ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the development of peace cultures in terms of concepts and strategies for common security; in terms of how human behaviors and the institutional structures. Peace researchers have been studying peace movements for decades. Alger quotes a warning given by Kinhide Mushakoji that peace researchers have been guilty of ignoring the center-periphery paradigm and settling for “center-type” knowledge of what is actually happening at the peripheries, where the grass-roots social movements are to be found. Katsuya Kodama, focusing on European peace activists, discovers that they are indeed the peripheries of their own societies. Singh castigates peace researchers for looking only at the conventional media, and suggests that all forms of human communication need to be studied in order to understand the social dynamics of peace processes. The peace leaders from churches in a number of Latin American countries, who gathered in Rio for the International Peace Research Association Conference, based their dialogue on the document.
