Katerina Standish

This book, as the first exploration of suicide in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), illustrates the scarcity of suicide research in the discipline and argues that the leading cause of violent death worldwide is a multifaceted phenomenon that needs to be fully comprehended as a significant and often preventable form of world-wide violence. The author supplies a theoretical framework for assessing suicide as medical or instrumental, posits interdisciplinary complementarity and offers future lines of inquiry that challenge established notions of prevention. The book presents a PACS meta-theory termed ‘encounter theory’ and supplies a suicidal peacebuilding platform via relationship. This book questions why more PACS scholars aren’t turning their attention to suicide when more people die by suicide than ethnic, religious or ‘terroristic’ violence combined.

This captivating book presents innovative answers to the question: why storytelling? Each chapter represents leading edge narrative research designs from Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice in central Canada, one of the world’s leading academic programs for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), and a major contributor to PACS scholarship. The authors are candid and offer inspiration for other scholars seeking groundbreaking ideas for their own research design while offering profound expansions to the current PACS literature. The scholarship reflects a diversity of ideas, passions, approaches, disciplinary roots, and topic areas. Each chapter explores different and critical issues in the field of PACS through various forms of storytelling, while providing recent original research designs for the future development of the field and the education of its practitioners and academics. This volume, co-edited by three of the early graduates of the program, presents and explores a number of these issues across the broad spectrum of Peace and Conflict Studies. Contributors to the book are recognized scholars and practitioners in their respective fields. The book has a wide audience, targeting those particularly interested in tackling and understanding old conflicts in new ways, and for those seeking to learn at the growing edges of PACS, at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels.

This book, as the first exploration of suicide in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), illustrates the scarcity of suicide research in the discipline and argues that the leading cause of violent death worldwide is a multifaceted phenomenon that needs to be fully comprehended as a significant and often preventable form of world-wide violence. The author supplies a theoretical framework for assessing suicide as medical or instrumental, posits interdisciplinary complementarity and offers future lines of inquiry that challenge established notions of prevention. The book presents a PACS meta-theory termed ‘encounter theory’ and supplies a suicidal peacebuilding platform via relationship. This book questions why more PACS scholars aren’t turning their attention to suicide when more people die by suicide than ethnic, religious or ‘terroristic’ violence combined.

This introduction to peace education and yogic science provides a good toolkit to help bring contemplative peacebuilding (efforts to stop harm) practices to the classroom and community center. The latest research is presented alongside personal reflections of teachers and facilitators who have used these methods for instructing students or participants on facing the hectic realities of life with self-regulation and nonviolence. Exercises and practices are included, along with creative activities for emotional grounding and stress management.