International Journal on World Peace

Introduction to IJWP, June 2014

From Kant’s influential Perpetual Peace to the social scientific studies of society in the twentieth century many writers argued that cultural values and economic interests needed to be satisfied to achieve a lasting peace. However, Hans Morgenthau, a highly influential professor of international politics disagreed. He wrote in 1948:

The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power.¹

This issue of IJWP challenges this political realism in several ways, arguing that it fails to hold state actors within the bounds of legitimate and moral use of power, that it fails to integrate economic and cultural “soft power” interests in its simplistic, black and white analyses, and that it fails to address levels of governance other than the state that are integrally tied to subsystems and international systems.

It is more important than ever to advance a more integral understanding of international relations that sees human society in terms of a set of interconnected social systems, beginning at the level of individuals, and moving through family systems and face-to-face community systems to state political economies, and finally to international organization.

There are three major spheres of influence, the political, economic, and cultural. Of these three, the political, which is the sphere of legal power and force, should be the servant of the economic and cultural spheres, rather than their master. But, power corrupts, and elites in any sphere whose powers are unchecked, will abuse that power and, like a cancer, feed off of those they are in a position to serve, creating unhappiness, inequality, and violence. This reversal of dominion is often cited as the difference between a “politician” and a “statesman.” It is what distinguishes a Nelson Mandela from the average power broker.

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Introduction to IJWP, December 2013

This issue of IJWP has two articles related to the Boko Haram group in Northern Nigeria and an article on child labor in Uzbekistan. Boko Haram is a northern Nigerian Islamist group that has killed thousands in campaigns of terror against Christians and others. It has sought the implementation of Shari’ah law in Nigeria and it is part of a growing alliance of international Islamist groups, spreading its influence beyond Nigeria and providing safe harbor for others, like Al Queda, in Nigeria.

Our first article, “Nigeria’s Terrorist Threat: Present Contexts and the Future of sub-Saharan Africa,” looks at the reasons for the rise and expansion of Boko Haram in poorly governed states in Northern Nigeria. It explains why military attempts to eliminate such groups often have the reverse effect of stimulating their growth, because they do nothing to eliminate the threat to traditional values and ways of life associated with secular states and the United Nations. These groups, uniting against this generalized common enemy, are in fact disparate groups and often bitterly divided among themselves and do not share common local objectives.
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Introduction to IJWP, June 2013

This issue of IJWP has articles on three different topics: Political stability in Chechnya, treatment of women in Pakistan, and bullying in U.S. schools. While these are quite different topics, they all relate to the general issue of rights and abilities.

Our global culture promotes concepts of human rights and democracy through the United Nations, the mass media, and many NGOs. However, human rights and democracy cannot be obtained without the ability to design structures of governance and the abilities of people living in a society to produce the things they want. Many people demand rights without having the necessary abilities to achieve them. The United Nations promotes rights, but cannot provide people with the ability to achieve them.
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IJWP, December 2012

Introduction to IJWP, December 2012

Conflicts are produced when great powers or international organizations draw arbitrary state boundaries over areas occupied by tribal and national cultural groups. When this happens, homogeneous groups that have lived together for many generations, and that have had their identity formed by shared values and laws suddenly find themselves divided and forced to live with other tribes or national groups that hold different values. Imposed abstract state boundaries divide natural nations, disrupting normal interactions, and even separating families.

Such divisions are particularly evident in post-colonial Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where Europeans drew administrative districts on maps over areas of land without much thought about the national self-identity of the peoples living in that territory. Such divisions are the cause of much anguish, strife, and even genocide in our world. The process of absorbing different national groups has followed conquests throughout history, and leaders of empires often left local rulers with some autonomy that honored the local values and customs. Today we are particularly aware of the after-effects of European colonization of Africa and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries because, as Europeans withdrew, the states left behind were composed of non-natural cultural groupings not predisposed to live peacefully together.
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Introduction to IJWP, June 2012

This issue looks at the thorny problem of how social ideals and rationally grounded moral principles can guide the structures and institutions of governance. This is no small feat in our age of political realism, power politics, national self-interest, and the general temptations of power and money. Washington DC lobbying, US elections, geopolitical nuclear politics, suicide bombing, and corrupt governments around the world are all signs that rational principles, such as those framed in the US Constitution, are failing to guide social policy. Rather we see power and money being used to dictate social outcomes biased towards those who have wealth or political power.

Our first article, by Leon Miller, begins by noting that the entire field of peace research is based on the premise that scientific research and humanistic values should be applied to institutions and structures of governance.  This field is indebted to the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, the vision of Immanuel Kant outlined in Perpetual Peace, the communication ethics promoted by Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas, the peace research writings of Elise Boulding, the economic theories of Kenneth Boulding, the political science of Quincy Wright, and the social theory of Johan Galtung. These figures played a prominent role in the interdisciplinary worldview of the International Peace Research Association and peace research centers like the University of Michigan.

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