The Moral Imagination or Postcolonial Disorders

The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

Author: John Paul Lederach

John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. As founding Director of the Conflict Transformation Program and Institute of Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, he has provided consultation and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. This new book represents his thinking and learning over the past several years. He explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding by reflecting on his own experiences in the field. Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act - an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination."

Table of Contents:

1	On stating the problem and thesis	3
2	On touching the moral imagination : four stories	7
3	On this moment : turning points	21
4	On simplicity and complexity : finding the essence of peacebuilding	31
5	On peace accords : image of a line in time	41
6	On the gift of pessimism : insights from the geographies of violence	51
7	On aesthetics : the art of social change	65
8	On space : life in the Web	75
9	On mass and movement : the theory of the critical yeast	87
10	On Web watching : finding the soul of place	101
11	On serendipity : the gift of accidental sagacity	113
12	On time : the past that lies before us	131
13	On Pied Pipers : imagination and creativity	151
14	On vocation : the mystery of risk	163
15	On conclusions : the imperative of the moral imagination	171
	Epilogue : a conversation	179

New interesting textbook: Explorer Extraordinaire or Fancy Nancy

Postcolonial Disorders

Author: Mary Jo DelVecchio Good

The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia.
Painting on book jacket by Entang Wiharso