make a meaningful sentence in pursuit of
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CONCEPTIONS OF PEACE span religions and culture, incorporating such values as security and harmony as well as justice and human dignity. Every major system of faith and belief, whether religious or secular in character, has in some way or other promised peace as an outcome of the implementation of its precepts.
While peace is undoubtedly one of the most universal and significant of human ideals, Raimon Panikkar describes it as "one of the few positive symbols having meaning for the whole of humanity" - the ways that we think about peace are often diffuse and content-dependent. We profess to honour peace in the abstract - for example, within a framework of religious precepts and affirmations - while organizing our thoughts about life and politics around more mundane ends and objectives. Implicitly, we circumscribe the meaning of peace to accommodate a system of largely implicit beliefs about how the world works, about what power consists of, and about what is expedient. As a result, the peace ideal is either co-opted by competing value priorities or remains distant from our daily activities and experiences. The "ideal" becomes separated from the "real," and peace becomes a pious invocation, a means to an end, or an empty term of rhetorical self-justification.
It is precisely a desire to bridge this gap between the "ideal" and the "real" that attracts students to the M.A. programme in International Peace and Conflict Resolution of American University's School of International Service. Each year, our programme brings together several dozen more bright and highly motivated individuals, many form overseas, to pursue a course of studies dedicated to what Gandhi referred to as "practical idealism." During the spring 2002 semester, it was my pleasure to facilitate the entry of just over twenty new students into the programme, within the context of a core course called "Peace Paradigms." The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to the theoretical foundations of peace studies, through an intellectually and personally challenging exploration of five "paradigms" of peace, considered as intellectual and practical models for peacemaking based on different sets of explicit as well as implicit beliefs and assumptions. The course begins with consideration of approaches to peace premised on the exercise of coercive power (power politics), and then proceeds to paradigms for peace through international law and institutions (world order), peace through conflict resolution, peace through nonviolence, and peace through personal and community transformation. By the end of a semester of reading, writing, discussing, listening to guest speakers, and presenting creative projects, most students attest that they have learned a great deal not only about the history and development of thinking about peace, but also about their own deeply internalized beliefs and existential commitments.
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