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Toda.eNewsletter #12



Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research
Toda.eNewsletter # 12
September 17, 2010




Dear Friends of the Toda Institute and Members of TIAC,

Greetings from Honolulu! I am happy to report that I have finally completed my move and am writing this from our Honolulu center. I am glad to be able to call Hawai'i "home." It will be a pleasure for the three of us, Satoko, Chloe, and I, to continue working with you with renewed enthusiasm from the land of Aloha, the "breath of life" which is a symbol of love, acceptance, and a welcoming spirit.

From Honolulu to Sydney:

This July the Toda Institute was proud to host two meaningful events in Sydney, Australia: our TIAC meeting, held in conjunction with the International Peace Research Association's (IPRA) bi-yearly conference; and a Conference on "Global Visioning and Humanitarian Competition." In addition to participating in many IPRA sessions, I had an opportunity to contribute a presentation together with TIAC member George Kent at the Transcend Global Meeting with a paper entitled: "The Transcend: Art and Peace Network (T:AP Network) Achievements and Potential."

We are grateful to those of you who were in attendance at the TIAC meeting where the institute's activities were reported and a possibility of collaboration with IPRA was discussed.

In addition to this fruitful meeting, we were able to hold a conference entitled "Humanitarian Competition and Global Visioning," in Sydney on July 12 and 13. We brought together three outstanding groups that have been working on topics related to the "South-South Network: Culture and Arts and Non-state Armed Groups," to "Envisioning Peace through Tourism," and a group evaluating the past 10 years of "Justice and Conflict Resolution in East Timor." We are greatly anticipating the outcomes of their work and the ability to potentially publish on these topics, please keep and eye out on our publications for more information if you are interested: http://www.toda.org/publications/books.html. We also plan on posting more information about the conferences and participants on our site, which should be ready by mid-October in the conference section: http://www.toda.org.

Publications:

In addition to the busy summer, we have diligently been working on the conference proceedings from another groundbreaking conference on "Music and Solidarity" that was held this past February in Tunis, Tunisia (please see eNewsletter #11 for more information). Out of that conference and along with Guest Editor Felicity Laurence, the institute has been hard at work on our 15th volume of Peace & Policy, which is entitled: "Music and Solidarity Questions of Universality, Consciousness, and Connection." We are aiming at publication in late December.

We are also happy to announce that the Toda institute will be preparing a special web section hosting conference proceedings from the Tunis Conference (many of them originally written in French). You can find the French versions with English summaries of those papers this October on our website.

New Directions:

Ever moving forward we also want to report that our activities to develop regional projects are picking up speed, and our Secretary General Kevin Clements is now in place working alongside Satoko Takahashi (as Director of Research). We are also proud to announce the addition of three newly appointed Regional Senior Research Fellows: Dr. Sverre Lodgaard (NUPI) for Europe, Professor Eileen Babbitt (Tufts) for North America and Professor Chaiwat Satha Anand (Thamassat University) for Asia. This past June, Kevin and Satoko initiated a planning meeting of this group in Boston and started discussions about a range of new research projects for the institute that would feasibly be developed and explored on the regional level as well as globally. The group was primarily concerned about ways in which we can maintain the momentum of dialogues for peace in the face of new borders, boundaries and walls that seemed to be emerging around the world. These new walls inhibit exchanges and dialogues across boundaries of difference. The team thus undertook to prepare a framework paper on Borders, Boundaries and WAlls as impediments to peace (now completed in Draft) and a generic project on diverse ways of "Engaging The Other" in peace building. Specific regional projects within this general area include an analysis of the ways in which the US might focus more attention on soft power in relation to conflict transformation and management; revitalizing European political architecture for the 21st century and the role of religious spaces as sanctuaries in Asia. In addition, this group is also working on producing a forthcoming volume of Peace & Policy on Dialogue.

I wish to wish you success and good health during the next three months, as we put the finishing touches to all our goals an endeavors for 2010.

With best regards on behalf of the Toda.eNewsletter team,

Olivier Urbain
Director