Peace by Antony Adolf

Introduction
    How Does Peace Have a World History?

    An analysis of the history of mankind shows that from the year 1496 BC to the year 1861 of our era, that is, in a cycle of 3357 years, there were but 227 years of peace and 3130 years of war: in other words, thirteen years of war for every year of peace. Considered thus, the history of the lives of peoples presents a picture of uninterrupted struggle. War, it would appear, is a normal attribute of human life.
    Ivan Bloch 1
    As the industrialist, internationalist peace activist Bloch goes on to contend, we no longer have the luxury of seeing the actualization of peace as a noble if naive vision of how things could have been or can be. His argument in The Future of War is that the historically unimaginable destructive capacity of modern weapons, coupled with the inclinations of those who use them, have made risking war morally impermissible as well as rationally unthinkable. He put forth his unheeded advice at the turn of last century, in the midst of the technological, socio-economic and political upheavals leading up to the First World War. But the promises of and perils to peace today make his point as valid and vital at the turn of our own.
    The problem with Bloch’s shorthand world history of peace is his narrow definition of it exclusively as the absence of war, also a dominant one contemporarily. Convenient for quick quantitative analyses, this confinement makes qualitative approaches based on the many other meanings of peace proposed and practiced throughout world history practically impossible. Two millennia ago, as the Roman Republic became an Empire and the Pax Romana dawned, the historian Livy asserted that “war has its laws as peace has.” 2 What Livy here allows for and Blochdoes not is that just as some ways of waging and winning wars are constant and others change over time, depending on what wars mean for participants and the means at their disposal (to name just two factors), so it is with ways of making and maintaining peace. Peace and peacemaking are not a line of pharmaceutical products the only functions of which are to treat symptoms and diseases of war, nor are they merely preventative vaccines. What are they?
    Three basic heuristic categories of peace and peacemaking can serve as aids in capturing a panoramic view of their history across cultures and centuries, while also permitting us to zoom in on issues of permanent or periodic importance, subjectively and objectively:
    1.   Individual Peace : How individuals become and stay at peace with themselves;
    2.   Social Peace : How groups become and stay at peace within themselves; and
    3.   Collective Peace : How groups become and stay at peace between each other.
    The purpose of this book is to show how peace and peacemaking along these and other lines have evolved in and transformed their/our historical contexts. My hope is that this pedagogical exercise in the recent, distant and primordial past can improve their prospects in the present and future by emphasizing that taking cultural contingencies and diversities into consideration is a necessary choice for peace and peacemaking to be actualized based on a set of imperatives.
    The purpose of this introduction is to explore how radically different forms of peace and peacemaking throughout world history coupled with our (mis)understandings of them were both causes and consequences of cultural change, and why this makes putting forth a static definition of either at the outset counterproductive. Individual, social and collective peace as described above are not intended as definitions in this sense, but as dynamic paradigms in which culturally specific meanings of peace have historically been proposed and practiced. The value of these meanings-in-action within and across cultures, as focal points of this book, lies in the ways in which they have influenced those of today and can better those of