Description:
This book attempts to approach peace from its theoretical fundations, developing a framework that, first, will address critiques of concepts of peace, which nullify this fundamental relation and are therefore called 'imperial peace' here (also 'liberal peace' elsewhere); and second, for (re)thinking of peace as a tension between 'self' and "other" anchored in a politics of the promotion and cultivation of differences. This framework thus operates as both a critique and a re-articulation of peace.
Review Quotes:
"Difference has become a significant concern of the study of international politics and also in peace and conflict studies. Yet, approaches to understanding or incorporating issues of difference into the analysis of international order have often tended to come to rest on essentialising notions of ethnicity or other forms of identity, which also are relegated to a state of lesser importance than westernised notions of secular citizenship, cosmopolitan toleration, and free-flowing capital. This important book engages with the difficult and necessary task of envisioning peace-with-difference in international politics. Without advances in this area, as Professor Behr outlines, difference is destined to undermine order when instead it might be constitutive of peace."
Prof. Oliver Richmond, University of Manchester, UK
"Hartmut Behr makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the fundamental problems centering around our conventional concept of peace. With the help of phenomenological, anti-essentialist thinkers, he reveals that the concept of peace, as deployed in the Western tradition of political and philosophical thought as well as in international politics, is a hegemonic and imperial concept that suppresses and assimilates difference, thus effacing otherness for the sake of the self. He eloquently invites us on a thrilling but serious journey towards reconceptualizing a non-hegemonic peace that is hospitable to difference."
Takashi Kibe, Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Peace Research Institute, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
"Philosophically grounded, Politics of Difference not only produces one of the most compelling critiques of 'imperial peace' and its genealogies, but offers with sustained intellectual vigour an original discourse on the ontology of our times. It is truly a tour de force."
Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Chair in International Politics, Aberystwyth University, UK