A Journey into the Future: Imagining a Nonviolent World

The inspiration for this essay came to me after a daylong workshop on Imagining a Nonviolent World which I offered for prisoners at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk on a wintry Saturday morning. This type of imaging workshop first evolved in the late 1970s, as I began to realize that we peace activists, working to bring about a nonviolent world without war, really had no idea how a world in which armies had disappeared would function. How could we work to bring about something we could not even see in our imaginations? Stepping back into the 1950s in my own mind, I remembered translating Fred Polak’s Image of the Future from the Dutch original, a macrohistorical analysis that showed a war-paralyzed and depressed Europe how past societies in bad situations but with positive images of the future had been empowered by their own imaginations to work to bring the imaged future about. Here was a possible answer

Introduction

Excerpt The papers brought together here represent a part of the work of the IPRA (International Peace Research Association) Commission on Conflict Resolution and Peace Building that met during the 1994 Conference of the International Peace Research Association at Malta to address the issues of peace building in crisis areas. The focus here is particularly on new approaches to peace building, including United Nations reform and civil society innovation. After fifty years of UN peace building efforts, it is clear that the UN cannot function effectively without the involvement of civil society in each conflict region. How the UN, member states and civil society can interact effectively is an important new question for the peace research community, and these papers offer some fresh thinking on the subject

A Disarmed World: Problems in Imaging the Future

One of the major handicaps to scholars, activists and would-be policy makers associated with the post-World War II peace research and peace action movements has been the inability to construct coherent and believable images of a post military industrial United States society. Even at the height of the economics of disarmament studies in the I960s\u27 the most that economists could demonstrate was that disarmament could take place without severe economic dislocations, and that resources released from arms could be used for improving the global standard of living. The new peace research movement was also producing books in the sixties showing that it was possible to replace a technology of warmaking with a technology of peacemaking, but what the new society would look like, no one could spell out.y A week-long seminar on Images of a Disarmed World held in Denmark in the summer of 19633 generated a great deal of analysis by the socialist and nonsocialist economists participating, but not one word about what the future would look like. This was typical of such seminars in that decade

Family Adjustments to War Separation and Reunion

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67965/2/10.1177_000271625027200109.pd

Cultures of peace : The hidden side of history

New Yorkxvii, 347 p.; 23 cm

The image of the future

328 p., ref. bib. : ref. et notes dissem

The Effects Of Industrialization On The Participation Of Women In Society.

PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/187934/2/6917970.pd