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Two conflicting conceptions of peace are prevalent in South Africa today, held by the government and its supporters on the one hand, and by all those organisations and individuals who reject the present political dispensation on the other hand. A fundamental resemblance between these two conceptions can, however, be noted in so far as armed force is seen, by both the South African government and its radical opponents, as in so far as they blame each other for the disruption of our society.In a stark contrast to that, peace is present in the Bible as something that does not only benefit certain groups of people, but is to the benefit of all, and cannot be realised by armed force, but only by reconciliation. The biblical concept of peace challenges Christians to criticize the prevalent peace conceptions, to strive together to attain peace that is to the benefit of all the inhabitants of South Africa, and to persuade the fighting parties that the conquering of enmity is a far better way to attain peace than victory over the enemy.

This article examines some of the ways in which Plato conveys a concern with peace and what conceptions of peace he has a concern with. I first consider Plato's attitude to war (πόλεμος) and its conventional opposite, peace (εἰρήνη). In this context we find very little concern with peace at all and, by contrast, a somewhat disturbing emphasis on the importance of war. However, if we turn from war to a different type of conflict, faction (στάσις), we find a distinct difference. Plato considers faction unproductive because of the internal divisions it sustains. Yet Plato does not specifically call the opposite of faction 'peace'; instead, he uses terms that have different extensions for us, such as δικαιοσύνη ('justice'). Nevertheless, it is possible to outline a positive Platonic conception of peace by tabling a set a of peace-related terms. I distinguish three categories of terms that describe (1) conditions of peace (or negative peace), (2) dispositions of peacefulness, and (3) relations of peace, where such relations result from the expression of peaceful dispositions. My examination suggests that positive peace, for Plato, is founded on the unity and integrity of character. Only when individuals are at peace with themselves can peace within society be achieved.

This article re-examines some of the principal portrayals of military conflict in academic treatises and works of art, arguing that the changing visions of war and peace which they presented were indicative of a wider acceptance within critical sections of the various public spheres of the German lands. The majority of recent studies, which have sought to debunk the myth of national 'wars of liberation', have tended to overlook the reasons for and ramifications of such shifts. This study shows how contemporary commentators, faced with an unending series of revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns, gave up any hope of a perpetual peace and accepted, however reluctantly, the necessity of military conflict. Writers', artists', academics', and other publicists' failure to acknowledge the actual conditions of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, despite evidence that the nature of combat had altered, meant that conflicts could be viewed as patriotic, heroic, and defensive struggles, which served to simplify the divided loyalties and complicated diplomacy of the Napoleonic era.

This article examines age-related changes in the conceptions children and adolescents hold about peace, war, and strategies to attain peace. These were expected to change from concrete, materially related to abstract, norm-related conceptions. The conceptions were assessed by means of a semi-structured questionnaire presented to 101 Dutch children between 8 and 16 years of age and divided into five age groups (mean ages 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 years). Each age group consisted of approximately equal numbers of boys and girls to ascertain any gender differences. Developmental levels for children's understanding of the reciprocal nature of interpersonal relationships (assessed by means of role or perspective-taking tasks) were presumed to relate to their conceptions of peace and strategies to attain peace, in particular. In addition to a development from concrete, materially related conceptions to abstract, norm-related conceptions, the findings suggest a more complex developmental course. While 8 to 12-year-olds used concrete, materially related characteristics for peace, war, and strategies to attain peace, 14 to 16-year-olds mentioned abstract, norm-related characteristics only when strategies to attain peace from an everyday perspective were considered. As noted by Selman, most 12-year-old children understood the mutual or reciprocal nature of interpersonal relationships. The latter understanding was primarily associated with the more abstract, norm-related level of reasoning involving ideas about human attitudes and universal rights.

This Article examines the role of corporate law in promoting sustainable peace. The Author argues that corporate legal theory can make a distinctive contribution to a more peaceful world by exposing some deeper roots of corporate law doctrines. Beginning with a brief overview of the corporation in legal discourse, the Article addresses the corporation as property, person, contract, and community. Next, the Article explores the significance of legal language, detailing the ways the law, through language, constructs and impacts the "character," "culture," and "community" of society. The Article then analyzes the dominance that the property and contract conceptions of the corporation demonstrate over the person and community notions of the corporate entity. Using a specific case as an illustration of how basic understandings of the corporate entity affect the sense of corporate responsibility for corporate harms, the Author focuses on how the contract and property notions overwhelm the community notion of the corporation. Finally, the Article concludes that the person and community notions of the corporation offer the better prospects for the goal of sustainable peace by enlarging the sense of corporate responsibility for harms associated with corporate undertakings.

AbstractPreserving Northern Ireland's peace process in the midst of a war against international terrorism has presented the British government with a series of dilemmas at the level of political rhetoric, policy-making and legislation. The peace process demands adherence to human rights standards to provide a foundation for the new political dispensation, while an implication of the necessity for a war against terrorism is that restrictions on liberty are justifiable in the name of security against the backdrop of the existence of an emergency. These conflicting conceptions for addressing political violence at the national and international level are addressed.

With the onset of the 21st century, Japan is passing through a transformative era in which it is in the process of forming a new national role conception. This study argues that as a result of international pressure, changes in domestic leadership and social norms, and a growing desire for respect in international affairs, Japan has been changing its foreign policy norms and its national role conception. The change in Japanese foreign policy manifests itself most clearly in Japan's international peacekeeping behaviour and the accompanying new legislation governing the functional limitations on its armed forces. This study suggests that path dependency increases the chance that Japanese foreign policy norms and the resulting behavioural effects will push Japan towards a more internationalist path, with contribution to peacekeeping being its most definitive behavioural outcome, thus offering "peacekeeping state" as a new National Role Conception that has the potential to define Japan's role in the world in the future.

This essay revisits Johan Galtung's early articulation of the concept of "positive peace" in order to re-surface its fundamental radicalism, together with some of its inherent tensions, paradoxes, and politics. It then explores the linkages and contested relationship between the concept of positive peace and the prevailing peacebuilding paradigm of our day: liberal peacebuilding. I argue that our understanding of debates about both positive peace and liberal peacebuilding can be clarified when viewed through the lens of contested liberalisms and conflicting liberal values. Such debates often appear to reflect more of a political and ideological debate within the larger liberal tradition itself and between competing liberal values than some kind of choice between liberal, illiberal, or "postliberal" peacebuilding. Advancing peace theory and praxis at this stage would benefit from an increasing willingness to more openly confront some of these choices and a greater degree of transparency about our liberal commitments, including in the hard, "real world" cases where tensions seem irreconcilable.

Abstract
Indigenous African knowledge of building and maintaining peace is not well known and has not been much used in the dominant modern mechanisms of conflict resolution. With the aim of addressing this limitation, this article analyzes the broader conceptualization of peace and peace building among the Guji-Oromo in southern Ethiopia. The Guji-Oromo are keenly aware that their existence as a society depends on the maintenance of peace (nagaa) among them as a community and between them and God as well as between them and their natural and human environments. They believe that peace is not a free gift, because maintaining it requires continuous and earnest negotiation, social actions, and cooperation among many stakeholders who possess political, cultural, and spiritual powers. The article further argues that the Guji-Oromo conceptualize peace beyond the conventional understandings that position it as the absence of conflict or warfare. Rather, for the Guji, peace is broadly understood as a continuous flow of relationships between the people and their human and nonhuman environments. The article shows that Guji's conceptions of peace are not static; rather, they are subject to internal and external influences that shape how different members of the society conceptualize it and the way it is maintained.