The Japan ICU Foundation and the ICU Rotary Peace Center hosted a Rethinking Peace book launch at ICU on Friday, October 25. Rethinking Peace was published by Rowman & Littlefield earlier this year. The book emerges from Rethinking Peace Studies, a three-year project funded by the Japan ICU Foundation, which consisted of three workshops and a culminating conference. The edited volume features 14 chapters written by authors who participated in one of the Rethinking Peace Studies workshops.

The book is interdisciplinary in nature and is structured around four themes: discourse, memory and temporality, translation and dialogue. The editors, Alex Hinton, Jeremiah Alberg and Giorgio Shani, identify four dominant threads in Peace Studies, which the contributions to the volume seek to rethink. These are hypostasis, teleology, normativity and enterprise. In other words, within Peace Studies, peace is often presented as a fixed thing informed by a specific tradition. It is often associated with specific projects that are goal-oriented.

The book launch was moderated by lead-editor, Alex Hinton (Rutgers University). Jeremiah Alberg (ICU), Hartmutt Behr (Newcastle University), Shin Chiba (ICU), Beverely Curran (ICU), and Giorgio Shani (ICU) all spoke as panelists.