Thursday 18 July 2013

The Center for Global Nonkilling: An Update

A vision of a nonkilling society was proposed 1998 and, then formalized in 2002 by Dr. Glenn D. Paige, University of Hawaii, in his book, Nonkilling Political Science. Though a Korean war veteran, he simply says that killing is a curable social disease. His plan was promoted in 9 books and 10 articles from 1991 to 2004.
 
My colleague Balwant "Bill" Bhaneja, Senior Research Fellow, Program for Research in Innovation Management and Economy (PRIME), School of Management, University of Ottawa, and co-founder of CPDI summarized Dr. Paige's 2002 book in a review for Peace Magazine, Jan-Mar 2005, page 27:

The term "nonkilling" is not as comforting as "nonviolence." Mighty nations still assert pre-emptive wars without qualms. Paige shows that both the violence-accepting politics and political science of the last century have failed to suppress violence by violent means. The study of government and international politics has not addressed the root cause of global violence.

Paige's vision is for political science to diagnose the pathology of lethality, and seek to remove killing from global life. He shows that at most only about five percent of human beings have ever killed another person. Paige suggests we should train people to strengthen their resistance to killing.

He uses medical science as a metaphor. Medicine, through focusing on prevention, intervention, and post-traumatic transformation strategies, has produced both knowledge and practitioners for the preservation of life. Paige considers the same commitment to non-lethality applicable to the social sciences.
 
In November 2007, the First Global Leadership Forum on Nonkilling was held in Hawaii, attended by about 50 wisdom people from the around the world who suggested ways to build a warless world.

I was honored to be invited to present a paper, and attended with my wife Kristina Kristova. We listened to the wisdom of the ages about such stalwarts as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. I took photos and presented my talk: Tolstoy and the Doukhobors, about how we contribute to the quest for a killing-free world order. My paper is on pages 207-214 of Global Nonkilling Leadership Forum Book of Proceedings, 2008.

Since 2007, the Center for Global Nonkilling has blossomed to become one of the world's foremost imaginative nongovernmental institutions working to create a just culture of peace and save our Planet Earth from the epidemic of violence and wars.
For Dr. Paige's 80th Birthday, I had the honour of writing a tribute to him, published in 2012 in Towards a Nonkilling World: Festschrift in Honor of Pro. Glenn D. Paige (edited by N. Radhakrishnan, Glenda Paige, Balwant Bhaneja, Chaiwat Satha-Anard, and Joam Evans Pim). My closing paragraph (p. 52) was:

My deep thanks to Teachers of Life such as Lev Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Glenn Paige. As wrestlers for Truth, our main challenge today is to grow a good harvest (without killing and exploiting our fellow beings) and not allow it to be trampled down. Let's do our part to ensure that the spirit of wisdom will be distributed far and wide throughout the world. Let's give wings to the good ship of Love called Global Nonkilling!

The Center has excelled by coaxing scholars in all disciplines around the world to produce well-researched books using the nonkilling architecture for human relations. Besides the numerous publications, Dr. Paige's landmark book has been translated into 28 languages, with more in progress. In its 19 Research Committees, over 600 scholars from 300 universities are involved working on relevant research.

All publications are free to download and printed copies can be purchased at cost.

Here are links to articles I posted which directly promote the Centre, among many which promote peace:

1 comment:

  1. Gunter Schaarschmidt27 July 2013 at 17:25

    Thanks, Koozma, for the update for the Center for Global Nonkilling. I have yet to travel to Hawaii so there is a good reason to go but only after seeing the exhibition in Ottawa for which you have provided such an excellent list of what there is to see and what one might have expected to see. We in BC have our own Peace Centre, as you well know, in the form of Selkirk College especially as a center of reconciliation between the Sinixt and the Doukhobors. I find it always very impressive to muse about the Sinixt and the Doukhobor migrations and how the two finally settled things in a nonkilling way in BC.

    ReplyDelete