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The purpose of this paper is to examine peace as a paradigm for promoting peace culture.

The paper amalgamates paradigmatic concepts, insights and analytical writing while building on existing literature.

The findings of this research suggest that the paradigm of peace can be used as a model to promote peace culture and harmony in the 21st century, which is characterized by “hyper” and “super” diversity. Diversity is everywhere, including schools, workplaces and marketplaces. Diversity is very complex and encompasses nearly every element of human life. Diversity should not only be based on the race, culture, ethnicity, religion or gender of an individual. Diversity should be based on the uniqueness of an individual. The fact that we live in a diverse world does not mean that we cannot coexist harmoniously. This paper explores the paradigm of peace research by focusing on how it enhances peace culture to thrive amidst diversity. This study also illustrates that peace and conflict studies cannot be restricted to the resolution of war, violence and conflict. It can likewise aid us in addressing cultural, racial, religious and ethnic concerns. In addition, this research demonstrates that encouraging positive peace (and discouraging negative peace) can be used as a deterrent against violence, including war and conflict. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the significance of personal peace and some other types of peace. It demonstrates that inner peace combined with external peace yields personal peace. Therefore, an individual may not be able to enjoy the holistic values of personal peace without inner and external peace. Also, this research indicates that encouraging a daily culture of peace can assist us in becoming quotidian agents of peace.

Most publications focused on peace and conflict but made no connection between peace and culture. In addition, the majority of publications did not discuss peace as a paradigm that can aid in promoting a culture of peace and nonviolence. In addition, most papers did not link peace culture with diversity. Moreover, the majority of studies did not connect peace with the environment. This study addresses these gaps by introducing peace as a paradigm for fostering a culture of peace amidst diversity in the 21st century. This paper introduces peace as a paradigm for promoting nonviolence, peace culture and harmony. This study also emphasizes the need for environmental peace, thereby increasing awareness of the problems that affect the planet. This study also includes a discussion of positive and negative peace, as well as other definitions and viewpoints of peace. It also underlines the importance of establishing positive peace. This paper can be used as an introductory pathway to understanding the intriguing aspect of peace that fosters a peace culture if practiced adequately and why a peace culture is important in a world of diversity.

This chapter examines the delicate balance achieved by apex courts in new democracies when dealing with impunity for rights violations during times of transitional justice. While international law has clearly rejected amnesties for past rights violations, domestic politics sometimes incorporate amnesties as part of larger peace settlements. This puts courts in the difficult situation of balancing the competing demands of law and politics. Courts have achieved equipoise in this situation by adopting substantive interpretations and procedural approaches that use international law’s rights-based language but without implementing international law’s restrictions on amnesties. In many cases, courts do this without acknowledging the necessarily pragmatic nature of their decisions. In fact, oftentimes courts find ways of avoiding having to make any substantive decision, effectively removing themselves from a dispute that could call into question their adherence to international legal norms that transcend politics. In doing so, they empower political actors to continue down the road toward negotiated peace settlements, while at the same time protecting the courts’ legitimacy as institutions uniquely situated to protect international human rights norms – including those they have effectively deemphasized in the process.

Post-conflict economies are characterized by high, and often growing, levels of debt. At the same time, peace is particularly fragile in the aftermath of a conflict. This chapter studies how debt affects the risk of war in the 10 years that follow the end of a previous conflict. After controlling for per-capita income and other economic, political, and geographical factors, external debt is found to increase the risk of war. Conversely, the effect of domestic debt is negligible. The policy implication for the international community is clear: debt relief helps stabilize peace in war-torn economies.

Guided by Ericson’s counter-law analytic, the focus of this paper is how peace bonds erode traditional criminal law principles to govern uncertainty and provide applicants with a “freedom from fear” (Ericson, 2007a). Peace bonds permit the courts to impose a recognizance on anyone likely to cause harm or “personal injury” to a complainant. This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis to answer the question: how and to what extent are peace bonds a form of counter-law? Facilitated by the erosion of traditional criminal law principles and rationalized under a precautionary logic, proving that a complainant is fearful through a peace bond can result in the expansion of the state’s capacity to criminalize and conduct surveillance.

Purpose – The chapter reports on an attempt to compute the size of gross world product (GWP) under the assumption that all violence ceases.

Methodology/approach – Spreadsheet-based simulations, given seed values taken from extensive literature review; this is done, for 2007, in nominal foreign exchange–based US dollars (USD) as well as in purchasing power parity (ppp)–based dollars (international dollars).

Beneficial economic effects from more internal peace (nonviolence within countries) as well from external peace (nonviolence between and among countries) are calculated for each of 140 countries. In addition, we compute sectoral economic effects for the United States.

Findings – For 2007, the simulations suggest that in a state of nonviolence the world economy could have been larger by 4.8 trillion dollars, or 8.7 per cent of actual GWP, when measured in nominal, foreign exchange–based USD, or by 6.0 trillion international dollars, or 9.2 per cent of GWP, when measured in purchasing power parity values.

Limitations – The simulations are based on disparate values found in the literature to seed the spreadsheet calculations; various assumptions are made that would need to be confirmed through country- and sector-specific studies.

Practical implications – Knowledge of the potential size of forgone economic benefits due to violence can assist to set out global violence reduction goals in order to achieve measurable economic results.

Originality/value of chapter – To our knowledge this is the first attempt to calculate the size of the worldwide economic benefits forgone due to violence.

Capacity development in fragile environments in Africa has often proven to be a complex undertaking. This has largely been because of existing knowledge gaps on what exactly causes fragility of states, the economy and society. The liberal peace development model that generally informs post‐conflict reconstruction and capacity development has a limited conception of fragility by narrowly focusing on the national dimensions of the problem, promoting donor‐driven solutions, emphasizing minimal participation of beneficiary actors in the identification and prioritization of capacity development needs, and by subcontracting the design and management of projects and programs. The resulting capacity development impact has generally been disappointing. In the absence of homegrown strategic plans, stakeholder participation and ownership, international development partners have all too often addressed capacity gaps by financing training, supply of equipment and professional exchanges of parliamentarians and parliamentary staffers. These efforts usually achieved their presumed number targets but tended to ignore addressing the larger issues of political economy within which capacity development take place. However, the recent re‐conceptualization of parliamentary capacity development as a development of nationally owned, coordinated, harmonized, and aligned development activities seems to be gaining growing attention in Africa. As the experience of Rwanda eloquently demonstrates, capacity development is essentially about politics, economics and power, institutions and incentives, habits and attitudes – factors that are only partly susceptible to technical fixes and quantitative specifications. These structural factors have to be negotiated carefully and tactfully.

Purpose – The main purpose is to provide ideas about an intellectual framework for considering the role of “economic factors” in conflict and to suggest some potentially useful future areas of research. I selectively reference some relevant findings from the other chapters in this volume.

Methodology/approach – This chapter is speculative, but raises important issues. It might seem that economic factors should be considered “hard” constraints on the dynamics of large-scale conflict and peace, whereas political factors are “soft.” I propose the opposite. I argue that we should consider political factors as causally primary and economic factors as contingent on them. I present statistical analyses that call into question some recent research on the apparent primacy of economic factors in international conflict.

Findings – These models challenge a strong belief in the primacy of a “capitalist peace” or “economic peace” over political factors such as democracy. But my purpose here is no more than to suggest that this is a promising area for further inquiry. Economic factors are of course hugely important, but they are filtered through norms and institutions, which are political creations. If the basic logic of my thinking holds, similar results would be obtained for studies of civil conflict initiation and escalation.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter raises the issue of the appropriate place of economic and political factors in understanding organized conflict at various levels of analysis. It suggests how the chapters in this volume help advance thinking about the relationship between economic factors and conflict in this context and provides some novel empirical results to suggest the plausibility of the argument that economic factors may be less theoretically fundamental than political ones.