الكاتب: Johan Galtung

And then it happened: Mubarak out. Enormous cheers in Tahrir square; Egypt is Free! A historical deed, triggered by Tunisia, carried by a million heroes. Leaderless of course, as a strategy; leaders can easily be targeted. Everybody rallied around one idea, the ouster of Mubarak ― like of Ben Ali in Tunisia. End of Act I.

المزيد

Part One And then it happens, right there, for our eyes. The pattern, above all a product of the US-Israel alliance (inspired by Jesaiah 2:1-5), is unraveling. The pattern was always the same, by force or bribes or both to create “friendly governments”, “allies in the peace process” as VP Joe Biden–Obama’s foreign policy expert–says. These hours, these days. Some process.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Weltinnenpolitik–a term linked to the great Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker–global domestic policy, needs concretization to move from policy to politics. We live in a world still to a large extent a state system, based on the work of diplomats to “negotiate ratifiable agreements”, in Sir Harold Nicholson’s admirably short formulation. The idea is to find some equilibrium balancing national interests–meaning those of the dominant nation in states–against each other, in a world anarchy. The countless wars give testimony to the failure. Today the wars among states, like the revolts against colonialism, are decreasing. The state system, surviving…

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Speech delivered at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, Berlin. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, what a good idea, a conference on a world without walls in the country of Kant who never put his brilliant mind to work on the walls between civilizations but postulated global hospitality. He did not have the traveled and troubled life of, say, an Ibn Khaldun, nor an Oriental wife with other thought categories than his own. So let this talk also function as the epilogue to a forthcoming book, A Theory of Civilization, Transcend University Press, 2010.

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Do we not have enough peace, development and environment problems if we should not in addition worry about “unidentified flying objects”, UFOs? Why not rather worry about US wars in and from space? That too, and it may be a part of the same complex.

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Jondal, Hardanger, Norway: A seminar on peace service after a symposium where Ministries of Peace were brought up puts this little community of 10,000 in the forefront of peace politics. Nordisk fredsakademi, the Nordic Peace Academy, is the organizer, under the fine leadership of Laila Bergsagel, Alexander Harang and Synöve Faldalen, who is also the convener of TRANSCEND-Nordic, and the person fronting SABONA; TRANSCEND in family, school and at the work place. A strong team. Symposium-seminar, every August.

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Washington Post published 19 July an article by Dana Priest and William Arkin on the huge US “national security enterprise”. And July 26 came the long awaited “biggest leak in US military history” – in the Guardian as “Afghanistan-The War Logs”, in the International Herald Tribune as “The Afghan war, unvarnished”, and in Der Spiegel as “Protokoll eines Krieges“ – ”The Whistleblowers: Is WikiLeaks a Blessing or Curse for Democracy?” – from the website wikileaks.org.

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Speech delivered at the International Sociological Association – Gothenburg, Sweden, July 2010. The mediation theory of TRANSCEND opens for five possibilities for simple conflicts and much more for more complex conflicts, as spelt out in A Theory of Conflict.  But they are hidden in history.

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This is the Epilogue of a book just to be printed, A Theory of Conflict, TRANSCEND University Press, 2010. “If you cannot remove conflict, why not adjust your thinking about it? Why not try and see conflict as the salt of life, the big energizer, the tickler, the tantalizer, rather than as a bothersome nuisance, as noise in perfect channel, as disturbing ripples in otherwise quiet waters? In short, why not treat conflict as a form of life, particularly since we all know that it is precisely during the period of our lives when we are exposed to a conflict…

المزيد

Greensboro, NC [i]: This is where it happened: the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch-counter 1 February 1960, unleashing a cascade of events leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, formally ending segregation based on color in the United States of America. The event got its International Civil Rights Museum 1 February 2010; 50 years (!) later. But then the Civil Rights Act came nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed 1 January 1863, making the war anti-secession and anti-slavery. The South fought even more bitterly, England and France gave up the idea of recognizing the Confederacy as…

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“Only about 400 rebels had been in the fight at the bridge, but as the day wore on the number increased to several thousand. They would shoot at the enemy column from behind fences, trees, barns, walls, from inside houses, then reload, hurry ahead, and then shoot again. This was a strange, new type of warfare to the British, who were neither experienced, nor trained for it. To them it seemed dishonorable, hiding and shooting at men in the open who could not even see their enemies. As one Redcoat wrote his family: They did not fight us like a…

المزيد

JICA-ASEAN-WORLD BANK Consultation on World Development Report 2011 Address by Johan Galtung to the ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta, April 2010 Your Excellencies, a World Bank World Development Report is a world view, and all the benchmarks are problematic conceptual tools defining world view discourses; indeed central to our concerns.

المزيد

The US Empire is leaving an economic-military-political-cultural gap, China is not signing up, nor the EU with its recent experience of how colonialism crumbles. The state system is also fading — except for the biggest ones — being increasingly region-oriented. EU is the most mature, but AU, SAARC and ASEAN are coming up. Three new regions are in the making: Latin America-Caribbean (LA), Islamic from Morocco to Mindanao (OIC), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), possibly competing with an East Asian Community.

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We are living a world battle against terrorism. With the words of the present US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, then, in 2001 a Senator, in our ears: “if you are not with us (meaning US) you are with the terrorists”. Not the bland, “if you are not with us you are against us, no, you are with the terrorists. Tertium non datur, no third possibility, like being against both/or in favor of both, more original, an option for arms traders and double spies — or being non-aligned; handling the issues on a concrete case-by-case basis.

المزيد

Consider this.  Obama promised change we can believe in and delivered non-change we certainly believe in, betraying those who voted for him.  His deeds do not match his rhetoric, so he will lose badly at the mid-term elections.  A one-term president?  Worse, maybe his lame duck presidency is over.  Not even one term.

المزيد

President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture in Oslo 10 December 2009 – the Human Rights Day! – added tragedy to the comedy. It was vintage Orwell, war is peace, serving outdated thoughts by nations trying to legitimize their warfare, with the eloquence and charm that came through to many of that persuasion. A reactionary speech, more becoming to war college graduation in a militaristic country like the USA; and a total travesty of the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize, intended to go beyond that kind of mentality.

المزيد

Istanbul – Imagine a country losing an empire in their command for more than five centuries, ending with the occupation of Istanbul 1918 at the end of World War I. England (Mr. Sykes), France (M. Picot) and the Russians had conspired, engineering Arab uprisings against the Ottomans – “Lawrence of Arabia” being a part of that) – promising them freedom if they do the job, then colonizing them, causing enormous problems and suffering: Palestine-Iraq to the UK, Lebanon-Syria to France, unloading the consequences on the future.

المزيد

The past week had two important anniversary messages. One came through loud and clear in the Western media: the 60th anniversary of the triumph of the Chinese Revolution, guided by Mao, restoring China to its own people, violently, on October 1.

المزيد

This UN General Assembly will go down in history because of three persons: Hu Jintao, Qaddafi and Chávez, from the three Third World continents. And Obama will be less remembered for a speech–a high school essay promising to honor the UN multilateralism his country is committed to as a UN member–than for Chávez’ comment about two Obamas, Obama 1 talking peace and Obama 2 building bases.

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