A Brief Introduction into Transrational Peace Research and Elicitive Conflict Transformation

Abstract

This article is a summary of the author’s `Many Peaces´ trilogy, which comprises in its original version more than 1200 pages. It has been published by Palgrave Macmillan in London 2012, 2013 with the third volume still to be issued.

It presents a broad range of peace interpretations in history and culture, which are divided into the so called five peace families – the energetic, the moral, the modern, the post-modern and the transrational perceptions and understandings of peace(s).

It further elaborates the transrational peace philosophy and derives from John Paul Lederach’s famous pyramid of conflict (work) a broader systemic understanding of conflict as relational phenomenon. It offers a tool for analysis of these complex processes that happen at human “contact boundaries at work” – the enlarged pyramid-model of themes, levels and layers.

Finally, it introduces resonance, correspondence and homeostasis as principles of elicitiv conflict mapping, the methodological toolkit for applied conflict work.