MAKE THE UNITED NATIONS GREAT AGAIN: RE-DISCOVER PACIFISM IN THE AGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
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2020-08-17
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en
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While peace could be considered a desirable goal in the international community, the normative framework of peace and peace movements have to face a significant number of challenges in the intellectual debate and practice. Normatively, while war and peace have always been seen as the two faces of the same coin, the phenomenon of war has continually gained more theoretical attraction than peace. Accordingly, many theoretical traditions have been used to justify the use of violence to resolve conflicts between political communities. Moreover, the dominance of realism in international relations contributes to the construction of the “realist world”, which would be normalized as the world. As a result, while peace would be considered more desirable, its pursuits both normatively and empirically gain limited success because of its idealist status. Academically, pacifism and its advocacy for peace are deemed too ideal to pursue, leading to its lack of visibility in the intellectual debate on war and peace. Empirically, while the United Nations (henceforth the UN) represents the almost-universal effort of international cooperation, it also has problems that could prevent it from fulfilling its mission as the peace guardian of the world. Nevertheless, the peace movement has new motivation from the human rights revolutions, which originated and motivated the United Nations. The new peace movement demands protection and nurtures human rights, creating an emerging source of pressure for change in the theoretical foundation of international relations and world governance. As the chief human rights regime, the United Nations should not only change to adapt to such desire, but it also should be the leader in the quest for a new goal, which is the pursuit of positive peace instead of negative peace. This thesis would argue that the United Nations should re-discover and re-apply pacifism in its peace-oriented operations.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen