Abstract
Many readers may never have heard of a “culture of peace.” In recent decades the concept has been promoted by several nongovernmental bodies, UNESCO chief among them. A culture of peace can be understood to contribute to Galtung’s (1969) “positive peace,” a peace not just of the absence of physical violence, but also the absence of structural violence via greater social justice and the vigorous protection of human rights. Forming a Culture of Peace should be of interest to those interested in the important work of understanding, creating, and practicing a vibrant culture of peace around the globe.
Karina Korostelina and her contributors provide an interesting and provocative collection of both empirical and theoretical analysis. The objectives of the book are twofold: “(1) to challenge the discourses, narrative frames, and systems of values and beliefs that support and promote violence and conflict, and (2) to provide conceptual frameworks and methodological tools for enhancing the processes of communicating peace” (p. 4). Overall, the focus is on altering and reframing public discourses in the service of creating a culture of peace. The collection emphasizes discourse’s dual capacity to both reflect and recreate social reality, so that discourse offers a potentially powerful tool for the desideratum of a culture of peace out of the raw social realities of conflict, domination, and violence.
With an interdisciplinary and international approach, the book offers a diversity of theoretical articulations of culture that may prove challenging to readers. In the conclusion, Korostelina proffers her own theoretical system to explain cultures of war and peace, a collective axiology. “A collective axiology is a system of value commitments that offers moral guidance to maintain relations with those within, and outside, a group” (p. 94). Two variables characterize a group’s collective axiology: their degree of collective generality and degree of axiological balance. Collective generality refers to the degree to which out-groups are viewed as either consistent, homogeneous, and stereotypical or internally differentiated in terms of beliefs and behaviors and their capacity to change. Axiological balance refers to the degree to which an out-group is understood to have both positive and negative qualities or merely negative ones. The more out-groups are seen in highly general and negative terms, the greater the chance that culture can legitimate violence toward that out-group.
With collective axiology, Korostelina appears to be collapsing many social psychological variables affecting perceived out-group threat and theoretically relating these to the group’s ethical stance toward the possibility of committing violence against the out-group. While this attempt at theoretical parsimony may simplify our understanding of the cultural determinants of conflict in helpful ways, it remains unsatisfying to this reviewer in that it may miss the political and hermeneutic struggles over culture necessary to support either war or peace. Korostelina acknowledges that the collective axiology of a group changes, especially under conditions of intergroup tension or violence, but the model does not focus on the processes of interpretation at the center of the cultural battles to understand and interpret out-groups. Conspicuously absent to sociological readers interested in culture and war is a significant engagement of Philip Smith’s (2005) account of the narrative cultural basis for war that argues that an apocalyptic telling of events is necessary for a war or organized violence and that less “inflated” narrative genres will not support a war. Smith’s account of genre wars, or the contestation over the narrating of events, seems to offer a more nuanced account of the variable potential for all societies to potentially engage in collective violence and the processes by which they do it. It remains unclear to this reader how the concept of collective axiology captures either this potential for war or peace in all societies and the power contest behind the processes of cultural interpretation that fuel both war and peace.
My own theoretical hesitations aside, the collection nevertheless catches the field at an exciting time, as it and the world are just beginning to articulate a fuller conception of the cultural demands and support for peace. The variety of areas for study nearly overwhelm and include public discourses, history education, personal discourse, media discourse on global poverty, media discourse and images, social marketing for peace, and peace communication within war zones. The styles and methods of this collection vary greatly as well, ranging from Marc Gopin’s gripping interview with a Palestinian peacemaker’s journey, to more turgid theoretical accounts detailing the broad theoretical contours of a culture of peace.
Particularly strong chapters should be noted. Michael Karlberg details the necessity of a broad framing of social life with the “social body” frame that requires cooperation and portrays human actors as interdependent, rather than the two dominant frames, social command and social contest, that stress obedience to authority and the dictates of market forces and competition, respectively. Korostelina’s chapter demonstrates how history education for peace sheds important light on how collective memory is constructed and transmitted and can form the foundation for attitudes and the possible foundations for future conflicts through its influence on national identity via public discourse about the past. Finally, Gopin shows the crucial importance of critical self-reflection for those victimized by violence in order to avoid perpetuating cycles of destruction.
As with any edited collection, many readers will be unsatisfied with the breadth and scope of the book’s theoretical and empirical range—the book’s contributors gallop along, leaving many questions unresolved and lines of inquiry unexplored. Additionally many sociologist readers will find the book’s obvious normative perspective and commitments challenging, but to work in the area of peace studies is to generally operate in an academic area of inquiry that is comfortable and explicit in its privileging of peace over war.
Uneven at times, this collection nevertheless is worthy of attention to those interested in peace and culture first and foremost. It captures a diversity of approaches and disciplines in the nascent academic movement to better understand the culture of peace, a culture very much worth our understanding and promotion, both for theoreticians and practitioners. Selections from the book may be useful for reading in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in culture, conflict transformation, or peacebuilding.