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Peace is not an esoteric word. It has philosophical underpinnings and real world connotations. In a nuclear era with the latest, and manifest, conflicts which may end in total war, peace becomes a deceptively complex word. Peace Research and peace movements become dualities which are necessary strategies for world peace. As a scientific compilation of data and meaning methodology, they are a comparatively new phenomena but in terms of some kind of a movement have always been active. Even if only a protest by a minority it has been an ongoing phenomenon. Peace Research and eventually peace movements become part of a social consciousness that is important to achieve a political end—world peace. This paper spells out the meaning of Peace Research, its development and links with peace movements. Some peace movements in different parts of the world have been brought out merely to substantiate the peace research and its concepts. It is by no means exhaustive. A lot needs to be researched and brought out. But one main idea seems amply clear that the world system needs restructuring to absorb Peace Research and peace movements if only to rationalise it, make it viable for both study and activism. So also a change is needed among the "realist" thinking if only to achieve positive and developmental peace, i.e. peace combined with social justice.

AbstractToday we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable "World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It)," this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by "local" in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified "local agenda" when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.

מגב כריכת ההוצאה הראשונה, 1961 הספר סוקר את התפתחות יחסי ישראל-ערב בשנים 1961-1948 כפי שהשתקפו בעיתונות הישראלית ומעל במת הכנסת. דעות כל החוגים בישראל -- מ"חרות" עד מק"י – מובאות בהרחבה מפי דובריהם המוסמכים ביותר. רבים ימצאו כאן לראשונה תאור מפורט של עובדות נשכחות. המעטים היודעים את העובדות יופתעו להיווכח באיזו מידה מסוגל מנגנון תעמולה ממלכתי לעצב לא רק את השקפתו של האזרח אלא גם את זכרונו מההקדמה להוצאה השניה, 1999 למהדורה זו צורפו נספחים הכוללים מידע שהיה חסוי בשעתו ונחשף רק עשרות שנים לאחר שכתבנו את הספר. שיערנו שניתוחינו יקבלו לימים אישור נוסף. ואכן, העובדות שנחשפו מאז, שאחדות מהן הפתיעו גם אותנו, מאשרות את ניתוחנו. אין פירוש הדבר שכל המידע החסוי מאותה תקופה כבר נחשף

Despite the proliferation in recent years of scholarly journals, university and college departments and research institutes dealing with peace studies, it would be difficult to conclude that this area of academic enquiry is as yet firmly established in the wider field of International Relations. It may well be, as one sympathetic writer noted recently, that peace research is 'alive, vigorous, rapidly maturing and producing a good deal of work conforming to the tenets of social science'. At the same time it remains a fairly new field and one which, over the years, has suffered, and continues to suffer, from internal disputes, particularly about substance and values. In some respects these debates and controversies are a sign of intellectual vigour. It must also be said, however, that in the past the 'lack of agreed focus and definition ideological divisions, competing disciplinary biasses, ambiguities of priorities and purposes', have led to 'an unhealthy confusion and mystification of issues' which has helped to prevent its wider acceptance within the academic field.

Peace is not an absence, but rather a visibly identifiable set of norms. This visualization can take place through internationally recognized signs such as the white flag and the blue helmet. These representations of norms are united in their ability to be distinguished from similar objects or signs through their use of colors. The identificatory use of color avoids confusion between parties embroiled in a conflict, making an organization or envoy stand out and creat- ing the expectation that they are encompassed by the specific norms of war- fare, which these colors make visible. Through establishing such "dumb signs" of peace, as Grotius put it, the colors of peace have, we argue, played a notable part in establishing customary international law. The aim of our con- tribution is to offer an illustrative chromatological analysis of how peace and its norms are made visible through objects and symbols which are not con- nected with peace beyond their coloring (e.g., emblems, flags, helmets, or war- zone vehicles). We show how certain colors, in their situated use, come to both symbolize and enact peace in terms of international politics.

Under what conditions do religious groups engage in peace activism? Religious groups engage in peace activism if the associated costs are low and they compete with either conflict party over the interpretation of their religious content concerning war and peace. Peace activism is a promising action as peace activists maintain their positive self-evaluation. I introduce a novel dataset of peace activism for 511 religious groups in 128 countries from 1990 to 2008. Conditional fixed effects and logistic models support my hypotheses. The findings highlight the role of rational considerations in the decision to conduct peace activities by representatives of religious groups.