About the Program - Philosophy
The Philosophy of the Many Peaces
Established in 2001 the MA Program in Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck was strongly inspired by the UNESCO's famous Manifesto 2000,
which proposed to turn the new millennium into a new beginning, an
opportunity to change, all together, the culture of war and violence
into a culture of peace and non-violence. The six corner stones of the
Manifesto 2000 are:
- Respect the life and dignity of each human being
- Practise active non-violence
- Share time and material resources
- Defend freedom of expression and cultural diversity
- Responsible consumer behaviour
- New forms of solidarity.
The program took the Manifesto 2000 as an argument to gather faculty
and students from all around the world to fill these points permanently
with new life, to explore our planetary understanding of peace and
conflict transformation. From there we concluded that there are as many
peaces in the world as there are human perceptions and that the
challenge for an academic program is to analyse the relation between
these myriads of interpretations, evaluate their predominantly
harmonious flow and find ways of transforming the sometimes competing
interests. Thereof resulted a Call for Many Peaces,
formulating the specific character of this program. Gradually we
developed a systematic understanding of different forms of peace.
According to our findings the main “families” of peace interpretations
are
- energetic peaces
- moral peaces
- modern peaces
- postmodern peaces
- transrational peaces
We developed text books on this topic and in the context of our program
all these interpretations will be discussed and respected. However, the
spirit of the Manifesto 2000 demands to promote our common
understanding of peaces and it does not allow just to repeat the
traditional wisdom, be it religious dogma or the scientific state of the
art of previous epochs. According to the four leading principles of the
program, scientificity, inter-culturality, inter-disciplinarity and
orientation on practical experience we try to transgress the limits of
conventional modern and postmodern schools of peace studies, which are
abundant all around the world.
In addition to a first class
academic education of the network in Peace Studies the Innsbruck program
offers a special field training component designed to integrate
academic excellence with the skills required in real conflict
situations. Students have to be prepared for the adventure of a very
holistic – physical, emotional and intellectual - exploration of
themselves, their society and in more general terms of the whole world.
Transrational peaces, as defined in this program, twist the division
between subject and object; they go beyond the conventional limits of
reason; they are not only rational but also relational; they start the
search for peace with the deconstruction of the observer’s identity;
they apply all the methods of conventional peace studies and go much
further. Thereof derives a unique curriculum and the world’s most
challenging academic training program for peace workers.
Applicants shall know that we do not only say that, we mean it and we do it!