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It is intuitive to view peace and war as inherently opposite categories. Peace is routinely defined as the freedom from organised collective violence, or as the 'absence of war'. Conversely, war is generally conceived either in Clausewitzian terms as organised violence to achieve political ends or as a moral or legal condition defining the permissible limits of organised violence. And yet, one of the founding tenets of contemporary peace and conflict studies has been to reject this binary 'negative' concept of peace as merely the 'absence of war' by asserting a positive concept of peace that refers to consensual values and the 'integration of human society'. The enduring aspiration of how to achieve peace can be summed up with the phrase 'peace through peaceful means'. While the field has remained normatively grounded on sustaining a prohibition on the resort to violence—peace through peaceful means—it has also grappled with questions of how, how much or in what way, military force ought to be deployed in contemporary challenges such as humanitarian interventions, complex emergencies and stabilising postconflict societies. Strategic and security studies have also been grappling with a widening (issues) and deepening (agency) security agenda which has opened up questions about the utility of force to respond to so-called non-conventional threats and in responding to non-state actors. Both fields of scholarship have utilised the concept of hybridity in their efforts to understand the blurred lines between peace, war and across a range of challenges in contemporary world politics.

"This book provides a critical understanding of the emerging role of African militaries in peacetime democratic Africa. This book departs from the dominant perspective which simply presents the military as an'enemy' of democracy because of the history and legacy of unending military coup d'©?tats and interventions in civilian politics. In the context of Africa, the military has been blamed or largely held responsible for instigating wars, armed conflicts, political violence, poverty and underdevelopment due to bad governance and mismanagement of the state. Drawing from diverse case studies across Africa, including Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and Egypt, this volume presents the argument that though the military has played a negative, and sometimes, destructive role in undermining constitutional rule and the overthrow of democratic civilian governments, the same military, now operating in a changed global environment, is making effort to support the development of democracy and democratic consolidation as well as remain subjected to civilian democratic oversight and control. Notwithstanding, the real challenge for this emerging trend of African peace militaries is the extent to which they are able to fulfil, on a predictable and consistent basis, their constitutional mandate to defend the people against'elected autocrats' in Africa who try to use the military to perpetuate themselves in power. This work fills a critical gap in the literature and will be of much interest to students of African security and politics, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general."--Provided by publisher

In the sixties the green and the peace movements alerted the international community of the deterioration of the environment and of the danger of nuclear conflicts. Since then, the green movement has been transformed into political parties, departments, jobs, environmental impact assessments and several international regimes. The first publication of the Club of Rome in 1972, Limits of Growth, had a catalyzing effect for raising life and death questions that confront mankind and claiming that planetary planning was the most important business on earth (Meadows 1972). The peace movement, on the other hand, evolved differently. There were some peak moments such as the peace marches in the eighties, but the impacts were weaker and less decisive. One explanation is that the peace movement had to cope with the strong bureaucracies of foreign offices and of defense departments that claimed the expertise. Another explanation is that a great deal of the peace movement does not define peace as a collective good. Being removed from the embedded conflict gives a false sense of apartness making some conflicts seem irrelevant to societies at peace. The possibility of cruise missiles hitting peaceful countries caused huge peace marches; the snipers in Sarajevo did not. A third reason is that costs of violence continue to be underestimated because of inadequate estimates of the price of failed conflict prevention (Reychler 1999a).