We are thrilled to announce the publication of Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation & Dialogue. Edited by Rutgers University’s Alexander Laban Hinton, and ICU’s Giorgio Shani and Jeremiah Alberg, Rethinking Peace marks the culmination of the Rethinking Peace Studies program.

The Rethinking Peace Studies program is a collaboration between JICUF, ICU and the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, that has consisted of three seminars and a conference held in Japan, the United States and Sri Lanka between 2014 and 2016.

Rethinking Peace is a multi-disciplinary work that, “critically interrogates the field of peace studies, considering its assumptions, teleologies, canons, influence, enmeshments with power structures, biases, and normative ends.” It features 14 chapters written largely be authors who participated in one of three Rethinking Peace Studies seminars.

Professor David Blaney of Macalester College, who served as one of the publications reviewers, states,

This important volume puts into practice Ashis Nandy’s admonition not simply to reject Peace Studies for its entanglements with liberal modernity, including the state, but to work to recover resources for peace from spaces and voices that are generally invisible or even exiled from our studies and practices. Though what Nandy calls “undomesticated” voices can be hard to hear from our positions in the Academy or international/transnational institutions, Rethinking Peace wisely makes issues of translation and the challenges and possibilities of dialogue central to its call for rethinking. I recommend that anyone drawn to Peace Studies first read this book as both a cautionary tale and a source of hope.

Book launches are being organized at Rutgers University on April 26,  The New School on May 8, and at ICU later in the fall. We hope that Rethinking Peace can be utilized by Peace Studies programs around the world.