“Projecting Peace:
The Perpetual Search for the End to All Hostilities”

Diane Morgan
 (University of Leeds – d.l.morgan@leeds.ac.uk)
and
Dave Webb
 (Leeds Metropolitan University – d.webb@leedsmet.ac.uk)


Last year we applied for and were awarded a small grant from the British Association for a project to bring academics and others together around the theme of “Projecting Peace”. The proposal grew from a concern that advocates of peace are often accused of being out of touch with the harsh realities of political life and human nature and are often caricatured as well meaning visionaries who simplistically and ineffectually dream of a return to a non-violent golden age. In the face of such criticisms, we propose to establish a network for “Projecting Peace” - to provide an interdisciplinary forum for exploring the complexities, ambiguities, ambivalences and varieties of peace-making and peace-thinking with the aim of addressing how these varied academic disciplines and schools of thought can address, in some practical way, perhaps the greatest challenges in history – anthropogenic climate change and nuclear proliferation.

The ‘scramble’ for sustainable natural resources within a technologically-changed and -challenged climate is an increasingly important source of global conflict. The self interests of governments for national survival run counter to the evident necessity for collaboration and cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Therefore, our main focus in this interdisciplinary research project will be on the practicalities of applying and maintaining ethical, ecological, and humanitarian considerations beyond national boundaries in the fragile economies of emergent cultures of peace and security. By so doing we will be contributing to the current interest in “cosmopolitics”, i.e. a politics which reaches beyond - or even supersedes – the nation state and to whatever form - pacific or otherwise - this might take in the future.

It is widely recognized that the future of our planet is threatened by two man-made dangers – nuclear proliferation and the effects of climate change. These self-inflicted problems have generated the necessity for an elaborated strategy of global cooperation. The question therefore becomes - how can academics and activists join together to contribute to the debates and strategies that are developing around these issues? Our future survival may indeed require us to better understand the underlying human aspects of our past and current predicaments in an attempt to achieve Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”.

Aims and Objectives: Through the various lenses of associated partners in a range of disciplines, we aim to explore the following related topics: cosmopolitics and human rights; global justice and its institutionalization; cultural memory and education; varieties of pacifism; ecology and technology; the rules of war and peace; hate speech and performativity; the relation between the sciences and the military; the geographies of peace (utopian and historical); anthropological examples of “peaceful societies”; “modern” and “postmodern” imperialism and their and their economies of global insecurity.

The project is concerned with fostering dialogue and pooling resources about past, present and possible future forms of peace-making and thinking across disciplines.

Timetable of events