Peace in an Age of Transformation

This article seeks to cope with the fundamental problematique of our time which cuts across all the specific crises and challenges-Survival. It posits the thesis that human history is today poised on the threshold of yet another mutation, spanning the entire network of arrangement of human affairs-political, economic, social, cultural, ethnic, religious, ways of thinking and styles of living - right from the global to the grass-roots levels. It sees in the all-too-plain aborted promise of a bygone era for a continuously rising prosperity for all, in the quick succession of crises in both international and national affairs (each more severe and more intractable than the last), in the deep divisions and sharp polarizations (both between and within nations), in the ceaseless preparations for - and frequent eruptions of - war, and in the perpetually haunting fear of total destruction - symptoms of a sickness in the existing arrangements that can no longer be made to respond to analgesics and palliatives. On the other side, it sees in the pervasive discontent and unrest, in the endemic turbulences and turmoil, and in the slow but sustained initiatives for creating a just world - signals of a surge towards a fundamental transformation of the status quo, even though the signals are sporadic and episodic, and the surge inchoate and neither well conceived, well directed nor well coordinated. The greatest irony of the situation, the article notes, is that while the surge for transformation emanates from the peripheries, from societies believed to be traditional and doggedly resistant to change, and from people believed to have been suppressed into quiescence and passivity for good, the opposition to change (by various strategems, not excluding the threat of use, or actual use, of naked force) comes precisely from those who once prided themselves on their role as the powerful dynamo of change unprecedented in history. The article traces the developments leading to the present state of affairs in the historical perspective, and discusses the issue of peace and security in this context of emerging transformation. It sees peace neither as a function of the balance of terror and of mutual assured destruction put forward by nuclear strategists, nor as a consequence of proposals for disarmament put out by peace researchers, but as emerging out of struggles at creating structures that are, and are seen and felt to be, just and equitable, and that ensure the security of peoples and the survival of the human species, and of creation as a whole. It also attempts to provide a new pedagogy and methodology for such an approach to peace and survival.