ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book contributes further to an understanding of peace as an element in the historical experience of human beings and also, without unduly editorializing, to use history to promote more self-conscious thinking about peace as a human possibility. World history has not been kind to peace, either in human experience or in scholarship. Most societies spend more time not at war than in war, but this statement is complicated by the extent to which wars may be planned or prepared during apparently peaceful interludes. As the chapter discusses, it is certainly a rare moment in modern human history when a significant war is not occurring somewhere. Certainly historians have not for the most part treated peace kindly. There are far more studies of war than of peace. Survey histories, in most national and regional traditions, spend more time on war.
