Elizabeth Cashdan asks a profound question: “What evolutionary forces underlie human violence, and how can we use this knowledge to promote a more peaceful society?” According to a news story last Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the University of Utah is hosting a conference this week which addresses those… Continue reading…
Leslie Sponsel opens a recent essay on the futility of violence and war with two profound questions: Is a nonkilling society possible, and what are the possibilities of a nonkilling anthropology? He adapts these two questions from Glenn D. Paige’s pathbreaking 2002 work Nonkilling Global Political Science (available on the… Continue reading…
Unrest among civil service employees has broken out in both Ladakh and in Tahiti, where government employees are striking to improve their retirement pay scales. While these two developments are purely coincidental, they suggest an important question: do strikes and other forceful activities, which try to compel others into taking… Continue reading…
“Peaceful societies demonstrate that human beings clearly have the capacity for living with very little violence and for dealing with conflicts without aggression,” Douglas Fry will argue tomorrow. In a presentation at an important conference in Denmark, he will also maintain that nonviolent societies provide “specific insights about ways to… Continue reading…
Barack Obama’s apparent victory over Hillary Clinton will pit, in the November American presidential election, a clear opponent of the war in Iraq against one of its resolute supporters. However, from the perspective of this website, larger questions should focus on whether this election might foster a more peaceful society… Continue reading…
The debate over the supposed innate propensity of human beings to be aggressive has once again surfaced in the popular press, this time in the current, April, issue of Discover Magazine. (The article is also available for free on the Discover website.) The proponents of the different sides of this… Continue reading…
Today is the first anniversary of the historic decision by the Botswana High Court that the G/wi have a right to live on their own land. Unfortunately, the government of Botswana has been doing its best to thwart that decision ever since. Other countries in the news are savaging forest… Continue reading…
Why should anyone quibble about the obvious? Don’t daily news reports show how violent we are? Don’t scholarly studies prove that humans males have evolved to be warlike? In his new book Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace, Douglas Fry doesn’t just quibble about these issues: he demonstrates quite… Continue reading…
Thousands of people will converge on Washington this weekend to mark the fourth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. Most will question why the United States, among other countries, launches wars so often. Some of the demonstrators may do more than protest. They may also discuss the value of… Continue reading…
Thousands of people will converge on Washington this weekend to mark the fourth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. Most will question why the United States, among other countries, launches wars so often. Some of the demonstrators may do more than protest. They may also discuss the value of… Continue reading…
