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A Natural History of Peace
Thomas A. Gregor
Vanderbilt University Press, 1996
A stimulating and innovative consideration of the concept, causes, and practice of peace in societies both ancient and modern, human and primate.<.)

We know a great deal about aggression, conflict, and war, but relatively little about peace, partially because it has been such a scarce phenomenon throughout history and in our own times. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace requires special relationships, structures, and attitudes to promote and protect it.



A Natural History of Peace provides the first broadly interdisciplinary examination of peace as viewed from the perspectives of social anthropology, primatology, archeology, psychology, political science, and economics. Among other notable features, this volume offers:



a major theory concerning the evolution of peace and violence through human history;
an in-depth comparative study of peaceful cultures with the goal of discovering what it is that makes them peaceful;

one of the earliest reports of a new theory of the organization and collapse of ancient Maya civilization;

a comparative examination of peace from the perspective of change, including the transition of one of the world's most violent societies to a relatively peaceful culture, and the decision-making process of terrorists who abandon violence;

and a theory of political change that sees the conclusion of wars as uniquely creative periods in the evolution of peace among modern nations.

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Negotiating With Eta
Obstacles To Peace In The Basque Country, 1975-1988
Robert P. Clark
University of Nevada Press, 1990

Since the late 1960s, the Basque insurgent organization ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) has been engaged in a violent struggle against the Spanish state in an effort to gain the independence of the Basque Country. ETA violence has led to the death of hundreds of people, making the organization the most violent insurgent group in Europe. Between 1975 and 1988, nearly thirty attempts to negotiate an end to violence, with a few limited exceptions, all ended in failure. This important book examines why the efforts to negotiate have failed and makes suggestions on how to improve the chances for successful discussion in the future. Although Clark does not disprove the conventional wisdom that negotiation with terrorists is a bad idea, he does begin from the opposing point of view that there may be some positive values to be realized from such negotiation.Negotiating with ETA describes the various factions that are interested in the outcome of such negotiations and the Spanish antiterrorist policy throughout the period under examination. The book also recounts the early attempts to negotiate, the first attempt at "social reintegration," various attempts by the Basque Government to get negotiations started, negotiation efforts under the Spanish socialist government of Felipe González, and the lengthy negotiations that took place in Algeria. A wide range of scholars and specialists will find this book valuable, including those interested in contemporary Spanish politics, ethnic nationalism, Basque affairs, the problem of terrorism, and conflict resolution.

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Never Justice, Never Peace
Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks
Ginny Savage Ayers
West Virginia University Press, 2018

In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21, a popular history now considered a classic. Among those the book influenced are Denise Giardina, author of Storming Heaven, and John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a lesser-known Mother Jones crusade in Kanawha County, West Virginia. His daughter Ginny Savage Ayers drew on his notes and files, as well as her own original research, to complete Never Justice, Never Peace—the first book-length account of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–13.

Savage and Ayers offer a narrative history of the strike that weaves together threads about organizer Mother Jones, the United Mine Workers union, politicians, coal companies, and Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency guards with the experiences of everyday men and women. The result is a compelling and in-depth treatment that brings to light an unjustly neglected—and notably violent—chapter of labor history. Introduced by historian Lou Martin, Never Justice, Never Peace provides an accessible glimpse into the lives and personalities of many participants in this critical struggle.

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A New Generation Draws the Line
'Humanitarian' Intervention and the Standards of the West
Noam Chomsky
Pluto Press, 2012

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The New Winter Soldiers
GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era
Moser, Richard
Rutgers University Press, 1996

Richard Moser uses interviews and personal stories of Vietnam veterans to offer a fundamentally new interpretation of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. Although the Vietnam War was the most important conflict of recent American history, its decisive battle was not fought in the jungles of Vietnam, or even in the streets of the United States, but rather in the hearts and minds of American soldiers. To a degree unprecedented in American history, soldiers and veterans acted to oppose the very war they waged. Tens of thousands of soldiers and veterans engaged in desperate conflicts with their superiors and opposed the war through peaceful protest, creating a mass movement of dissident organizations and underground newspapers.

Moser shows how the antiwar soldiers lived out the long tradition of the citizen soldier first created in the American Revolution and Civil War. Unlike those great upheavals of the past, the Vietnam War offered no way to fulfill the citizen-soldier's struggle for freedom and justice. Rather than abandoning such ideals, however, tens of thousands abandoned the war effort and instead fulfilled their heroic expectations in the movements for peace and justice. According to Moser, this transformation of warriors into peacemakers is the most important recent development of our military culture.

The struggle for peace took these new winter soldiers into America rather than away from it. Collectively these men and women discovered the continuing potential of American culture to advance the values of freedom, equality, and justice on which the nation was founded.

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NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE
Jane Addams
University of Illinois Press, 2006

In this her second book, Jane Addams moves beyond humanitarian appeals to sensibility and prudence, advancing a more aggressive, positive idea of peace as a dynamic social process emerging out of the poorer quarters of cosmopolitan cities. Her deep analysis of relations among diverse groups in U.S. society, exemplified by inter-ethnic and labor relations in Chicago, draws widely useful lessons for both domestic and global peace, in an early formulation of today’s "globalization from below."

In an unprecedented, revolutionary critique of the pervasive militarization of society, Addams applies her scathing pen to traditional advocates and philosophers of “negative” peace, founders of the U.S. constitution, militarists, bigots, imperialists, and theories of “democratic peace” and liberal capitalism. Instead she sees a slow, powerful emergence of forces from below--the poor, the despised, workers, women, ethnic and racial communities, oppressed groups at home and abroad--that would invent moral substitutes for war and gradually shape a just, peaceful, and varied social order. An extensive, in-depth introduction by Berenice Carroll and Clinton Fink provides historical context, analysis, and a reassessment of the theoretical and practical significance of Newer Ideals of Peace today.

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No Peace, No War
An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts
Paul Richards
Ohio University Press, 2004

A rash of small wars erupted after the Cold War ended in Africa, the Balkans, and other parts of the former communist world. The wars were in “inter-zones,” the spaces left where weak states had withdrawn or collapsed. Consequently the debate over what constitutes war has returned to basics. No Peace, No War departs from the usual analysis that considers the new wars mindless mass actions to offer the paradoxical idea that to understand war one must deny war special status. Rather than leave war to the security specialists, these writers attempt to grasp its character as one among many aspects of social reality.

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Nothing Is Impossible
America's Reconciliation with Vietnam
Ted Osius
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Today Vietnam is one of America’s strongest international partners, with a thriving economy and a population that welcomes American visitors. How that relationship was formed is a twenty-year story of daring diplomacy and a careful thawing of tensions between the two countries after a lengthy war that cost nearly 60,000 American and more than two million Vietnamese lives.
 
Ted Osius, former ambassador during the Obama administration, offers a vivid account, starting in the 1990s, of the various forms of diplomacy that made this reconciliation possible. He considers the leaders who put aside past traumas to work on creating a brighter future, including senators John McCain and John Kerry, two Vietnam veterans and ideological opponents who set aside their differences for a greater cause, and Pete Peterson—the former POW who became the first U.S. ambassador to a new Vietnam. Osius also draws upon his own experiences working first-hand with various Vietnamese leaders and traveling the country on bicycle to spotlight the ordinary Vietnamese people who have helped bring about their nation’s extraordinary renaissance. 
 
With a foreword by former Secretary of State John Kerry, Nothing Is Impossible tells an inspiring story of how international diplomacy can create a better world.
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