Invitation to Peace Studies

Invitation to Peace Studies is the first textbook in the field to emphasize 21st-century research and controversies and to encourage the more frequent use of a gender perspective in analyzing peace, war, and violence. Recent empirical research forms the core of most chapters, but substantial attention is also given to faith-based ideas, movements, and peace pioneers. The book examines compelling contemporary topics like cyber warfare, drones, robots, digital activism, hactivism, the physiology of peace, rising rates of suicide, and peace through health. It is also unique in its use of a single coherent perspective--that of a global peace network--to make sense of the historically unprecedented and interconnected web of diverse ideas, individuals, groups, organizations, and movements currently promoting peace across the world.

Houston Wood teaches peace studies at Hawai'i Pacific University. He is the author of Native Features: Indigenous Films from Around the World (2008) and Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai'i (1999) and the coauthor, with Hugh Mehan, of The Reality of Ethnomethodology (1983).

Preface
1. Invitations to Peace Work
Part One: The Global Peace Network
2. Peace Concepts, Disputes, and Confusions
3. Peace Networks: Benefits and Challenges
4. Trends in Violence, Terrorism, and War
5. Building Gender Security
Part Two: From Violence to Nonviolence
6. Interstate War and Peace
7. The Rise of Nonviolence and Human Rights
8. Nonviolent Power, Methods, and Strategies
9. Religious Influences
Part Three: Disciplinary Perspectives
10. Biological Foundations
11. Peace Psychology
12. The Sociology of Violence
13. Inner and Outer Peace Work
Appendix: Selected Secular Peace Organizations
Glossary
References
Index