The following introduction draws together some of the salient findings of the Innsbruck School of Peace Studies . As such it owes its existence, just like this School itself, to the oeuvre and productive output of Wolfgang Dietrich during the past decades. Since this output is far too substantial to capture in the few lines of a chapter, the following is necessarily a selection.1 In line with the topics of the current book on Transrational Resonances it will focus Wolfgang Dietrich’s work on three of its main aspects, which also have become the conceptual cornerstones for the Innsbruck School: (1) the transrational peace philosophy , (2) elicitive conflict transformation and (3) elicitive conflict mapping . In doing so we follow the structure provided in Wolfgang Dietrich’s three volumes that are published in English under the title of Many Peaces Trilogy (2012, 2013, 2017). Each volume of this series has one of those three aspects at heart.
In writing this introduction we attempt to stick to the topic of our current book: resonances. We aim to provide just that – a resonance on Wolfgang’s Dietrich’s work that simultaneously can also serve as an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with some of the key terms. As for this chapter’s introductory nature, this implies that those readers already accustomed to transrational and elicitive terminology might want to skip ahead and go right to the end of the chapter, where the individual contributions that form this volume are introduced.
From the Many Peaces to the Transrational Peace Philosophy
The insight on the multiplicity of peaces found its first expression in the by now famous “Call for Many Peaces” (Dietrich and Sützl 2006). Published in German in the mid 1990s and re-published several times in English and Spanish, it forms the initial impetus for what later on will become the Innsbruck-School.2 The text is written in the postmodern-inspired spirit of the time and shares intellectual proximity with another key text of Peace Studies that appears at the turn of the millennium in Spain, namely Francisco Muñoz ’ (2006) “Imperfect Peace ” (Span. Paz Imperfecta). Inspired by the critique of development and economic growth as road to peace by pioneers like Gustavo Esteva , Ivan Illich or Leopold Kohr , Wolfgang Dietrich takes up their assessment and combines it with the commitment to plurality of Jean Francois Lyotard’s postmodernism.
Peace is not one, peaces are many. In such a simplified manner could be described the opening steps in the dance of the many peaces. Against the homogenizing, modern, capitalist trends that impose the idea of one worldwide peace as regulatory ideal, Wolfgang Dietrich posits a multiplicity of often competing and contradictory small, concretely lived and relational peaces. This plurality of peaces calls for their systematic investigation in their linguistic, cultural and historical variations.
In the first volume of the Many Peaces Trilogy, Dietrich (2012) sets out to fulfill this task. Peaces, Wolfgang Dietrich finds, are as different as the contexts from which they emerge and as manifold as the people who think, speak, act, dream, live them. The Taoist peace of Wu Wei and the Cantonese He Ping differ in form and content from the Mediterranean Pax or the Andean-Amazonian Thaq . The etymology of the German word Friede has a different understanding at its root than the T’ùmmu of the Ethiopian Kambaata (Dietrich et al. 2014). Any attempt to universalize and homogenize peace is, contrary maybe to its own assumptions, just another situated perspective. When it comes to the academic study of peace, a discipline that calls itself Peace Studies cannot conceive of itself as just one more variation of International Relations or Political Science with their focus on the model and system of the European nation states.
To uphold in postmodern manner that peaces are many is one thing, to investigate their concrete variations yet another. The attempt to systematize this lived multiplicity leads Wolfgang Dietrich towards the notion of at least five different families of peaces: the energetic, moral, modern and postmodern as well as the transrational one that forms the core of the Innsbruck approach. Peace is conceived differently in each of them.
Energetic peaces tend to relate peace to harmony. In the Taoist version mentioned above, peace emerges out of balanced relations within the Great Triad that is made of the human being (society), nature and divinities. Harmonious relations are the central category for energetic peaces, resonance is the means to perceive them:
If the human being, with all her faculties, wants to bring herself into harmonious resonance with the macrocosm of the universe, to experience peace, then she has to mobilize all those aspects of herself that can resonate. According to experience these are breath, voice and movement. (Dietrich 2012, 60)
He Ping, the Cantonese term for peace, can equally be translated as ‘calm breath in resonance with the divine breath in the whole world’ (Dietrich 2012, 48; Kam-Por 2014, 244–247). Far from being individualistic, peace here turns into a relational phenomenon that is encompassing and holistic, as it leaves no aspect of existence disregarded.
Moral peaces , in contrast, tend to view peace as the fruit of justice as can be found in different variations in the three monotheistic religions Judaism , Christianity and Islam . Modern peaces often trace their origin back to the contractually arranged Pax of the Roman Empire and later on the nation-state. The secular peace of modernity then becomes a matter of security and task of governmental order. Both moral and modern peaces, unlike their energetic counterparts, rely on norms and institutions for the authoritative interpretation of peace. In modernity, this also results in the authority of the implementation of peace. Postmodern peaces relate to the modern peaces, yet as their critical and doubting counterpart their peaces emerge from competing truth claims and the multiplicity of small truths that they enable. They often can be found as the peaces of activism and resistance or rather doubt that the hegemonic modern one peace can ever fulfill its promise.
The transrational peace philosophy, finally, emerges as attempt to differentiate and integrate the many peaces. On the one hand, Dietrich recollects the truth that each peace family brings along, without trying to overcome or negate any of them, but attempting to neutralize their one-sidedness. From energetic peaces, transrational approaches “integrate the moment of transpersonality and spirituality, of intentionality as well as the connectedness between all things and thus the moment of peace out of harmony” (Dietrich 2012, 266). Security and justice, which in moral and modern interpretations are absolute and derive from ‘strong thought’ (Vattimo 2006), become relative and relational. Finally, Dietrich takes the notion of plurality of truths from postmodern philosophy and postmodern variations of peaces and borrows it for a transrational proposal. This new integration, however, subverts postmodern views via incorporating the question of spirituality without a new teleology that replaces the vacuum left by the constructed character of individuality.
Transrational peaces send the human being on a lifelong quest in search for the dynamic balance in which ethical moments may manifest as characteristic of aesthetic ones, and aesthetic moments as topic of ethical ones. Harmony may be a function of security , security one of justice , justice one of truth , which in turn can only exist in harmony. (Dietrich 2012, 268)
Peace arises in the homeostatic balance between personal harmony, structural justice, relational security and cultural truth. Transrational peace philosophy is based on the premise that peaces address the human being in all her/his faculties. This has consequences for the academic investigation of peace. Unlike modern traditions of Peace Studies in their Idealist , Realist or Critical variations, Wolfgang Dietrich argues that it is not only rationality that is relevant for our comprehension of peace. As human beings, we are rational yet also so much more (Dietrich 2014).3 As it is experienced by human beings, peace has a mental aspect, just as well as an embodied, emotional or spiritual one. Transrationality is that understanding which includes rationality and its sense for critical discernment, yet also is open for the integrating moments of energetic, systemic or transpersonal approaches.
Transrational peaces are per se relational and take to heart Martin Buber’s understanding that “all real living is meeting” (Buber 2010, 11). Drawing on humanistic and transpersonal psychology (Grof 1988; Maslow 2011; Perls et al. 2006; Rogers 2003) the human being is conceived in relational manner as temporary meeting point, as contact boundary at work. Transrational peaces therefore do not look for peace in a presumed outside world but understand, in line with the famous preamble of the UNESCO Constitution (UNESCO 2000) that just like war begins in the human mind, also peaces rise and fall in human consciousness.
Elicitive Conflict Transformation
Conflict Resolution, Management and Transformation
Conflict resolution and management are framed within a modern discourse that portrays conflicts...