Stories written by Johan Galtung
Johan Galtung is a professor of Peace Studies and Director of TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network (www.transcend.org). Dietrich Fischer is Academic Director of the European University Centre for Peace Studies in Stadtschlaining, Austria (www.aspr.ac.at) and Co-Director of TRANSCEND

Five Theses about Assange-Manning-Snowden

THESIS ONE: The leaks are not about "whistle-blowing", but about a nonviolent, civil disobedient fight against huge social evils.

Making Peace with Our Futures

Future studies, like peace-development-environment studies, is an interdisciplinary, international effort to get a grip on key issues, divided into ‘preferred futures’ – utopias – whose?; ‘predicted futures’ – forecasting – who does it, for whom?; and ‘future practice’ – scenarios bending the predicted toward the preferred – by and for whom?

The New Fascism

The atrocious Second World War left behind lasting damage by lowering our standards for what is marginally acceptable.

Colombia, the United States, and Montesquieu

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas. Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Defusing the “Three Against Two” Nuclear Pentagon

It has not been this bad since the 1950-53 Korean War. October 1962, the Cuba-USSR-U.S. crisis, comes to mind. There were horror visions of mushroom clouds. A proud Cuba, with a strong leader-dictatorship, a social revolution in the near past, was denied a normal place in the state system, bullied by the U.S. and some allies with sanctions and boycotts into isolation, which has lasted more than 50 years.

Hugo Chávez Made History

That his life and his deeds had black dots is part of the story but should not prevent us from seeing the greatness of a maker of history. First, in his own country, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez lifted those at the bottom up from misery, into economic wellness, political participation, cultural pride (in their often African, or Indian, blood), social dignity – going far beyond Gini coefficients to measure increasing equality.

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The Crime of Slavery

­That Liverpool was once the uncontested centre of the world slave trade, accounting for 40 percent, is well documented in the International Slavery Museum in the port where slave ships docked.

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The Future of the Arab-Muslim World

The Middle East-North Africa – MENA -- is Arab-Muslim with a growing Jewish island in its midst. It was colonised for over four centuries by the Sunni Ottoman Turks, then the secular West, United Kingdom-France-Italy -- for half a century and is now under Israeli colonialism and U.S. imperialism.

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To Save the U.S. Economy, Lift the Bottom

The problem of the U.S. economy lies much deeper than the fiscal cliff. Wise people--Robert Borosage, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz--see neither the fiscal deficit nor the U.S. debt as the key problems, but the lack of growth.

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Preventing World War III

A Third World War is not impossible, but fortunately is rather unlikely. Let us explore why, and what can be done to prevent it.

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The Decline of U.S. Global – and Israeli Regional – Influence.

On Nov. 29, 138 member states of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of giving Palestine “non-member observer state” status. Only nine voted no, 41 abstained. Beyond Middle East politics, the vote also mirrors the limits of the U.S. global, and the Israeli regional, empires: 138 defy their grip and favour change, 41+9=50 do not for various reasons. Who wants what?

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Missing Themes in the U.S. Election

The media did their best to make the U.S. presidential election look important, the altar on which democracy is built. But there has been a problem ever since the Supreme Court legalised unlimited campaign spending (six billion dollars this year), thereby authorising one more freedom of expression, called "commercial speech" even though much of this speech is libellous, often neither true nor relevant.

Balkan Wars at 100: Four Roads to Good Neighbourhood

Empires come and go. The Ottoman-Muslim Empire was among the better, and the Iberian-Catholic and European-Protestant among the worst. In the Ottoman empire, religions of the kitab (‘the book’: Judaism, Christianity, Islam) were respected; Turkish was not imposed. Religious-linguistic entities survived in the Balkans as opposed to in Latin-Caribbean America. National independence movements succeeded: Greece in 1829, Serbia and Rumania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Albania in 1912.

Peace for the Americas

In trying to bring peace to conflict-ridden parts of the world, it is important to distinguish between negative peace - ceasefires and the absence of violence in general - and positive peace - cooperation for mutual and equal benefit, emotional harmony, reconciliation of past traumas, and the capacity to resolve future conflicts peacefully, nonviolently, with empathy and creativity, instead of forcing those with serious grievances to lay down their arms and reintegrate into civilian life.

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The Catastrophic Consequences of an Attack on Iran

The Israeli attack seems imminent. Israeli blogger Richard Silverstein circulates a leaked "shock and awe" strategy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak hard zionism to decapitate, paralyze Iran, and New York University professor Alon Ben-Meir warns against believing that Israel is bluffing.

What Can We Learn from Current Conflicts?

Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties and not an attribute of one party. Therefore the solution is a new relation. While conflict gives rise to the danger of violence, it also provides an opportunity to create new realities.

A better solution to the showdown with Iran

Conflict is a relation between parties with incompatible goals. It is not the property of one party. While it risks escalating into violence, it also offers an opportunity to create new realities.

Improving Tense U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan relations

Five long-term trends form the backdrop for this subject: the fall of the U.S. empire; the de-development of the West; the decline of the state system in favour of nationalisms from below and regionalisms from above; the rise of the rest of the world; and the rise of China.

Solutions to the Economic Crisis

One of the hidden faces of the economic crisis lies in the famous Black-Scholes equation to find the "correct price" for financial derivatives, a complicated equation adapted from thermodynamics, for which Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton received the 1997 Swedish State Bank's prize in honour of Alfred Nobel. Fischer Black had died in 1995 and was no longer eligible.

Stop Threatening, Start Talking

We are currently witnessing the worst features of the state system: trading insults and threats, sanctions, readiness to use extreme violence, forward deployment of U.S. troops in Israel as hostages to guarantee U.S. involvement in a possible war, disregard for common people and the effects of warfare in the Middle East and the world.

What to do about Syria?

We all feel desperate watching the horrible killings, the suffering of the bereaved and the whole population. But what can be done?

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