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A Special Message from Betty Reardon:
an update on the $90K for 90 Campaign

Magnus Haavelsrud, Norwegian peace education pioneer was first to arrive from abroad for the June 15th book launch and celebration.

Welcome to Third Trimester of the $90K for 90 Campaign

Dear Friend,

Peace education has had much to celebrate as we come to the end of the second trimester of the $90K for 90 Campaign. There have been over 90 contributors, and we are very close to the half-way mark of our fundraising goal. This response has been a true validation of the International Institute on Peace Education (IIPE) and the Global Campaign for Peace Education (GCPE).

Equally validating and encouraging, is the recognition of the wide social significance of our practice to the realization of the vision that has inspired so many to work to rid the world of the “scourge of war,” to recognize the universal realization human rights as “the foundation of peace,” and to save this planet.  In addition to your support, this recognition came in the form of awards received by three practitioners, members of the IIPE secretariat team and initiating participants in IIPE/GCPE: Janet Gerson receiving the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Lifetime Achievement Award, Tony Jenkins’ having won the Educators’ Challenge Competition of the Global Challenges Foundation, and Betty Reardon being recognized for “Outstanding Achievement” by the Alumni Association of Wheaton College (Norton, MA). These awards attest to the growing awareness of the need for and potential of peace education as a force to confront the multiple crises that simultaneously threaten the survival of our own species, the remaining lifeforms of Earth and the planet itself.

All of you who have contributed and those of you who will do so in this last, the third trimester of our fundraising campaign, have both validated IIPE/GCPE and helped to assure their future. We extend our thanks and our hopes that you will continue to be involved in the support and practice of the field as it develops new ways to meet new challenges. Your sustained support and participation are an invaluable source of hope for all peace learners, all critically aware planetary citizens, and especially for all participants in IIPE/GCPE.

A summary report at the close of this special campaign will be issued, a report that we hope will include more contributions made during this final trimester. But that report will not indicate the end of the need for, nor our requests for your support. The work needs steady, sustaining support to continue and to evolve. For this reason, I hope that some will consider becoming sustaining donors at the suggested levels of $9 or $19 or $90 or any amount you might be able to pledge on a monthly basis. For all that you have done and all that you will do, IIPE/GCPE thank you.

Peace,
Betty

Betty Reardon (5/26/19)

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"Meditating on the Barricades"

Betty’s 75th birthday celebration. From left: Mary Touhy Hyson, high school friend; Betty Reardon; Margaret Park, life-long friend from early childhood; and Margaret Carter, friend and colleague from days at Institute for World Order.
Editor’s Note: This post is the first of two in the third cycle of recollections from Betty Reardon’s six decades of thinking about peace education.  It provides relevant excerpts and reprises themes from “Meditating on the Barricades:  Concerns, Cautions and Possibilities for Peace Education and Political Efficacy,” (PP Trifonas and B Wright (eds) Critical Peace Education: Difficult Dialogues, Springer, New York, 2013). “Meditating” is a reminder to herself and to her fellow peace educators to be more self-aware, to confront the possibility that their own perspectives on the peace problematic and all the issues that comprise it might also be limited, as are the views and thinking that they identify as obstacles to peace. In her “Contemporary Commentary” here below, she emphasizes her concern with the limits to authentic dialogue presented by political impasses thrown up by conflicting and contradictory ideologies. She argues that the current challenge to the field is to transform our political discourse as an essential process in the transformation of our present global realities, the ultimate purpose of an authentically just peace. Asserting that among the major global crises that should form the substance of peace education, the most urgently threatening is climate change, she offers some suggestions about pedagogies that might help in developing a public discourse more conducive to addressing it.

“The lack of reflection…. has …. specious political controversies, producing even more intense conflicts….”

“I find it ever more important…. remind myself that I may be wrong”

“…continued learning constitutive to critical peace education.”

-Betty Reardon (“Meditating on the Barricades”)

Contemporary Commentary: 
Reminding Ourselves that “Peace is the Way”

By Betty Reardon
IIPE Founder
May 2019

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” I shouted along with my fellow protestors, verbally hurling my “righteous” anger at the gleaming façade of the hotel emblazoned with the name of the “Commander in Chief.” A person who commands without the capacity and without the legitimacy of a chief. Yet, he is the chosen leader of those with whom we urgently need most to communicate. At that moment I would have been totally incapable of any constructive communication, unable to utter a single reasoned sentence, much less putting together a stream of sentences laying out the reflective arguments I so staunchly have advocated through the years. Nor could I have with clarity articulated what underlay my anger. I would certainly count myself among those who comforted ourselves with assurances of the validity of our positions and the intransigence of our antagonists, likely a mirror image of assurance indulged by the “other side.” Here in, I fear, lies the problem that now challenges peace education. Perhaps we should be searching the mirror for our own images.

Let me be clear about it, I am not abjuring anger, nor the fear and sorrow that accompanies it. These very human responses are the impetus to the action essential for change. We, in the United States, are daily confronted with cause for anger – climate change denial, fear – advocacy of “usable” nuclear weapons, and heartbreak – tiny children caged in barbed wire, to note but a few of the horrors we face. There is good reason to believe that our fellow peace educators elsewhere in the world are also so confronted. Nor do I recommend that we forego demonstrations and when ethical response calls for it, fierce resistance. What I seek to argue is that we, as peace educators, should be more intentional about preparing ourselves and our students to try to lead the way to the reasoned public discourse so urgently needed. Should we not push ourselves and our leaders beyond the venting and the retaliatory exchanges? For without reasoned and reasonable political conversations, even our best planned and carefully implemented actions are not likely to lead to positive change.

If we argue that reflection and reason should imbue public discourse and decision making, then should not we, ourselves, be more reflective and reasonable in our political, as well as, our pedagogical undertakings? There is not one of us in the fields of peace knowledge and action that is not familiar with the phrase, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way” or Audrey Lord’s admonition about “the master’s tools.” We know that we cannot achieve our ends with means that are infused with values, views and strategies that manifest their antithesis, yet our conversations, even among ourselves and perhaps with our students do not consistently manifest that knowledge. Such was the perception that inspired “Meditating on the Barricades.

Download the excerpts of Betty Reardon's publication(s) mentioned in this article


Reardon, B. (2013).  Meditating on the barricades: Concerns, cautions and possibilities for peace education and political efficacy.  In Trifonas, P., & Wright, B. (Eds.), Critical peace education: Difficult dialogues (pp. 1-28), New York, NY: Springer.

See also: Snauwaert, D., & Reardon, B. (2011). Reflective pedagogy, cosmopolitanism, and critical peace education for political efficacy: A discussion of Betty A. Reardon’s assessment of the field.  In Factis Pax, 5(1): 1-14.

Shouting Across the Chasm Silences Reason in Difficult Dialogues

While the pedagogic prescriptions it outlined caught the attention of colleagues, and was the subject of an exchange between me and Dale Snauwaert that appeared in In Factis Pax, (Volume 5 Number 1 (2011): 1-14) remains a concern that still hangs over my hopes for current and future peace education, made the more acute by the worsening of the prevailing political conditions that first provoked the concern put forth in 2011. The representative democracies of the world have become even more entrapped in conflicting ideologies; ripped apart by beliefs that seem immune to reason. The widespread rise of authoritarianism is closing off public discourse. Where fragments of democracy remain, the “difficult dialogues” that we peace educators advocated became more problematic as we take note of the deterioration of public discourse. We talk, (or rather shout) at each other rather than to each other and certainly not with each other, the shouting in our own heads drowning out the messages shouted at us in the ongoing adversarial interactions, devoid of civility, passing as public policy discussion. There is little or no effort to find complementarities of aims or convergence on means. I, for one, know that even in these times so in need of them, have neglected the very skills I advocated as essential to difficult dialogues:

“Reflective listening and participatory hearing….  emphasis on understanding before responding and clarifying before challenging…  (Education for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective, UNESCO, 2001)

These and the large repertoire of skills we have learned from conflict resolution are among the multiple possibilities for curative learning we already have in our peace education “medical bags.” We need to rummage through the bags for those most useful to the present crisis in communication that is the main obstacle to the resolution of the complex crises of climate, war and human oppression, seemingly intractable under present political conditions.

These political conditions - from which, sadly, peace education is not immune – threaten everything we purport to stand for. And we, ourselves, may be contributing to the threat. Many of us - I include myself - have become so convinced of our views and positions that our capacity to perceive, much less to understand those of others who hold contending views has been stunted. It may well be that we as a field are faced with a “heal thyself” challenge. If we can see the political pathology that infects the public discourse for which we hope to educate, surely we can strive toward curative forms of learning. If we are to help others to learn to participate in authentic dialogue, should we not become committed co-learners in that learning process? I do not purport to hold any keys to curative learning, but I have a few hunches with which I hope to jump start an inquiry into the development of such.

Count down to 90: 89th birthday with Sr. Kathleen Kanet.

Peace Pedagogy and Civic Healing

The process might begin with a review of current practices and the pedagogies we have designed to fulfill the purpose of preparing to be responsible citizens, makers and builders of peace. The basis of all the pedagogies I have devised through the years were derived directly from a particular peace problematic as I perceived it. I still believe that the resolution of particular problems requires particularly, even uniquely, relevant modes of thinking developed through pedagogies intentionally designed to address the problem. For instance, as reviewed in this series, the development of alternative security systems, I argued, called for pedagogy to facilitate thinking in terms of systems and multiple alternatives as in Peacekeeping (see: Teaching about Peacekeeping and Alternative Security Systems). Another example was the use of simulated tribunals to instruct in the kind of thinking that would enable citizens to devise and apply law as an instrument of peace and justice as suggested in the inquiry proposed in the War Criminals, War Victims post (see:  Law as an Instrument of Peace: “War Criminals: War Victims”).

In the case of “Meditating on the Barricades,” the suggestions for reflective inquiry were derived from what I saw as the problematic of the narrowing and hardening of public political discourse, reflecting my belief that effective pedagogy is the product of carefully assessing the forms of thinking that produced the problems of concern, and speculation on alternative modes of thought that might result in preferred outcomes. Peace education, in its efforts to prepare an informed citizenry equipped with the requisite capacities to engage constructively in difficult and antagonistic dialogues, needs to be more focused on verifying our problem assessments and attending more to a problem per se than on what political opponents have to say about it. Shouldn’t we be well enough informed about the particularities and complexities of peace to be able to discern contending concerns and where others “are coming from?” Should we not try to enter dialogues of difference with some authentic understanding of the world views and concerns of those on the other side of the controversies that challenge all parties?  Perhaps we should put ourselves to some of the same tests to which we put diagnoses that contradict our own; really try to take a more nuanced and multidimensional view.

Peace is a complex, varied, often elusive, set of social and political arrangements perceived as is all of life from the perspectives of our places in the world and the cosmology within which we interpret the world. Such are the complexities that even in harmonious times, issues of how to achieve and maintain it would be far from simple to resolve.  My original notion of peace was less complex. I saw it as the product of humanistic values, prosocial attitudes and institutional arrangements in which human endeavors could be pursued with minimal cost in human suffering and sacrifice, i.e. unnecessary harm to human well-being. In my curriculum development endeavors, it lent itself to devising ways to teach about possibilities for humanly constructed institutions and socially derived processes that might constitute such arrangements; ideas I came to identify as foundational peace, something to be constructed. The approach was intended to be global and holistic, and I still believe it to be useful. But it needs to be contextualized within an evolving and more cosmopolitan form of ecological thinking that emerged with the notion of organic peace, something to be cultivated. Without that context it remains embedded in the anthropocentrism that has contributed to the current climate crisis. I, among most, was not yet thinking in the planetary terms that might have brought about earlier preventive responses to environmental destruction. It was not that there were no warnings, including from the peace knowledge community. In 1972 Richard Falk, then a member of the World Order Models Project, published the prophetic, This Endangered Planet, (Vintage Book, New York) illuminating the problematic that underlay the world order value of ecological balance. But the problem remained more at the margins than at the center of critical peace education. So, today we are warned of The Uninhabitable Earth (David Wallis Walker, Allen Lane, London, 2019).

Ecology as Essential to Peace Education

While peace educators embraced the value of ecological balance and recognized the problem as integral to the peace problematic, I among others did not see it as a pedagogical injunction. When the visionary Norwegian peace educator, the late Eva Nordstrom designated it as the particular global issue around which, even during the Cold War, American and Soviet Educators might engage in a common endeavor, my view of the peace problematic evolved. In a publication that resulted from that endeavor, Learning Peace: The Promise of Ecological and Cooperative Education (SUNY Press, 1994), Sergei Polozov, then a Soviet science editor, identified anthropocentrism as a significant obstacle to effective, long-range environmental education. The learning gleaned from that project led to our advocating a form of reflection that I termed “ecological thinking,” thinking in terms of natural systems that function to maintain life, rather than focusing primarily on humanly constructed systems to maintain peace.

There is an enormous learning challenge in the shift from thinking in terms of political structures and humanly devised systems to ecological systems. Ashamedly, I have until now given insufficient attention to the actual pedagogical requirements for the cultivation of that form of thinking. Certainly, I have urged and attempted to imbue our work with reverence for Earth. However, what it requires to teach so as to enable ourselves and learners to realize, internalize and live within that reverence has yet to be a widely practiced Earth centered peace pedagogy. There is a pressing need to teach toward the understanding of the integral and essential relationship of the human species to our planet and to all the life forms it supports. Our alienation from the latter has been alarmingly documented in recent reports of the approaching extinction of literally thousands of species.  Some peace educators began serious work on integrating environmental problems into their work decades ago.  I hope those who may have undertaken Earth-centered, living systems peace pedagogy will send reports of their efforts to the Global Campaign for Peace Education, so that they may be shared through this platform. I have a suspicion, bordering on conviction, that this failure of realization of the fundamental life relationships, in addition to the lack of reflective thinking, may account for both the ecological crisis and the communications crisis. We need desperately to transcend the alienations that affect so many life-sustaining relationships, among them, the body politic from the Earth, and those who seek to act to hold back planetary destruction from those who deny the threat.   Devising pedagogies to transcend human alienation from other life forms, and from others of their own species, may be a route to the curative learning that could equip us to take on the challenge of antagonistic dialogues that have so debased our public discourse and impeded the conceptualization and implementation of restorative responses essential to saving Earth.

These limits to our thinking become perilously dysfunctional as the issue of climate change brings forth some of the most vitriolic and aggressive exchanges in the public discourse. That reasoned reflection is sorely needed in addressing the extreme threats now assaulting the biosphere is a point made by Professor Jason Frederick Lambacher in “The Good Fight” (The New Republic, May 2019, p. 68, an article worth the attention of all peace educators). In discussing the controversies swirling around the climate change oriented policy known as the Green New Deal (GND), he urges, “To begin addressing it, we should look into the modern form of civic-republican inquiry pioneered by Hannah Arendt, who insisted on the symbiotic relationship between political freedom and civic obligation.” If peace education is to be an agent for the defense of freedom, a fundamental quality of positive peace, then we need to double down on our efforts to educate for “civic obligation.” And if we are to undertake abatement of the climate crisis as a paramount civic obligation, we must make the issue central to the field of peace education and relate it to whatever our own particular professional emphases and political concerns. Eco-feminists have long done so. All who focus on human rights and social justice issues might follow suit. Certainly, all recognize the connections with sustainable development and some are beginning to see the abolition of nuclear weapons and an end to the war system as sine qua non of reversing the disasters of climate change. It is an issue perfectly suited to the global and holistic approaches that are integral to our practice.

The sections excerpted here from “Meditating on the Barricades” were intended to make an argument similar to Lambach’s. We have come too close to shirking our own civic obligation by acceding to the shouting match, instead of engaging in what I have called elsewhere, “civil disputation.”  The excerpts speak briefly to the deepening problematic of difficult dialogues, especially as they became more and more oppositional dialogues of difference; differences in ideologies, world views and values that hardened into political positions and found their way to becoming the medium of exchange in public discourse. That diagnosis produced a specification of forms of the reflective inquiry that I argued to be essential to the pedagogy of comprehensive critical peace education. Those three forms of reflective inquiry, critical/analytic, ethical/moral, and contemplative/ruminative, were conceptualized before I had fully grasped the actual extent to which the crisis in public discourse was impeding progress toward the goals commonly pursued by most engaged in building peace knowledge. Now in the light of these obstacles, and with special emphasis on the threats to human and planetary survival posed by the climate crisis, I propose to add two additional forms of reflective inquiry, forms of thinking I do not see accounted for in the first three. Those to be added are: ecological/cosmological and generative/strategic reflective inquiry.

As with the first forms, one form may well evolve into another, or even merge in process.  I put them forward not as distinct from, but rather as a complement to the first forms, a means to further specify perspectives on learning through reflective inquiry that seem to me much needed now. Young Greta Thunberg tells us that “our house is on fire.” We as peace educators must attend to this cry and to the call of the young to act toward preserving a viable future for subsequent generations.  They are pleading for a view of the future that extends beyond the next election cycle and the length of our adult lives, and certainly those of our aged leadership. We need not only historic perspective, but that developmental perception of social evolution, Elise Boulding’s oft-quoted concept of the hundred-year present. Healthy living systems evolve at a pace far slower than the growth of most malignancies, which, with apologies to Susan Sontag, I see as a metaphor for our current political pathology. Of course, we need to do whatever possible with the immediacy necessary to put out the fire, but we also need to understand that it takes generations, even centuries for forests to grow. We need now to strive toward the authentically democratic discourse through which we can quench the flames (both real and metaphoric), tend the trees, and let the forests grow.

I have a hunch that we as peace educators could take such action in finding ways to facilitate ecological/cosmological reflection as the basis of thinking about the climate crisis. As ruminative/contemplative reflective inquiry is intended to probe the heart and to awaken the inner self, ecological/cosmological inquiry is intended to carry the self to the edges of our perceptions, the outer reality. Here, as I have used ecological to mean as related to living systems, I use cosmological to mean as related to fundamental world views; for many of us inadequately unexplored beliefs about the origins and purposes of the universe; how it functions toward those purposes. I have come to believe that our attitudes toward Earth are formed in this realm more than any other. Not only might such thinking quench the flames and assuage our paralyzing fears, might it not also engender in us a stronger sense of relationship to our planet and to the cosmos in which it lives? Might we devise ways which enable us to internalize cognition of our relationships to these realms so as to elicit the affective response of the love and sense of obligation most of us feel toward our parents and relatives, those who, as has this planet, given us life and sustained us?  How might we strive toward achieving this knowledge and feeling as integral to our perception of the common human condition we share with all, even those with whom we find ourselves in opposition? What might be the consequences, should we fail in the discourse that could produce that common understanding? If in the early stages of cooperation between Soviet and American educators, environmental issues were the unifying issue, might we not try to use the lessons of that experience toward the development of ecological/cosmological reflective inquiry through which we all, no matter our current political views, might learn to see ourselves as part of Earth, all formed of the same stardust?

Perhaps we might look up, if only briefly, from the “devices” and screens which literally occupy our imaginations, toward as much of space as our polluted environment allows us to see.  It is still enough, even with our infinitesimal capacity to perceive it, to inspire awe and the wonder that has been at the heart of human learning since we were first self-conscious enough to ask questions about our world, its origins and our place in it. We have been to the moon, and we propose to return within the next decades. Surely, we should be able to perceive ourselves as part of the cosmos and our own age as but tiny bit of time in millennia of the history of Earth. As is said these days, that is “awesome.” It is an awesome realization that I find inspiring of the motivation to pay a more constructive part in the history of our hundred years. Over the first half of that century, we have allowed our leadership to let us become the major threat to ourselves and our entire planet, as they pursue “intractable” conflicts on every level of social organization and in every realm of human identity. Clearly not healthy or sane behavior.

Were ecological thinking and concern for the health of Earth to become the common cosmology out of which our values and purposes arise, we would, I think, recognize and take up the challenge of devising an inquiry of generative/strategic reflection in an effort to fulfill our civic obligation.  It is my guess that such was the form of thinking that produced the concept of the Green New Deal, the realization of which will require a reasoned discourse of difference among the broad and now divided public. Generative/strategic reflection is that form of thinking that frees the imagination to conceive new possibilities, and plan and initiate policies to bring them into being. It is practical and particular thinking that often tests both the cosmology through which we view the world and our place in it, and our capacities to intervene in the world as it is to guide it toward what we wish it to be. It is the inventive process which produces what world order studies referred to as “relevant utopias,” images of the most desirable alternatives to the crises we seek to overcome, be they the ravages of the war system or the despoiling of Earth. The images we conceive are only so relevant as the strategies we devise to achieve them are effective. While the images are in and of a preferred future, the “transition strategies” are grounded in the problematic present.  Their effectiveness will depend on the accuracy and the validity of our diagnoses of the current and often urgent manifestations of the critical problem at play. Accuracy and validity are not well served by thinking derived from any one ideology, be it one that reifies or one that refutes the prevailing attributions of cause and the common understanding of what the problem is. Neither are they assured when viewed from one or a few of the multiple human perspectives through which the peoples of the Earth view their respective and our common realities. Because it demands multiple perspectives, it is in the discourse that flows from generative/strategic reflective inquiry that I see some significant possibility for authentic dialogue. The quality of the dialogue will depend upon the personal and intellectual integrity of the participants. It presupposes elements of the critical/analytic in the diagnosis and the moral/ethical in the formation of the strategies. The integrity of the participants, I believe lies in the practice of the contemplative/ruminative, a facing of the self, the testing of one’s own motives for advocacy of a strategy or policy. Do we really seek assurance that costs and benefits will be measured within a cosmology that avows equal value to all human beings and primacy to the preservation and restoration of Earth? In this process is the generation of the civic obligation that assures freedom, as Prof. Lambacher reminds us was asserted by Hannah Arendt, as well as the hope for the kind of public discussion of climate policy he calls for. He, too, argues that diversity “must be turned into a strength for the GND.” It is in the changes in thinking that could turn diversity from a source of controversy and confrontation, to a resource for constructive strategic action that a process of curative learning toward reason public discourse may begin.

Indeed, although I assert that we live in conditions of social illness and political pathology, both growing more virulent and lethal by the day, I believe that it is still possible that we can learn our way out of those sicknesses. To begin, we need to know the degree to which our own thinking has been infected by the pathology, and to consider the ways in which the multiple forms of reflective inquiry might serve as means to healthier thinking and better prepare ourselves for difficult dialogues for the healing of the polity and the planet whose fate it will determine. Of course, even in the healing there will be anger, fear, and heartbreak, but at least we will have tried. May future generations reflect on our responses to the great existential crises of this time without thinking, “Shame! Shame!”

Suggested Reflective Inquiries as Preparation for Reasoned Public Discussion on Constructive Responses Climate Change


Keeping our “Cool” while recognizing that “the house is on fire”:

  1. Spend time individually reviewing your own responses and styles of communication in difficult dialogues. With the goal of trying to achieve a commitment to and capacity for “civil disputation” and for “reflective listening,” ask yourself what you would try to change in your modes of response and styles of communication.
  2. In “reflection group” put forward some of the changes that you think might form the basis of a guideline for transcending the diatribes and engaging in constructive civic-republican inquiry toward generally acceptable policies and strategies to abate climate change. As a group prepare and practice the guidelines.
  3. As a group determine actions you might take both together and individually toward developing an Earth-centered discourse and public consensus on the need to save this planet. Identify a range of opportunities in which such discourse might be initiated and choose some to try out. One possibility is to review and initiate public discussion of the multiple legislative initiatives that are emerging at local to national levels, including the Green New Deal HR 109 and S 59. Local Sierra Clubs may help with this. Another is to review toward a wider public discussion the Provisions of the Paris Accords.

Making Connections: Climate Change at the Center of Comprehensive Critical Peace Education:

  1. As a group, research the literature of ecofeminism, prepare a bibliography and assign specific readings to members of the group for report to and discussion by all. Consider the ways in which the thinking and world views revealed is similar to that advocated here as ecological thinking. How might the conceptive and related forms of thinking contribute to wider feminist participation in difficult but constructive dialogues? How might you and your group engage others in such dialogue?
  1. Conduct a similar research on the literature on the abolition of nuclear weapons and of war? How does it reflect critical analytic thinking that might enhance the possibilities of evolving difficult dialogues into generative/strategic reflection? Review the environmental consequences of war and preparation of war and the potential planetary consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. How might wider knowledge of these consequences bring the environmental and disarmament movements into a common generative/strategic inquiry? Anticipating such speculate on potential actions toward disarmament as a mechanism to abate the climate crisis, and select one or more for your group to
  1. Review the 17 Sustainable Development Goals within the framework that might emerge from a common generative/strategic reflective inquiry among participants of the ecofeminist, environmental and disarmament movements. What guidelines for implementation might you draft as suggestions for public discussion, civil society actions and UN project planning? In your own generative/strategic reflective inquiry devise a set of actions that your own group might undertake.

Pump Primers: Books to Prepare for Reflective Inquiry

The following are but a few of the many major works that can be studied to relate abuse of the natural environment to the peace problematic.  In addition to the publications cited in the above text, we recommend these three landmark works:

  • The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell’s provocative projections of the effects of the use of nuclear weapons (2000, new edition published by Stanford University Press)
  • Staying Alive: Women Ecology and Development, Vanda Shiva’s ecofeminist interpretation of the abuses of development policies (2016 edition: Penguin/Random House )
  • Laudate Si, Pope Francis’ encyclical, appealing to all faiths to take moral responsibility to “care for our common home” (2015)

Civil Society Organizations, among many that offer resources and opportunities for civil action are:

Read the series: “Issues and Themes in 6 Decades of Peacelearning: Examples from the Work of Betty Reardon”


“Issues and Themes in 6 Decades of Peacelearning” is a series of posts by Betty Reardon supporting our “$90k for 90” campaign honoring Betty’s 90th year of life and seeking to create a sustainable future for the Global Campaign for Peace Education and International Institute on Peace Education (see this special message from Betty).

This series explores Betty’s lifetime of work in peace education through three cycles; each cycle introducing a special focus of her work. These posts, including comments from Betty, highlight and share selected resources from her archives, housed at The University of Toledo.

Cycle 1 features Betty’s efforts from the 1960s through the ‘70s focused on developing peace education for schools:

Post 1: “Let Us Examine Our Attitude toward Peace”
Post 2: Teaching about Peacekeeping and Alternative Security Systems
Post 3: Law as an Instrument of Peace: “War Criminals: War Victims”
Post 4: Social Education for Human Survival

Cycle 2 features Betty’s efforts from the ’80s and ‘90s, a period highlighted by the internationalization of the peace education movement, the formation of the academic field, the articulation of Comprehensive Peace Education and the emergence of gender as an essential element in peace education.

Post 5: Militarism and Sexism: Influences on Education for War
Post 6: Making Peace a Real Possibility: Video Interview with Betty Reardon (1985)
Post 7: Tolerance – the Threshold of Peace

Cycle 3 celebrates Betty's most recent efforts, including her influential work on gender, peace and ecology.

Post 8: "Meditating on the Barricades"

$90k for 90!

A 9-month campaign to help sustain the Global Campaign for Peace Education & International Institute on Peace Education

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