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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.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to discuss diversity among individual activists and the movement as a whole in the United States and identify the concerns, challenges, opportunities, and initiatives facing the broader network of global peace activists.

Design/methodology/approach – Data were from my study of U.S. peace activists that included 251 Internet survey respondents and 33 telephone interviewees.

Findings – I present a typology of internal and external challenges for the peace movement identified by activists, as well as five strategies for diversifying the movement.

Social implications – As some respondents expressed how their privileged status as American citizens prompted their peace activism, I explore how the intersection of a socially dominant status with the experience of belonging to a subordinated gender group impacts activism. I also discuss global opportunities to strengthen the peace and justice movement with a particular focus on women's activism.

Originality – While most studies of peace activism focus on social movement organizations, this is a comprehensive study of individuals involved in peace activism after September 11, 2001.

Target 16.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) refers to the need for ‘responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making’ to facilitate just, peaceful and inclusive societies. This chapter discusses why it is important that security and justice institutions, and decision-making therein, are responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative; how to develop such institutions; and how to measure success in this regard. It is argued that the limited scope of the official SDG indicators used to measure progress risks action being taken on less tangible and less measurable but often more meaningful aspects of building just, peaceful and inclusive societies. The chapter argues that facilitating more inclusive decision-making, especially in the security and justice sector (redistributing power), and evaluating progress in this regard (determining what success looks like) are both highly political undertakings. These undertakings are thus, fraught with practical difficulties and likely to generate resistance from those who have a vested interest in retaining the status quo. Retaining focus on the Target and overarching Goal, however, can help avoid implementation being derailed by being distracted by a huge data gathering exercise to respond to a narrow set of quantifiable indicators. It can also ultimately help facilitate transformational change towards just, peaceful and inclusive societies.

UNI Global Union’s General Secretary, Philip Jennings, delivered the Movement for the Abolition of War Remembrance Day Lecture at the Imperial War Museum on November 12th 2017. On a day when we remember the millions who died in the First World War and subsequent wars, Jennings called for renewed collective action to tackle the threats to peace. During the lecture, Jennings explored the ties that have bound the trade union movement to the peace movement over the last century or more and its relevance today to the struggle for social justice.

The chapter details the creation of a Peace Fellows program for students at a New York university, supported by community and university institutions, as well as activist professors, to nurture young people to learn about and take action on peace and social justice issues. The program resulted in an Institute for Peace Studies, a Minor in Peace and Conflict Studies, a Peace Action Matters club, and alumni who hold positions as peace organizers.

This underscores individual and social implications for how mental disorders and mental well-being are constructed, conceived of and treated. Further, this paper aims to examine positive psychology’s role in supporting the advancement of a broader systemic and contextual approach to mental health. With that aim, this paper connects data on mental health and well-being with peace studies to describe the systems of value and social ecologies underpinning mental disorders, using public happiness/Felicitas Publica as a possible framework to enhance public mental health while intervening at the local level (Bruni and Zamagni, 2007; Marujo and Neto, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2021; Marujo et al., 2019).

Theoretical foundations and data on positive peace and mental well-being are described with the intention to propose a systemic, contextual, relational, communitarian, economic and sociopolitical perspective of well-being that goes beyond individual bodies and/or brains and, instead, views mental disorder and mental health as social currency (Beck, 2020).

The interventions using dialogic, conversational and community approaches are a possible path to promote peace, mental health and public happiness.

Examining the interplay between the fields of positive psychology, mental health and cultures of peace, this work contributes to the broadening of research and subsequent intervention topics through transdisciplinary approaches while reinforcing the role of systemic and social determinants and complementing the prevalent medical model and intraindividual perspective of mental health and well-being.

Adopting positive psychology to address mental health through public happiness concepts and interventions opens opportunities to respond to the ebb and flow of social challenges and life-giving opportunities. Therefore, the paper intends to articulate actor-related, relational, structural and cultural dimensions while moving away from discrete technocratic and individual models and pays attention to the way their implementations are aligned with both individual and social needs.

The work offers an inclusive, equalitarian, politically sensitive approach to positive mental health and positive psychology, bringing forward a structural transformation and human rights-based approach perspective while rethinking the type of social and political solutions to mental health issues.

Creating a critically constructive debate vis-à-vis the fluidity and complexity of the social world, the paper examines mental health and positive psychology simultaneously from a “hardware” (institutions, infrastructures, services, systems, etc.) and a “software” (i.e. individuals and community/societal relations).

Jane Addams: Champion of Democracy is a biography incorporating history and social justice. This lesson involves students in grades 5-8 exploring social justice issues related to economic equality, racial equality, gender equality, health equality, peace, and justice. Students trace Jane Addams’s public service activities, in these areas of social justice, while simultaneously examining significant, external historical events and people, between 1860 and 1939, through the lens of Addams’s life. Students create a timeline and engage in ongoing discussions related to Addams’s involvement in these historical events and her connections to people, of this period, who, like Addams, were advocates for social change (e.g. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eleanor Roosevelt). Example activities and scoring rubrics are included in the appendix section. Inspired by descriptions of Jane Addams’s extraordinary life, an extension activity introduces students to social justice issues, within their own community, and provides steps to initiate community involvement.

Scholarship on the contact hypothesis and peacebuilding suggests that contact with marginalized ethnic and racial groups may reduce prejudice and improve opportunities for conflict resolution. Through a study of dual-narrative tours to Israel/Palestine, the purpose of this paper is to address two areas of the debate surrounding this approach to social change. First, past research on the effectiveness of contact-based tourism as a method to change attitudes is inconclusive. Travel to a foreign country has been shown to both improve and worsen tourists’ perceptions of a host population. Second, few scholars have attempted to link contact-based changes in attitudes to activism.

Through an analysis of 218 post-tour surveys, this study examines the role of dual-narrative tours in sparking attitude change that may facilitate involvement in peace and justice activism. Surveys were collected from the leading “dual-narrative” tour company in the region, MEJDI. Dual-narrative tours uniquely expose mainstream tourists in Israel/Palestine to Palestinian perspectives that are typically absent from the majority of tours to the region. This case study of dual-narrative tours therefore provides a unique opportunity to address the self-selecting bias, as identified by contact hypothesis and tourism scholars, in order to understand the potential impacts of exposure to marginalized narratives.

The findings of this study suggest that while these tours tend to engender increased support for Palestinians over Israelis, their most salient function appears to be the cultivation of empathy for “both sides” of the conflict. Similarly, dual-narrative tours often prompt visitors to understand the conflict to be more complex than they previously thought. In terms of activism, tourists tend to prioritize education-based initiatives in their plans for post-tour political engagement. In addition, a large number of participants articulated commitments to support joint Israeli–Palestinian non-governmental organizations and to try to influence US foreign policy to be more equitable.

These findings complicate debates within the scholarship on peacebuilding as well as within movements for social justice in Israel/Palestine. While programs that equate Israeli and Palestinian perspectives are often criticized for reinforcing the status quo, dual-narrative tours appear to facilitate nuance and universalism while also shifting tourists toward greater identification with an oppressed population. Together, these findings shed light on the ability of tourism to facilitate positive attitude change about a previously stigmatized racial/ethnic group, as well as the power of contact and exposure to marginalized narratives to inspire peace and justice activism.

I wish to argue that peace, justice, peace building and non-violent conflict resolution raise important moral, ethical and spiritual concerns, which call into question what it is to be a human being. The path to peace (contrary to what is mostly practised today) is all about the world of heart, mind and spirit. In the first section, I will tell you about my own journey for peace, which has transformed me from an ‘economist as usual’ into ‘an economist for the common good’. The other sections deal with the definition of the common good and the aims of the ‘Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative’ (GCGI).