From Negative Peace To Positive Peace

Western peace psychology takes the human beings'peace psychology and peace behavior as the research themes, and aims at helping individuals gain inner peace. It also explores the possibility of eternal peace by studying people's peace potentials, reducing and preventing violence and promoting human dignity and happiness in order to restore the peace value of psychology. This dissertation explores the periods of western peace psychology and the fruitful results, which is a must of western peace psychology research. It also benefits both the Chinese characterized peace psychology and Chinese harmonious society building.Western peace psychology has gone through three periods during its development, which are the period of inoculation during the pre-cold war, the period of birth during the cold war, and the period of its development from post-cold war.There are several outstanding peace psychologists who hold individual and sparkling ideas in different fields of peace psychology from post-cold war age.The Norwegian peace psychologist Johan. Gultung explores the nature of violence and peace, his violence nature theory, peace nature theory, four-stage peacemaking model and eliminating terrorism by dialogue etc enlarged the innovation of peace and offer new ideas of peace building in the new age. Douglas P. Fry holds a clear idea that human being can achieve a peaceful world by cultivating human peace potential. He also criticizes the wrong idea that war comes from human nature. Herbet, C. Kelman holds the point that human beings are capable to resolve conflicts in a positive and constructive way; and human beings also have the potential to promote harmonious relations among groups. As for group conflicts, two parties are born to have the tendency of resolving conflicts in a constructive and creative way in an ideal social condition where individual need is well satisfied. Therefore, meeting individual need, encouraging group members to find win-win peaceful conflict-resolving ways will be of great importance to achieve peace aims. For many years he has been practicing his creative conflict resolution theory and integrative problem-solving theory into practice in many conflict areas and gained a high reputation. Based on Gandhi's peace theory, Mayton formed his peace psychological ideas on peace personality trait and peace personality measurement.Joseph deRivera insists transforming the whole planet into a loving community and calling for building peace cultures based on human nature analyses. His ideas on the peace cultures of enhancing human beings'planet identification, equal status, and positive dependable relations are badly needed in the new century. His measurement model on peace culture makes it possible to evalue and compares peace cultures among different nations. It proves that it is a good and practical tool to revalue the development of peace culture in a civic country. Mashall Rosenburg takes the peace transformation, peace perception promotion, caring interpersonal relationship building as the important goals of the peace therapy. His worldview, healthy ideas, viewpoints on patient-canceller relationship, therapy methods etc. are very different from those of modern therapy classes and therefore he contributes a lot to therapy theory development.To offer a proper history position of western peace psychology from post-cold war age is not only a must to western peace psychology development but also of great importance to Chinese peace psychology healthy development and harmonious society building. From the theoretical perspective, it firstly enlarged the innovation of peace by supplying deeper and sharper ideas on peace. The positive peace concept combines human being's happiness with peace.Therefore, it has completed the transformation from negative peace to positive peace. Secondly, peace potential theory emphasizes the direct research on human being's peace potential, it also stresses the value of human being's peace, and those two points are regarded as the important theories of peace building in this new century. Thirdly, peaceful conflict theory highlights the potentials and creativity of conflict resolution of human beings, it also regards conflicts as opportunities for problem solving, which will promote the friendly relationship between two parties. Fourth, peace personality theory offers opportunities to advance personality research to a peaceful, healthy personality trend, which enriches the theory development of personality research. Fifth, peace culture theory provides an opportunity to lead psychology to a peaceful way. Sixth, peace therapy theory combines healthy psychology with peace psychology and therefore it highlights the peace value of healthy personality, which breaks the narrow limitation of traditional healthy psychology. Its advocates a flexible, integrative way to use almost any kind of proper therapy method proves an enrichment and development of therapy research.Western peace psychology from post-cold war age contributes a lot to psychology practice. First, peace nature theory empowers individual to resist institutional and cultural violence, which advances the development of peace movement.Secondly, peaceful reform theory offers opportunities for peace reform development. Thirdly, conflict resolution theory provides practical ideas to peacemaking development in many conflict areas among the world. Fourth, peace personality theory is of great help to individual peace transformation. Fifth, peace culture theory helps to advance the development of peace community conflict building and peace culture movement. Sixth, peace therapy theory promotes the practice of therapy development.Western peace psychology from post-cold war age provides several enlightenments for Chinese harmonious society building. First, our country is encountering the social transformation while the social conflicts and economy conflicts puts the society into a breakthrough point. The conflicts between people in rural areas and cities, the conflicts between the rich and the poor, the terrorism in Xinjiang prove that implicit structural violence exists in our country. Gultung's peace nature theory provides useful ideas to think over the hidden violent institutions and his model of delimiting terrorism by dialogue provides us with possible idea to prevent terrorism in our country and try to turn our country into a harmonious one. Secondly, Fry's peaceful society reform theory benefits us to think how to better our social system by promoting people's dignity and happiness, which is also an important part of our social reform. Thirdly, Kelman's conflict resolution theory provides us possible ideas how to promote the positive contact between people in cities and rural areas, how to provide more opportunities for equal dialogues and gain a win-win outcome for two parties. Fourth, peace personality theory is of help for us on how to provide kids with warm, caring family and social background, which is positively correlates with peaceful personality cultivation.Fifth,Joseph deRivera's ideas on peace culture and its functions, its measurement and evaluation provides us a possible example how to build our peace culture to meet our harmonious society building, it pushes us to think how to understand the function of harmonious culture and its evaluation as well. Sixth, peace therapy theory is useful for us to reflect how to build a more harmonious interpersonal relationship, and help people to form peaceful personalities, which also benefit the current therapy practice in our country.However, there are some theoretical limitations among western peace psychology from post-cold war age. First, its viewpoints on human nature are narrow because of lack of human being's historical practice, which leads to a viewpoint that human being's peace potential is a heritage from nature, and human's subjectivity, inner peace choice play a cardinal role while the passivity, the influence from the social environment only work as a accessory. Secondly, the peace concept of peace psychology comes from western capitalism countries with a positive of capitalism political and economic system, it is a pity that the western peace psychologists don't have a clear mind that private ownership is the real obstacle to eternal peace. Therefore, this positive peace pursuit is somewhat Utopian. Third, there are some limitations among its research methods. Western peace psychology still is based on the empirical research principles.There are some practical limitations among western peace psychology from post-cold war age as well. First, because of difference political system, difference from developed and developing countries, it seems to be a fancy that peace dialogue is overstressed if the American and European countries still keep over strong armies and multicultural ideas are not fully respected. The appropriateness, localization of western peace psychology in other countries need further research in the future as well. Secondly, peace psychology theory is still encountering misunderstandings in practice. And it is also a fact that peace psychology research lacks of enough economic support.For further development of western peace psychology, it is a must to be based on a wholly developed human nature theory, and the peace concept needs to break the limitation of a formative attitude to capitalism. As for the research methods of peace psychology, integrative and open methods are very much needed. We need to keep a clear mind that both negative peace and positive peace are historical missions of psychology. We have to put the localization of western peace psychology into consideration with the aim at exploring a proper Chinese peace psychology for our harmonious society building.