Peace and Memory Monument

Violence , Peace , and Peace Research

Monument to the discoveries.

A week ago I was standing with my wife by the River Tagus in Lisbon, next to the Monument to the Discoveries. The monument is at the spot where Vasco da Gama set out to discover the southeast passage from Europe to Asia, past the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco’s discovery marked the beginning of the Portuguese maritime empire. At the furthest tip of Europe, Portugal was perfectly situated to found su...

Kant's Perpetual Peace and World Government

Peace Negotiations and Peace Talks: the Peace Process in the Public Sphere

The article develops an understanding of public deliberations during a peace process, focusing on the interaction between the elite level negotiations and the “public peace process.” It does so by examining the dialogical mechanisms that are set to work in the public sphere once the elite consider the possibility of identifying the former enemies as allies or friends. These dialogical mechanism...

Thucydides and Democratic Peace

Thucydides is an important author for any discussion of the possibilities for an ancient Greek democratic peace. Though democratic peace did not, in fact, seem to function in classical Greece, a number of passages in Thucydides show that an affinity did exist among democratic factions and city-states in the context of hostile competition between democratic and oligarchic regimes. Thucydides rem...