Rating Peace - 1 comment

You could read this, from the Economist: Give peace a rating: An index of pacifism. Nice try, but rather misses the point.

Alternatively, you could read Norm's 2007 Manchester Peace Lecture, a slightly amended version of which was presented at the Euston Manifesto conference:

From what I've said here I think it's clear enough that our world is still a very long way from those conditions of peace spelled out 30 years ago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: that the limits of state violence be set at the threshold where the need to defend society's members ceases; that we outlaw from the human condition the very idea that some are permitted to use violence regardless of justice, law and mutual agreements.

Where there is state lawlessness there is no peace, and the victims of such lawlessness are entitled to seek what help or escape they may, and others to provide it. That is why the tasks of a global peace movement go beyond the prevention of aggressive war.