Notice from Erina - free public PEACE lecture

International Symposium "Visions of Peace: The West and Asia"

Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand
10-12 December 2009
Open to the public
Sponsored by The Japan Foundation and Division of Humanities, University of
Otago

"Visions of Peace: The West and Asia" is a multi-disciplinary symposium
which explores various traditional conceptions of peace in the Asian and the
Western historical worlds. Current literature, prompted by September 11,
focuses on the laws and ethics of just wars; the ideas and ideals of peace
as they were conceptualized by past Asian and Western thinkers appear to
have escaped scholarly attention. The symposium is intended to fill this
lacuna, thereby shedding light on the hitherto overlooked or
underappreciated visions of peace in the global historical landscape. The
event will be organized according to the following cultural units and
traditions: Islamic, Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and European. The
symposium will approach the diversity of the global traditions of the idea
of peace at the interface of religion, philosophy and political thought from
the viewpoint of intellectual history. The main, but by no means exclusive,
focus will be on the "pre-modern" period (i.e. before c.1800). General
theoretical and historical questions to be addressed might include: What did
"peace" mean in a given tradition? Was it primarily political? Was peace the
end or a means for something else? Is it achievable in this world? What are
the conditions of peace? What are the contexts in which peace was valued?
What is the relationship between war and peace? How did each tradition
understand the legitimacy of violence?

Plenary Speakers
Kaushik Roy (Viswabharati University, India)
Yu Kam-por (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Shin Chiba (International Christian University, Tokyo)
David Cortright (Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University
of Notre Dame)
Malik Mufti (Tufts University)

This symposium is open to the public and the admission is free. For further
details, please visit:

http://www.otago.ac.nz/historyarthistory/peace/