Non Violent Politics: Rethinking State Order and Legitimacy in the 21^st Century
2^nd Innsbruck Peace Lecture by Prof. Jenny Pearce, London School of Economics 
Moderation: Prof. Wolfgang Dietrich, University of Innsbruck

Thursday 14^th of February 2019, 19:00 at the Tirol Panorama and Kaiserjäger Museum, Bergisel 1-2, 6020 Innsbruck 

The 2^ndInnsbruck Peace Lecture is organized by InnPeace in partnership with the Tirol Panorama and Kaiserjäger Museum and the Tyrolean State Museum. The 360-degree cyclorama showing the famous battle of Bergisel against Napoleon’s Army can be visited free of charge in the framework of this lecture.

 

Is a non violent politics a utopian ideal or a realistic and urgent necessity for a world in flux and increasingly beset by polarising narratives, horizontal and vertical inequalities of wealth and power, humanitarian crises and threats from climate change? This public lecture seeks to open up this debate.

It has been a century since Max Weber gave his lecture on Politics as a Vocation and introduced one of the most influential definitions of the state in history: The legitimate monopoly of violence (Gewalt) over a given territory. He also told his radical student audience, that their ethics of conviction would have to deal with the reality, that violence was an unavoidable part of politics and of human nature. Assumptions around the ’inevitability’ of violence, the right to use it and the multiple forms it takes across all the socialisation spaces, overshadow our capacity to build a peaceful world. Based on our knowledge about the differences between aggression and violence and the emotional and material triggers to violence, we will explore the possibility of rethinking the Weberian proposition and imagining a state which reduces violence.

Prof. Jenny Pearce is Peace Scholar and Research Professor at the London School of Economics.  

For further information please contact: innpeace@uibk.ac.at 

Click here to download the official poster of the 2^nd Innsbruck Peace Lecture as pdf. 

Towards a Science of Peace
1^st Innsbruck Peace Lecture by Prof. Christopher Mitchell, George Mason University

Wednesday, 21 November 2018, 19:30, Imperial Palace Innsbruck, Rennweg 1/3, 6020 Innsbruck 

The 1st Innsbruck Peace Lecture is organized by InnPeace in partnership with the Imperial Palace Innsbruck and the Exhibition Guernica Icon of Peace, which can be visited free of charge in the framework of this lecture .

The talk will begin by discussing the idea of a number of academics, Theo Lentz, Kenneth Boulding, Norman Alcock - in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, that the academic study of peace and conflict - and even a "science of peace" - was possible, desirable and even useful. It will talk about two possible objections to the idea of a peace science and conflict research - ideas about "human nature" and about the impossibility of any objective study of peace. It will suggest a few basic criteria for any study being "scientific" - asking answerable questions, seeking to generalize through careful comparisons, and trying to measure key phenomena. It will conclude with some examples of useful findings clustered around the question of conflict perpetuation - what keeps a conflict going and what might be done to stop or reverse it. 

Christopher Mitchell was born and educated in London. He has held academic positions at University College, London, the London School of Economics, and the University of Southampton. He was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Systems Science at the City University in 1973 and became Professor of International Relations there in 1983. He joined the academic exodus from Britain in the late 1980s, becoming Director of George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution between 1991 and 1994. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Conflict Research at GMU. He continues to work on practical and theoretical aspects of peace-making processes and has recently published articles on the theory of entrapment, on ending asymmetric conflicts and on a multi-role model of mediation. He has co-edited three books about grassroots peacebuilding with Landon Hancock, the latest of which, Legitimacy and Local Peacebuilding [Routledge] was published in Spring 2018. His retrospective text book, The Nature of Intractable Conflict, was published by Palgrave in December 2014.

 

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About the Exhibition Guernica - Icon of Peace

 After the terrible bombing of the Basque city of Guernica (Basque Gernika) in April 1937, Pablo Picasso creates his most monumental work, Guernica, for the World Exhibition in Paris in only 33 days. Afterwards, the work goes on an extensive journey through Northern Europe and the USA and is exhibited for an extended period in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since Picasso bequeathed the picture to a future Spanish republic, it returns to Spain in 1981. It is now permanently on display at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and will probably never leave Spain again.

The gouache on cardboard, which is exhibited in the Imperial Palace of Innsbruck, was made in 1955, 18 years after the oil on canvas. Nelson Rockefeller asks Pablo Picasso to paint the work Guernica for him again. Picasso declines and proposes instead to have a tapestry of the motif made by the weaver Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach, to which Rockefeller agrees. The 6 cardboard strips are produced in Paris and reworked by Pablo Picasso. They serve as a template for the tapestry, which is now on permanent loan in the foyer of the UN Security Council in New York. It is the first tapestry of a total of 26 Picasso motifs that are subsequently woven by Dürrbach for Rockefeller. Today, there is a stencil on cardboard for each motif. A unique project created under Picasso's supervision over several decades. 

"Thoughts on Guernica" invited artists from the Euregio region (Tyrol, South Tyrol, Trentino) and from all over Austria to make an artistic statement on the subject of the work and the topics of war, violence and peace. 33 artists accepted the invitation, and so 33 pieces formed a fascinating, diverse cabinet of curiosities of contributions to this highly topical subject. The artists' willingness to spontaneously present a piece that would be put alongside the monumental "Guernica" allowed for a diverse exhibition of very different individual works which address the contextual and stylistic elements of "Guernica" and bring them into the present.

Special Project for Peace in the Memorial Year

On 3rd November 1918, the ceasefire agreement between Austria and Italy was concluded at “Villa Giusti” in Padova. On this occasion, the gouache on cardboard "GUERNICA" for the 100th anniversary is currently exhibited in the Military Museum in Padova and returns in December again to the Museum of the Hofburg Innsbruck. In the meanwhile a high-tech projection of the artwork and some rare documentary materials can be explored by visitors.