subject Research
• Indigenous Approaches to Creating Knowledge
• Indigenous Policy Studies
• Mixed-methods designs & inquiry in Global Studies
• Nationhood & Nationalism
• New Media & Information Technology
• Postcolonial Methodologies
• The Audit Culture & Neoliberalism
• The Global Consumer Culture

The organization committee of the conference is chaired by Professor Norman K.Denzin.

Posted by Evelin at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Invisible Injury

Message from Bully OnLine:

I'm pleased to let you know that the 2005 edition of David Kinchin's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: the invisible injury is now available. The only significant change from the 2001 edition is a revision of chapter 12 on Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD).

The 2005 edition is the fourth edition of this popular book first published by Thorsons in 1994 and republished by Success Unlimited in 1998, 2001 and now 2004. In that time thousands of people have benefited from David's experience and insight into PTSD which is derived, as David writes in the introduction, from his own experience of being attacked by a mob.

Orders already placed for this book have been shipped this weekend.
To order a copy of David's book, go to https://www.successunlimited.co.uk/books/ccform.htm.
Best regards,
Tim Field
www.successunlimited.co.uk
www.bullyonline.org

Posted by Evelin at 03:46 AM | Comments (0)