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The Work of VIPIS

• Our Mission
• Teaching about Afghanistan
• Teaching about Terrorism
• Middle East Studies
• Timbuktu in Mali

Teaching about Peace

• What is terrorism
• Does religious terrorism exist?
• The "War on Terror"
• Clash of Civilisations?

Teaching about ISLAM

• History of Islam
• The World of Islam
• What is the Holy Koran?
• Teaching Tolerance
• Teaching Islam in Schools
• Islam and Peace
• Taliban are not Muslims!

Teaching about Arabic

• salaam aleikum!
• Allah o-Akbar!
• insh'allah!
• The Arab World?
• Arabic in the classroom
• Learning Arabic on the street

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Inside VIPIS

Teaching about Peace

(From the course taught by Dr Robin-Edward Poulton at European Peace University, Stadtschlaining, Austria)

Peace is more than the absence of violence; it is the presence of social justice through equal opportunity, a fair distribution of power and resources, equal protection and impartial enforcement of law.

Prof Johann Galtung (in "The Coming One Hundred Years of Peacemaking: Visions of Peace for the 21st Century," a lecture given at the Centenary Conference of the International Peace Bureau in Helsinki on 30 August 1993) distinguishes between four forms of power: military, economic, political and cultural.

They correspond to four basic human needs, for survival, economic well-being, freedom and identity (the opposites being death, misery, oppression and alienation).

These lead to the distinction between four forms of violence:

• direct violence (hurting and killing people with weapons),
• structural violence I (the slow death from hunger, preventable diseases and other suffering caused by unjust structures of society),
• structural violence II (deprivation from freedom of choice and from participation in decisions that affect people's own lives),
• and cultural violence (the justification of direct and structural violence through nationalism, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination and prejudice).

Peace has then eight components: the absence of these four forms of violence ("negative peace"), and the presence of activities to bring relief for past or present violence and to prevent future violence ("positive peace"), in their military, economic, political and cultural dimensions.

Eight Components of Peace and Courses Addressing Them

Component	Negative Peace	Positive Peace
MILITARY	Violence, Security, Disarmament (fall); Terrorism: Its Causes and Prevention (fall); Cooperation vs Hegemony: European vs US Security Strategies (fall); Negotiation, Mediation and Reconciliation (spring); Mediation (spring); Crises Prevention, Intervention, Reconciliation and Reconstruction (spring)	Conflict transformation by Peaceful Means (fall and spring); Nonviolence (fall); Cooperation vs Hegemony: European vs US Security Strategies(fall); Conflict Free Conflict Resolution (spring); Peace and Social Movements(spring); Transition from Civil War to Peace(spring); Reconciliation after Civil War (spring)
ECONOMIC	Global Economy, Peace and Development (fall);The Global Economy and Alternatives (spring)	Global Economy, Peace and Development (fall); The Global Economy and Alternatives (spring); Theories of Development
POLITICAL	Human rights (fall); Good and Bad Governance, with Case Studies from Africa (fall)	Governance and Participation (fall and spring); Good and Bad Governance, with Case Studies from Africa(fall); Community-Based Peacebuilding (fall)
CULTURAL	Gender and Cultures of Peace (spring); Culture Communication and Conflict Transformation (spring); Peace Education and the Media (spring)	Culture & Communication (fall); Basic Needs, Deep Structure and Deep Culture (fall); Peace Education (spring); Peace & Deep Culture; Reconciliation; Deep Structure (spring); Emotional Intelligence in Intercultural Communication (fall); Utopias of Peace in Literature (fall)