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Please join Dr. Marc Gopin for an interest meeting for this APT on May 9th at 4:00pm in the 7th Floor Conference Room. Here is a description of the APT's focus:
NONVIOLENCE 2.0 EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION OF MIND, BEHAVIOR AND POLICY TOWARD A LESS VIOLENT WORLD
Recent bodies of research in several fields have suggested a steady and widespread decline in global violence per capita over the past few hundred years. There are numerous factors contributing to that possible decline, but they roughly can be divided into shifts in how we as humans think and believe, how we behave, and what policies we are making for the way we organize our societies, locally, nationally and globally.
The research however calls out for the need for a far more expanded and integrated approach of violence studies and nonviolence to conflict resolution practice. Conflict resolution theory and practice has in general paid too little attention to the research on and about nonviolence, its history, development and practice, despite the fact that nonviolent efforts have a clear relationship to conflict management, resolution, and prevention.
In this APT we will explore the possibility of an essential and expanded form of conflict prevention and resolution practice that in turn will inspire new conflict resolution theory.
The nonviolence research further suggests a vast expansion of our understanding of nonviolence generating techniques as they relate to conflict prevention, conflict management and conflict resolution. Nonviolence and conflict prevention may now possibly include a wide variety of activities, such as: social empathy development through a variety of educational, personal and communal practices, curriculum development and multicultural literacy projects; labor reforms and anti-discrimination laws; anti-torture and anti-abuse campaigns; the use of popular media to generate empathy for strangers; altering humans’ relationship to landscape and natural resources; successful and equitable business growth across enemy lines; local and global campaigns for women’s rights, children’s rights, labor rights.
We wish to suggest new possibilities for a global project of nonviolence that integrates a far greater number of global actors and stakeholders in the nonprofit and for profit sectors who are not generally considered part of the conflict resolution field. Students will be expected not only to understand the relationship between nonviolence and conflict analysis and resolution, but will be encouraged to imagine bold, new ways to translate this understanding into practice. There are many subjects to be integrated into this exploration, for example, such as the growing phenomenon of nonviolent resistance.
Finally some of the research into violence reduction ignores the violence perpetrated by more privileged sections of the globe or richer countries against poorer ones, through various forms of intervention, both military and economic. The APT will systematically explore, through research, intensive discussion, and interviews with activists and researchers, a path toward a systematic integration of violence reduction practices and policies into the current conceptualization of conflict analysis resolution theory and practice.