Category Archives: Introductions

Institutional Resilience and Peace

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Introduction to IJWP, December 2021 In this final issue of International Journal on World Peace, Don Trubshaw introduces the topic of institutional resilience and peace. Given the behavior of social institutions during the Covid pandemic, the social problems caused by dictators or single-party states, and the recent debates over “wokism” and free speech, this may be the most important topic of our time. Social institutions permeate modern life: governments and their agencies, banks, manufacturers, hospitals, … Continue reading →

Corruption and Constructivism

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Introduction to IJWP, September 2021 Taking or producing. These are two ways people can live. Wars result when people try to live by taking. Civilization is possible when people are productive. Corruption is a form of taking. In politics, corruption comes in two forms: bribery and the misuse of public funds. Bribery is when a public official or political party takes money from a moneyed interest to gain a legal or economic benefit at the … Continue reading →

Regional Peace and Nuclear Weapons

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Introduction to IJWP, June 2021 This issue has two themes: regional peace and stability, and China’s perspective on nuclear weapons. Peace and stability are examined in two regions: India and its neighbors to the east, and Nigeria and it neighbors to the northeast. Both these regional powers have neighbors who share ethnic and cultural backgrounds and are artificially divided by state administrative boundaries. These people want to freely associate. However, in both cases the surrounding … Continue reading →

The Environment and Peace

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Introduction to IJWP, March 2021 All human activity has environmental consequences. Some types of activity are highly destructive, while other activities can be sustainable. On the one extreme hunting animals to extinction, leveling forests, and disregard for the proliferation of toxic materials and industrial wastes is activity that makes the world inhabitable for human beings. At the other extreme is the call to depopulate the earth through forms of genocide so the environment is undisturbed … Continue reading →

Deterrence, Diplomacy, and Refugees: Then and Now

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Introduction to IJWP, December 2020 The world has changed a lot since World War II. Science gave us the nuclear bomb, the internet, and the means to more than triple the world’s population—from 2.3 billion to 7.9 billion. The articles in this issue address how these developments have changed deterrence, diplomacy, and refugees. Our first article, “Southern Asia Strategic Triangle: Deterrence Then and Now,” by Muzammil Ahad Dar both describes the evolving nature of deterrence … Continue reading →

Constructivism, Identity, and the “Religions” of Post-Modernism

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Introduction to IJWP, September 2020 This issue of IJWP marks the first time that our authors have used a constructivist approach to international relations. Constructivism begins with the premise that international relations are socially constructed and that states behave more on the basis of the identity of other states than on their material resources. In an excerpt from International Relations Theory, Sarina Theys, citing Alexander Wendt, explained constructivism as follows: Alexander Wendt (1995) offers an … Continue reading →

The Roles of Power and Communication in Peacemaking and Peacekeeping

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Introduction to IJWP, June 2020 This issue of International Journal on World Peace has three articles related to peacemaking and peacekeeping in Africa. The principles discussed apply to peacemaking and peacekeeping anywhere in the world. The first step is the creation of negative peace, the absence of fighting, and the second step involves positive peace, dialogue, negotiations, and a legal framework in which to work together for the common good. There is first an important … Continue reading →

Special Issue on the Rohingya Crisis

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Guest Editor: Norman K. Swazo, North-South Universtiy, Dhaka, Bangladesh On 27-28 July, 2019, the Department of Political Science and Sociology and the South Asian Institute of Policy and Governance (SIPG) of North South University (NSU) in Dhaka Bangladesh, together with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), sponsored and convened an international academic conference—International Conference on Rohingya Crisis in Bangladesh: Challenges and Sustainable Solutions. This special issue includes four papers that together provide background … Continue reading →

Utopian Vision and Social Progress

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Introduction to IJWP, December 2019 This issue of International Journal on World Peace has three very different articles: one on utopianism and peace, one on the nature of “enlightenment,” and one on the history of power struggles and human rights in Colombia. All of these articles are, nevertheless, related to the idea of social progress. Some ideas of “progress” are based on group advancement, where power is used by one group to conquer a group … Continue reading →

Interreligious Foundations of a Peaceful State

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Introduction to IJWP, September 2019 The relation of religion to governance is one of the most important yet disputed aspects of the modern state. Should a state merely administer services on a territory or should it use its force to impose a specific set of religious beliefs and values on all of its citizens and residents? And, if a specific set of values is imposed, should there be limits to what the state is allowed … Continue reading →