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Course Reader
Preparing the Course reader has been a participatory exercise. The reader
is structured around four modules. While some material is reproduced from
previous year's reading material collection, the effort is to add fresh
material in the light of the developments of the current year. For instance,
a whole new section was added to the material this year in form of Amnesty
International's report on the impact of 11 September and the anti-terrorist
measures taken by the U.S. and other governments on the human rights situation.
The reader is not meant to be exhaustively studied from beginning to end
during the course. While some of the significant material is mailed and
electronically sent also whenever and wherever possible to the participants
some two months in advance to help them in preparing their term papers,
the idea in producing the reader is that the participant can take the
reader back, and, as many have testified later in their evaluation and
in advisory meetings, use it in his/her work, and keep as a constant treasure
in human rights and peace education.
Part of the material is collected by SAFHR Peace Studies Desk, part consists
of reference material sent in advance by members of the faculty, and part
consists of material reproduced from previous years' readers. The material
is strictly for classroom use, is not put to commercial use, and not used
for any other work.
The reading material for the course is enriched with the publication
of SAFHR papers written specially for the course. This year three such
papers were prepared and published for the Course - "Militarized
Hindu Nationalism and the Mass Media" by Rita Manchanda (Paper 11),
"Three Essays on Law, Responsibility, and Justice" by Ranabir
Samaddar (Paper 12), and "The Current History of Peace Politics -
The Other Side of the War in Kashmir" by Tapan K. Bose (Paper 13).
SAFHR aims to publish a reader of peace studies based on material in
five courses, and the responses of all concerned.
The Course Reader contains select reference material for the six modules
in the Second South Asian Human Rights and Peace Studies Orientation Course.
These are meant for private circulation - classroom use only, and in no
way meant for commercial use, extraction, or authoring publications. The
six modules are on (a) Justice, Violence, and Non-Violence, (b) Gender,
Law and Peace Activism, (c) Dialogue and Social Audit, (d) Culture and
Economy, (e) Media and Information Organizing, and (f) Peace Studies Films.
Besides the reader, the course material contains three reports published
by SAFHR for discussion, analysis, and reference in the peace studies
programme.
It is important to mention in this context that the course material selected
and presented here around the module structure does not intend to present
a grand theory of peace and human rights. In fact the aim is opposite
- to present a diverse range of institutions, institutional practices,
and discursive practices on issues of violence, non-violence, justice,
and reconciliation, so that participants in the course are helped to grasp
their interconnections, their grammar, their "internal archaeology",
particular discernible identities, analogies, and sets of differences.
The purpose is to recognize the existence of particular opinions, and
information in form of theoretical texts and empirical instruments. In
short, the course does not intend to give a theory of human rights and
peace, but its knowledge, the complex relations leading to development
of ideas and practices.
Not unnaturally then, the reader may find contradictory elements in this
collection of writings, because in preparing the reader, we wanted to
see not what the politics of peace is, but what questions the theme of
peace raises to politics. We are not asking what is the ideology, theory,
and value of peace, but what ideological, practical, and ethical questions
does peace ask of politics of the time we live in? In picking a selection
of contemporary writings on peace and human rights, the chiaroscuro of
experiences, we can notice the presence of a whole new set of questions
which had not been part of the traditional domain of politics, yet many
of these questions emerge here in terms that reflect the manifest powerlessness
of politics we have inhered and have continued to define in a traditional
way. How to re-inscribe these questions on the body of politics is the
critical task of peace education.
The relations between human rights and peace seem at first quite straightforward.
Most just war theories have justified war in terms of just cause. The
justifiability of cause has been upheld in all major religious traditions
with war being thus justified if it has a just aim. Though the horrific
prospect of a nuclear war has taken away some of the gloss on the just
war theory, just war theory has not become obsolete. To defend human rights,
countries can go to war. In this new ethics, which is actually not so
new, killings are sanctioned provided killings are not intentional. People
have to think that the war is just. Thus patriotic and most liberal values
become ingredients in the mixture of emotion, fear, hope and courage for
the people to live and die for the state. Clearly, jus ad bellum
(just cause) has gained precedence over jus in bello (just procedure).
Thus killings of non-combatants, treatment of prisoners, use of poison
and gas, appropriation of property, deliberately making the civilian population
impoverished and destitute, and the use of smart weapons are getting less
consideration than considerations about the grounds on which war waging
becomes just. In all these, unfortunately, customary law, and charters
such as the Agreement for the Establishment of an International Military
Tribunal, better known as the London Charter (1945) have been of little
help in establishing the moral principle of just procedure. This suggests
that we are still captivated by the realism of wars and are not ready
to speak of the moral equivalence of just aim and just procedure, which
remains the only way to re-emphasize the issue of rights, justice and
dignity. Thus, as the material in the Course Reader suggests, the problematic
inherent in the relation between human rights and peace leads the human
rights and peace activist to examining all the accepted canons of justified
violence such as just cause, competent authority, comparative justice,
right intention, "last resort" argument, probability of success
and the principle of proportionality. Probably we shall see that a will
to be just, to be peaceful, is as important, if not more, as warrants
for just war, which is often a justified war and not necessarily
a just war. In short, the issue of justice raises before the politics
of our time questions about hitherto unquestioned assumptions, moral interrogations
of the received terms of international law. Both war and peace in their
contemporary forms have failed to do justice to the central problems of
the politics of our time, that problem being how to ensure rights and
dignity in their widest dimension, how to make peace just, how to make
the vocation of rights and justice the most powerful instrument for peace.
The course is thus intended to be foundational because it will encourage
the participants to examine the foundations again and again instead of
accepting some given foundations. The willingness and capacity to stand
aside for a moment, examine the basis and nature of one's activity, to
interrogate the style of work on human rights and peace, to examine our
relation to peace, is the foundation of human rights and peace education.
To be critical is to go back to the foundations time and again, put them
to scrutiny in the light of new practices, ideas, contests.
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