Definition of Peacemaking & Nonviolence
Peace is defined as
- a state of tranquility or quiet (freedom from civil disturbance or a state of security/order within a community provided for by law or custom);
- freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions;
- harmony in personal relations;
- a state/period of mutual concord or an agreement to end active hostilities; and
- a greeting or farewell, as a means of asking for calm, and a state of being, of concord.
Peace is more than the absence of conflict – it is an active state, to be created and nurtured by individuals, communities, and countries through alternatives to conflict and violence.
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peace
Peacemaking is, therefore, the act of those individual and collective choices we make to create/sustain peace. It is also the art of conflict resolution applied to larger-scale, systemic, often factional conflicts. In the latter, for which the term is most often reserved, it is critical to recognize that no faction or segment can claim to be completely innocent of the problems while pursuing an equalization of power relationships. In both, it is important to make new choices robust enough to forestall future conflict. To make peace is to acknowledge that peace is a choice – of new compassion, fresh interaction, different choices and new opportunities that we offer and benefit from as a whole.
The process of peacemaking is distinct from the rationale of pacifism or the use of non-violent protest or civil disobedience techniques, though they are often practiced by the same people. Indeed, those who master the nonviolent techniques under extreme violent pressure, and who lead others in such resistance, have demonstrated the rare capacity not to react to violent provocation in kind, and the difficult skill of keeping a group of people suffering from violent oppression, coordinated and in good order through such experience.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacemaking
Nonviolence(ahimsa) is a philosophy and strategy for social change that rejects the use of violence. Nonviolence practitioners use diverse methods in their campaigns for social change, including critical forms of education and persuasion, civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action, and targeted communication via mass media.
In modern times, nonviolence is a powerful tool for social protest. There are many examples of its use in nonviolent resistance and nonviolent revolution, including Mahatma Gandhi leading a decades-long nonviolent struggle against British rule in India, which eventually helped India win its independence in 1947, Martin Luther King's adoption of Gandhi's nonviolent methods in the struggle to win civil rights for African Americans, and César Chávez's campaigns of nonviolence in the 1960s to protest the treatment of farm workers in California. The 1989 "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government is considered one of the most important of the largely nonviolent Revolutions of 1989. Most recently the nonviolent campaigns of Leymah Gbowee and the women of Liberia were able to achieve peace after a 14-year civil war.
The term "nonviolence" is often linked with or even used as a synonym for pacifism; however, the two concepts are fundamentally different. Pacifism denotes the rejection of the use of violence as a personal decision on moral or spiritual grounds, but does not inherently imply any inclination toward change on a sociopolitical level. Nonviolence on the other hand, presupposes the intent of (but does not limit it to) social or political change as a reason for the rejection of violence. Also, a person may advocate nonviolence in a specific context while advocating violence in other contexts.
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