"If you want to know your past, look at your present condition, because it is the result of your past. If you want to know your future, look at your present condition, because it will be the cause of your future."

Buddha

This paper is too restricted in order to encompass in a detailed way the most important factors for building a culture of peace, thus the main purpose of this essay is to give a brief philosophical or a modest theoretical framework about the need, the capacity of societies and the possibilities to build cultures of peace. The stance adopted here is that of critical approaches of International Relations (IR) in general and of Peace Studies in particular. This impels us to treat theory not merely as a set of philosophical abstractions detached from the "real" political life or as a tool to view the world, but as constitutive of the reality it seeks to explain. From this perspective "thinking" has practical and political consequences in reality.

With the end of the Cold War the crisis our modern society was facing became even more obvious, showing explicitly the flaw of "the long negative peace" cherished by the neo-realist paradigm that both with its liberal counterpart called neo-liberalism tried to make the existing system work more smoothly, while legitimizing the political and economical actions of the superpowers. Among the critical approaches of the "existing order", that were discontented with the "scientific" and parsimonious explanation of the world as a given and immutable realm, Peace Studies emerged as an emancipatory and inter-disciplinary approach with emphasis on "positive peace" since the years of the Cold War.

What is seen as one of the most obvious handicaps of orthodox approaches of IR today, are their assumptions about the immutable human nature and the structure of international system. The latter was seen as the realm of repetition and recurrence of the struggle for power between states since the times immemorial when Thucydides wrote The Peloponnesian Wars and Machiavelli his magnum opus, The Prince. As Ken Booth rightly put it, "Thucydides would feel at home today in seminars about the international politics of the Middle East, with all the talk of crises, aggressions and self-interest, with the powerful doing what they can, and the weak what they must."[1] From the traditional perspective, war was deemed as a compatible part or at least as an inevitable feature of world politics. Thus, "peace" could only exist as a dependant variable of war, which in this case represented the independent variable. From the angle of peace studies, this negative approach toward peace is largely rooted in the cultural thought throughout history as well as in the mainstream theoretical accounts which have nurtured the way of doing politics.

The challenges of Peace Studies

Peace Studies or Peace Research[2] as it is largely known has similar intellectual roots with IR as regarding its concerns about the reduction and prevention of war as viewed in the idealism of the post-First World War.[3] But there was its concentration on the concept of peace and its normative commitment to promote peace which gave her a distinct identity from IR.[4] However the evolution of peace research has not a linear history. While it emerged in the idealism noted above, the peace studies of the 1950s, moved away from idealism's normative rhetoric, focusing instead on the empirical and factual research[5] according to the increasing fashion of positivism (remember the emergence of behaviouralism during this time) in U.S. Thus during the early years of Cold War, it "survived"[6] by maintaining a narrow concept of peace which could be explained quantitatively and by ignoring the dynamics of structural violence and inequality as significant factors that helped explain war.[7] However the peace studies as we know today developed outside the U.S. mainly in Norway. It was the work of Johan Galtung who set its distinctive lexicon and consequently helped distinguish it from conflict studies[8] which dominated the peace research agenda. Even the early works of Galtung were built under the traditional positivist school he has revised continuously his prior work and have contributed by introducing the concepts of "positive peace" and "negative peace", not to mention the concept of "structural violence" which had the effect to restructure all the discipline of peace studies. By defining the absence of war as "negative peace" and the "absence/reduction of violence of all kinds" as the "positive peace"[9] which must be our goal, he helped in rethinking some of the central assumption of strategic studies about war and peace.

The concept of structural violence, introduced firstly by Galtung in his influential article, Violence, Peace and Peace Research, in 1969 was considered as a turning point in the discipline due to the fact that it produced an affiliation with the critical voices, by replacing his positivist approach.[10] Galtung made a distinction between direct violence and structural violence. Broadly speaking, direct violence covers the armed acts of war like the physical assault of a party to cause damage and harm the opposite party.[11] On the other hand, structural violence is a much broader concept that consists in "policies which deliberately or knowingly result in the deaths or suffering of others from starvation or disease... acting via the impact of unequal and oppressive power relations."[12] Shortly summarized, "peace research should focus more on the social origins of conflict and address the question of 'invisible' or 'latent' conflict".[13] Moreover, as Bilgin mentions, "Galtung (1969, 1996) also emphasized that to attain 'positive peace', it is not enough to seek to eliminate violence; existing institutions and relations should be geared towards the enhancement of dialogue, cooperation and solidarity among peoples coupled with a respect for the environment...for  Galtung peace is not a static concept; it is rather a process"[14] similar with that of democracy or the concept of security as is advocated by critical security thinkers. Thus, the innovative work of Galtung, put the peace research vis a vis the Strategic Studies.

While the Strategic Studies considered war to be a perennial and somewhat normal feature of anarchical international system, peace researchers presented war as a problem that had to be eradicated.[15] Thus peace research has been a challenger of the mainstream theories since the years of the Cold War. During the Cold war peace research was a critical voice in academic debates, even though it was largely ignored by the mainstream academics or even blamed as a Marxist surrogate[16]and viewed as 'essentially an intellectual protest movement'[17] rather than as a serious research area. Peace researchers questioned both the morality and the rationality of Strategic Studies as well as the meanings of war and peace.[18] Peace research as such served as a springboard for the new (critical) approaches to security.[19]

Cultures of peace: is change possible?

The critical approaches- or post-positivist turn[20] as is known by its other label - to world politics and to human history raised many crucial questions about what was considered as timeless truths about social, cultural and political live. If "truth has a history" as Foucault stated then, we are in front of social constructions not of unchangeable truths. This format can be well applied to the approach of peace. If the culture of war is something constructed and invented and reinvented, it is possible to change it and replace it with a culture of peace, at least theoretically.

Thus, the emptiness caused by Derridean deconstruction of traditional truths, in our case the culture of war, can be filled with something positive like the culture of peace. But peace studies cannot be content only with a theoretical endeavor, they insist also in the action side, or to put it differently the work in terrain. This claim also, constitutes the distinction of peace studies from the other critical approaches like post-structuralism, mainly focused on meta-theoretical (theory about theory) debates.

The need for peace

The idea of building a culture of peace first of all, rests on the belief, but not only, that it is possible to construct such a culture.  If human beings are able to build cultures of intolerance that lead to war they can also, be able to build cultures of peace that would lead to a peaceful social and political life. The need for peace also, was triggered by the dramatic political changes that occurred in the aftermath of the Cold War. What the modern international community needs in order to overcome the crisis is not a different approach based on the same ontology and epistemology, or a different writing of history, or use of force, but rather needs to reconceive humanity's cultural, social and political life. This is what building a culture of peace is about as well as its starting point.

Building cultures of peace introduces a very assertive claim. It is true that there is a myriad of cultural, economical and political obstacles that needs to be overcome to achieve this vision and some can argue that humanity is still pre-mature for such a universal enterprise. Another problem is that throughout history many ideologies, doctrines or belief systems that enthusiastically claimed to have found the most just and true society for human dignity, turned to be oppressors of humanity and of the values they claimed to enhance. This genealogy of "truths" impels us to be reflective for every idea or belief that yells "EUREKA!" about the way of life and political system humanity merits having.

From Plato's utopian Republic, humanity has deliberately experienced many religious or secular political systems, each of them reflecting the specific attributes of the epoch to which they belonged, respectively being city-states, empires, theocracies, monarchies and nation-states. The political history where the actors above invented and controlled the "truths" leaves little room for an idea about a cosmopolitan or global society based on "universal" norms of human dignity that would lead to a positive peaceful life. All this history has generated a culture of fear, egoism and uncertainty in world politics but the real problem here is that many of us assume this situation to be natural and "real". This way of thinking has a crucial outcome that is, negative peace. In the light of these facts, our endeavor must be in the direction of emancipation and seeking new tools for building cultures of positive peace. Here peace is understood not as an inter-state or intra-state condition but as a psycho-social condition.

If we would accept the culture of peace as a "set of values, attitudes, modes of behavior, and ways of living,"[21] it is necessary to change social norms[22] in order to achieve a culture based on positive peace. This peace must not be exclusive and specific to a given society or international society like in the case of "European Concert" in a certain historical moment. Moreover, this can be possible only in a post-national and post-religious realm, were the national and religious labels will not produce the "other" anymore and being human will be the highest label under which a myriad of identities can flourish freely. This cosmopolitan idea is not a new thing but it is new to think of it not merely as just an idealist and exhausted utopia.

Conclusion

 The Seville Statement on violence states that: "IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature."[23] It is obvious that we cannot anymore legitimize our actions referring to unchangeable and pseudo-natural assumptions about human nature, international systems, immutable agents and structures and even cultures.

Building cultures of peace begins with awareness about the statement above and a mission for a better human life for positive peace. This mission allows humans to make their own history, and is a progressive alternative that promotes emancipation for all humankind. This is also, an open-ended process that shows us the direction of our efforts. As a result, the dictum of our era must change from the traditional one: "If you want peace prepare for war", into a new one: "If you want peace, prepare for peace".

[1] Ken Booth, "Dare not to Know: International Relations Theory versus the Future", in Ken Booth and Steve Smith eds., International Relations Theory Today, (Cambridge: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997 [1995]), p. 332.

[2] Peace research was the prefered label for this inter-disciplinary field of study during the 1950s. See: Peter Lawler, "Peace Studies", in Paul D. Williams ed., Security Studies, (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 74.

[3] Terry Terrif et. al., Security Studies Today, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 65.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 69.

[6] It was only through "scientific" and "value-free" analysis that peace research could attract funding and gain legitimacy and academic credibility within the American social sciences. See: Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Lawler, op. cit., p. 79.

[9] Johan Galtung, 1996, p. 9; quoted in Ibid., p. 80.

[10] Terrif et al., op. cit., p. 72.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Lawler, op. cit., p. 84.

[14] Pınar Bilgin, Regional Security in the Middle East: A critical perspective, (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 44.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 101-102.

[17] Terry Terriff et al., op. cit., p. 65.

[18] Buzan and Hansen, op. cit., p. 104.

[19] C.a.s.e Collective, "Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto", Security Dialogue 2006; 37; 443, p. 462.

[20] Post-positivist approaches are called also as critical or reflectivist approaches like post-structuralism, post-modernism, feminism, post-colonialism and Critical Theory etc.

[21] This definition belongs to UN Resolution A/RES/52/13, cited in Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, "Cultural change: A prectical method with a theoretical basis" in Joseph de Riviera ed., Handbook on building cultures of peace, (New York: Springer, 2009), p. 57.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Quoted from: http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.phpURL_ID=3247&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html