The ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrated that political transitions tend to occur together in space and time. Samuel Huntington coined the term ‘Waves of democratization’ in his book The Third Wave. The figure above shows that changes to the proportion of the world’s countries that are democracies occurs in spurts. Confirming Huntington’s three waves of democratization, spurts occurred from the … Read more »
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‘Maybe someday I’ll return…’
The ‘super-diversity’ case-study in the PREMIG project was, unlike the other five case-studies, not defined around a country of origin. Instead we defined it based on temporal dimensions, by interviewing people who had either come to Norway during their childhood, before turning 14, or recently, in the past 1-5 years. This was, more than anything, an experiment…. Read more »
Peace for Our Time?
When the organizers of this event suggested ‘peace for our time?’, with a question mark at the end, as the half-whimsical title for this lecture, I accepted gladly. As you are all aware, this was what the British prime-minister Neville Chamberlain promised the cheering crowds that received him on his return from Munich in September… Read more »
Non-violent Struggles: Scholarship, Policy and Realities
Thank you to PRIO for the opportunity to join you today and to Congressman John Lewis for his insights into the use of nonviolence in the American civil rights movement. [This text is a transcript of Kathleen G. Cunningham’s comments to John Lewis’ PRIO Annual Peace Address]. What I hope to add today with my… Read more »
The Role of Non-violence in the Struggle for Liberation
US Congressman John Lewis gave the PRIO Annual Peace Address 2011. Lewis has been a Member of the US House of Representatives for the Fifth congressional district in Georgia since 1987. He was a prominent leader in the nonviolent civil rights movement in the early 1960s and President Obama has recognized his role as a… Read more »
Norwegians Must Build Climate of Hope, not Fear
“Why do some people want to attack both my countries?” asks my 11-year old son with tears in his eyes. He is Norwegian and American, and this summer we are in California with his American family. He has just heard about what happened in Norway on 7/22. Our eyes are red, and we speak to… Read more »
Justice, Truth, Peace
The human mind seems to have a natural tendency to assume that all good things go together. This may be a result partly of what psychologists call tradeoff aversion and partly of wishful thinking. Let me offer some examples. Marx asserted that in the transition to Communism, one should try to “shorten and lessen the birth pangs”. For a… Read more »
Roots of conflict : Don’t blame environmental decay for the next war
When Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan known for her work in human rights and environmental conservation, including efforts to fight deforestation, won the Nobel Peace Prize last month, many took note that the Nobel Committee had evidently expanded its notion of “peace.” “Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment,” it proclaimed,… Read more »