The Muslim Minority and Communal Harmony in India: A Study of the Views of Wahiduddin Khan

The partition of the Indian subcontinent placed her religious harmony at stake. In postindependence India, one of the most crucial issues was to maintain communal harmony between the Muslim minority and non-Muslim majority. Renowned Muslim Scholars and organisations came forward and expressed their concerns on the issue. However, Wahiduddin Khan (1925-2021) suggested a different methodology, contrary to his contemporaries. Through the application of descriptive and content analytical methods, this study investigates Khan’s ideas of communal harmony in post-independence India. The study found that Khan emphasised da’wah and peace activism. Contrary to his preceding views, he blamed the Muslim populace for communal disharmony in the country. Further, based on his reading of the Treaty of Ḥudaibiyyah, he recommended Muslims take a unilateral and passive step to establish communal harmony in the country and assumed it to be the only possible way for the Muslim minority. This study observes that Khan’s understanding of Ḥudaibiyyah is questionable as he ignored all other significant incidents of the sīrah. Nevertheless, his views on the unity of religion remains significant.

Solidarity in Search of Human Agency: ‘Détente from Below’ and Independent Peace Activists in the Soviet Union

While the histories of Western grassroots movements and the officially sanctioned, communist-sponsored peace movement are well known, the independent peace activists of the Soviet bloc have remained footnotes in the history of social movements. The Group for the Establishment of Trust between East and West (the Trust Group) was the largest and most prominent unofficial peace group in the late Soviet Union. Active between 1982 and 1989, its members established significant ties with foreign peace activists. This article considers the agenda, activities and membership of the Trust Group. It contrasts the persecution experienced by this independent movement with the activities of the official, state-sanctioned Soviet Peace Committee (SPC). As the article shows, the Trust Group’s agenda resonated with the concept of ‘détente from below’, as promoted by members of European Nuclear Disarmament (END), including the historian E.P. Thompson. The article traces how Western advocates of ‘détente from below’ sought to support these independent campaigners in the Soviet Union, thus highlighting important East-West dimensions in European peace activism in the 1980s.

Communicating a Culture of Peace in Aotearoa New Zealand: The vision of Peace through Unity

<p>Narrative politics reframes how we cultivate knowledge in the academy, foregrounding the voices of research subjects and their relationships with researchers to re-embed scholars in the social world. Narrative affects the reader’s emotional capacities and fosters empathic understanding, encouraging a more human engagement with figures that have been made threatening, as Elizabeth Dauphinée explores in The Politics of Exile and Richard Jackson in Confessions of a Terrorist. Narrative politics is concerned with the question of how academics respond to the violence of war and whether the analytical tools of the social sciences are an adequate response to the human horror of war. The narratives of peace people are particularly compelling in the way they challenge the assertions of the dominant culture of wider society and the discipline of IR. Aotearoa New Zealand has a rich history of grassroots peace movements and activities that have influenced wider society. However, their stories are not well recorded in the dominant narrative of state institutions or academia. Peace Activist Elsie Locke published Peace People, a broad historical survey of peace activism from pre-European Maori to 1975. Maire Leadbeater brings the account up to 2013 in Peace, Power and Politics. All accounts emphasise that ordinary people were at the heart of activities, organisations and movements for peace. One of these ‘ordinary’ people left out of Locke and Leadbeater’s accounts is Gita Brooke, co-founder of the Whanganui-based charitable trust, Peace through Unity [PTU]. As a self-identified ‘peace person,’ Brooke has written much about their work and been involved in peace activities in Aotearoa NZ since the 1980s. Narrative politics provides a lens in IR to explore the story of Gita Brooke as co-founder of PTU. I show the contribution PTU has made and continues to make to a culture of peace in Aotearoa New Zealand and as a worldwide network, explored through the themes of education for global citizenship, transformation through thought-work, and responsibility for local action. It examines how PTU’s vision of a culture of peace has been communicated through the organisation’s newsletter, Many to Many, through its involvement with the United Nations as an accredited NGO, and through its local activities. Using archival sources, data from interviews and a content analysis of the newsletter, and complemented by the lens of and insights from the discourse of narrative politics, this study suggests that PTU provides a space for critical self-reflection in the pursuit of peace that challenges the thought/action binary of institutionalised NGOs. The deterritorialised publication, Many to Many, connects peace people through a networked area of mutual agreement that is inclusive, educative and transformative.</p>

Communicating a Culture of Peace in Aotearoa New Zealand: The vision of Peace through Unity

<p>Narrative politics reframes how we cultivate knowledge in the academy, foregrounding the voices of research subjects and their relationships with researchers to re-embed scholars in the social world. Narrative affects the reader’s emotional capacities and fosters empathic understanding, encouraging a more human engagement with figures that have been made threatening, as Elizabeth Dauphinée explores in The Politics of Exile and Richard Jackson in Confessions of a Terrorist. Narrative politics is concerned with the question of how academics respond to the violence of war and whether the analytical tools of the social sciences are an adequate response to the human horror of war. The narratives of peace people are particularly compelling in the way they challenge the assertions of the dominant culture of wider society and the discipline of IR. Aotearoa New Zealand has a rich history of grassroots peace movements and activities that have influenced wider society. However, their stories are not well recorded in the dominant narrative of state institutions or academia. Peace Activist Elsie Locke published Peace People, a broad historical survey of peace activism from pre-European Maori to 1975. Maire Leadbeater brings the account up to 2013 in Peace, Power and Politics. All accounts emphasise that ordinary people were at the heart of activities, organisations and movements for peace. One of these ‘ordinary’ people left out of Locke and Leadbeater’s accounts is Gita Brooke, co-founder of the Whanganui-based charitable trust, Peace through Unity [PTU]. As a self-identified ‘peace person,’ Brooke has written much about their work and been involved in peace activities in Aotearoa NZ since the 1980s. Narrative politics provides a lens in IR to explore the story of Gita Brooke as co-founder of PTU. I show the contribution PTU has made and continues to make to a culture of peace in Aotearoa New Zealand and as a worldwide network, explored through the themes of education for global citizenship, transformation through thought-work, and responsibility for local action. It examines how PTU’s vision of a culture of peace has been communicated through the organisation’s newsletter, Many to Many, through its involvement with the United Nations as an accredited NGO, and through its local activities. Using archival sources, data from interviews and a content analysis of the newsletter, and complemented by the lens of and insights from the discourse of narrative politics, this study suggests that PTU provides a space for critical self-reflection in the pursuit of peace that challenges the thought/action binary of institutionalised NGOs. The deterritorialised publication, Many to Many, connects peace people through a networked area of mutual agreement that is inclusive, educative and transformative.</p>

Between Resistance and Repatriarchalization. Women’s Activism in the Bay of Kotor in the 1990s

The author offers an account of women’s activism in the Bay of Kotor in the 1990s, thereby filling a gap in the academic literature on antiwar and peace activism in Montenegro during the Yugoslav wars. Although the Bay of Kotor saw regular antiwar and peace initiatives organized and led by women, these were unregistered grassroots activities. They went largely unnoticed by the media, which effectively erased them from the view of Montenegrin citizens and hid them from domestic and international historians and social scientists. The author compares the work of two non-governmental organizations, the ANIMA Centre for Women’s and Peace Education in Kotor, and RIZA–Bijela. She explores how the two organizations understood the place and role of women in the processes that took place in Montenegro in the 1990s. She assesses the similarities and differences of their respective approaches, and the effects of their work.

Peace wanted alive: an artist’s response to Kenya’s post-election violence

In this article I examine how the chaos of Kenya’s PEV became the source of motivation for Solo 7’s peace activism. For the artist, the term "chaos" was initially understood as a metaphor for the violence and destruction in the slum of Kibera (where Solo 7 resides), which upturned daily life as people knew it. The article will go on to argue that once this particular episode of chaos came to an end, other forms emerged – notably, an anxiety as to whether violence might reoccur, but also the uncertainty of surviving day to day in a precarious and highly unequal society. These multi-layered connotations of chaos created new subtexts for how Solo 7’s peace slogans and activism were interpreted and used by both the artist and public. [...] And they are needed today more than ever.