Centuries of identification between Christianity and civil life
have done more to secularize Christianity than to sanctify civil life

Thomas Merton (1915-1968).

• Conflict is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, conflict can be a necessary form of education.

• This web page highlights reduction of deadly violence through nonkilling (nonlethal) politics and other forms of conflict resolution.

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• How effectively have traditional, modern and postmodern political science examined, explained and challenged official governments' claimed monopoly on approved violence within territorial boundaries?

• What (if anything) distinguishes establishment violence — the use of violence by official governments — from the violence of insurgent political parties, future governments, gangsters or terrorists?

• Do critics of establishment violence romanticize violence by political outsiders? Or do they indifferently avert their attention from it?

• Simply insisting that violence is is unavoidable — or that it is evil — is not helpful. Saying only that is to give no guidance at all. Instead, who offers practical and manageable prescriptions, plans and suggestions for reducing violence?

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• Browse Hamilton Library's Peace Studies resources. You may find it helpful to think of peace studies as a subfield of comparative politics and public policy.

• Get publications and conference information from the Matsunaga Institute for Peace.

• Professor Glenn Paige is co-founder and a director of the Center for Global Nonviolence.

• Glenn Paige's Nonkilling Global Political Science (Philadelphia: XLibris, 2002) is partly based on a Gandhian interpretation of ahimsa. Download a free .pdf file of Paige's book.

• The Gandhian Global Nonviolence Network links to 200 local, national and transnational activist organizations in over 60 countries.

• On historical and textual grounds, peace studies scholars sometimes challenge the revisionist Gandhian interpretation of ahimsa as "nonviolence."

• As of January 2008, the Global Alliance for Ministries and Departments of Peace was active in at least twenty-four countries.

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• Parents who wish to keep military recruiters from having direct access to their children's phone numbers have formed a Leave My Child Alone organization. View their online video.

• Founded in 1986, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research "is an independent think tank, a global network and a homepage for peace by peaceful means."

• Visit the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database Project. "The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) acts as a 'one-stop shopping place' where authorized users can go online to find comprehensive information and intelligence on terrorism. The TKB includes two RAND databases, the RAND Terrorism Chronology Database and the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database. The RAND Terrorism Chronology Database records international terrorist incidents that occurred between 1968 and 1997, while the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database records domestic and international terrorist incidents occurred from 1998 to present."

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• Utilize teaching resources of The Institute for International Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

• In 2002 and 2003, Glenn Paige responded to questions and challenges from undergraduates in Vincent Pollard's "Introduction to Political Science" classes at Kapi‘olani Community College — University of Hawai‘i System.

• The second of these two events was conducted online in October 2003. KCC students read, discussed and reacted to the "Preface" and Chapters 1-2 of Paige's Nonkilling Global Political Science. They formed four teams to formulate questions for him. You may read the students' challenges and Paige's answers.

• In 2006, Pollard's classroom worksheet for small-group study, discussion and reporting was designed in response to usefully provocative issues raised in Chapters 1-2 of Paige's Nonkilling Global Political Science.

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• Teachers will find materials useful for facilitating discussions of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 from alternative perspectives.

• For data on U.S. military sales abroad, see Guns R U.S., a report written by the Federation of American Scientists in 2003.

• With 90 guns for every 100 citizens, the United States has the highest per capita ratio of nonmilitary firearms in the world. U.S. citizens own 270 million of 875 million known firearms. India and China are in a distant second and third place, with 46 million and 40 million privately held guns, respectively, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007.

• The Irish Initiative on Conflict Resolution & Ethnicity has conflict data for 42 countries. On that website, click the links for "Research," "Resources," and "Publications."

• Abolition 2000 urges individual governments and the United Nations to terminate production and possession of nuclear weapons by declared, presumed and potential nuclear powers.

• Use the National Index of Violence and Harm produced by the Peace Studies Institute of Manchester College.

• Most spousal abuse is directed against women, and most abuse still goes unreported. Ending Violence Against Women in the U.S. and elsewhere remains a goal yet to be met.

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• Since 1938, corporal punishment research has found links between spanking and aggression, anti-social behavior and mental health problems. The robustness of these linkages varies, and the extent to which the connections are causal is hotly debated.

• Since children are among those least able to defend themselves, shouldn't individuals, civil society organizations and governments limit violent parental disciplinary behavior?

• Expanding definitions of human rights have reinvigorated longstanding debates over parental violence ("corporal punishment"). For example, a 1998 European Court of Human Rights judgment against the mistreatment of young children challenged a spanking-tolerant U.K. statute.

• "Seven OECD countries ban physical punishment of children, according to the UN. Sweden was first to introduce an explicit ban, in 1979. Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland and Norway followed" (Tina Morrison, "New Zealanders Demand Spanking Ban After Deaths of Maori Twins," Bloomberg, 9 August 2006)."

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• How much longer should American society tolerate physical violence against children?

• In the U.S., the States of Mississippi and Arkansas rank first and second in the percentage of teacher-battered pupils, according to the group Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education.

• By 2002, twenty-seven other States had banned corporal punishment in the schools.

• Going even further, Minnesota limits corporal punishment in the family. In January 2007, Sally Lieber of San Francisco, a member of the state legislature, introduced a bill that "would outlaw spanking children three years old or younger and carry a possible penalty of jail time or a 1,000-dollar fine" (Agence France-Presse [dateline: Los Angeles], "California lawmaker prposes no-spanking law," Yahoo! News, 19 January 2007).

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• Should humans capture, domesticate, kill, torture and eat animals, birds and fish?

• By raising provocative questions like these, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have broadened our sensitivity to violence imposed on living creatures.

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For other conflict-related material, click links in the appropriate sections of five other web pages written by Vincent K. Pollard:

• Multiple futures.

• Cartoons, movies.

• Emerging civil society.

• Hawai‘i Politics WWW VL.

• Globalizations, international law, organization.

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Last modified, 4 April 2008.

© 1999-2007, Vincent K. Pollard.
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