ABSTRACT
Throughout his life, Buber advocated dialogue as a way of establishing peace and resolving confl ict, and therefore he is often referred to in both the academic and general literature as an advocate of pacifi sm. But is this the case? If so, what sort of pacifi sm was Buber defending? Boff (2010: 29) characterises peace as being ‘simultaneously a method (i.e. to always use peaceful means or to employ the least destructible means) and an aim’, and Kofi Annan’s defi nition of peace captures this idea beautifully when he says that ‘true peace is far more than the absence of war’.3
