government – Page 2 – Engaging Peace

International survey on peace and war

Posted on February 7, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

We promised in our first blog that we would share, on occasion, findings from our international survey concerning war and peace.

The Personal and Institutional Rights to Aggression and Peace Survey (PAIRTAPS) has been completed by ordinary people from over 40 countries around the world. This survey asks respondents to give their own definitions of war, torture, terrorism, peace, and reconciliation.

It also asks them to indicate on a seven point scale (from 1 totally disagree to 7 totally agree) the extent to which they agree with statements such as the following:

Sometimes one country has the right to invade another.
Governments have the right to order the torture of prisoners during times of war.
Individuals have the right to stage protests against war and in favor of peace.
Children have the right to grow up in a world of peace.

Participants are also asked to explain in their own words the reasoning behind their rating scale scores. These qualitative responses allow us to compare the kinds of arguments made for and against the use of violence and in favor of a right to peace.

How would you respond to those items? In what ways do you think your responses might differ from the ones made by someone from a different country?

In the last post, we asked the question, “In what countries do you think the greatest support for government-sponsored aggression can be found?” The samples showing the greatest tolerance for invasion of one country by another were the samples from the United States and China. In addition, a majority of the samples from both countries provided arguments supporting a state’s right to torture.

What speculations do you have about the apparent tolerance for governmental aggression in each of those countries?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Misrepresenting or minimizing consequences (Moral disengagement, part 6)

Posted on November 4, 2010July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Misrepresenting or minimizing consequences is another moral disengagement mechanism.

Psychologist Albert Bandura notes that when people commit atrocities for personal gain or as a response to social pressure, one way to offset shame and guilt is to minimize or distort the ill-effects of their behavior.

During contemporary warfare by the developed nations, this process is facilitated by modern technology, which allows maiming and killing from high in the air–thus avoiding the sight of blood, guts, and dismembered bodies; the screams of pain, pleas for help; and victims begging for an end to their ordeal.

It has been noted that the Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of the naked Vietnamese girl running from her napalmed village played a pivotal role in turning the American public against the Vietnam War.

To avoid a repetition of that kind of public disavowal of their political and military aims, more recent governments have exercised extreme control over media portrayals of wartime events.

Misrepresenting and minimizing consequences is rampant in relation to the environmental consequences of war. Among the long-lasting effects of war that are minimized right out of people’s consciousness are:

Sunken ships that continue to pollute the oceans
Landmines that continue to maim and kill
Hazardous waste from the manufacturing of weapons
Destruction and pollution of wildlife and human habitat through use of herbicidal weapons such as Agent Orange
Environmental degradation from the thousands of refugees fleeing the armed conflict.

(For more about environmental consequences of war, see the report of the Environmental Literacy Council.)

In reaction to the minimizing, misrepresenting, and denial of the environmental effects of war, the United Nations, in 2001, declared November 6 to be International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Note: This post was adapted from my previously published article in Peace Psychology (a publication of the American Psychological Association), Spring, 2009.

More than a few “bad apples”: American soldiers, the legacy of torture, and the trauma behind it

Posted on October 18, 2010March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

[Editor’s Note: In today’s post, we introduce a new feature to our engagingpeace.com blog. Periodically we intend to offer a brief review of a contemporary book that sheds light on issues such as war, torture, terrorism and their aftermaths, as well as on peace, reconciliation, and apology and forgiveness. We also invite our readers to submit commentaries on books they have found helpful.]

Review of None of us were like this before: American soldiers and torture By Joshua E.S. Phillips

Reviewed by Charikleia Tsatsaroni

In this thought-provoking and revealing book, Joshua Phillips asks why U.S. forces and officials believed that torture was effective, permissible, and necessary, and what were the factors that led them to engage in such practices.

He begins his quest with the death of Sergeant Adam Gray, who made it home from Iraq and died in his barracks. Phillips then guides us through his interviews with ordinary American soldiers, their families and friends, victims of torture, military, governmental, and intelligence officials, human rights lawyers, and activists, to name a few.

These interviews provide many examples of Albert Bandura’s socio-cognitive mechanisms of moral disengagement (e.g., advantageous comparison, euphemistic labeling) as the expanding set of individuals connected with the use of torture try to make sense of what happened.

Phillips’ narratives lead inevitably to the idea that Americans who engaged in torture were not just a “few bad apples” (p. ix) and that the factors leading to torture did not lie only within individuals but also and most importantly within the societal context and its interwoven systems.

His book also strongly reinforces the importance of greater attention to the trauma inflicted on soldiers by their involvement in torture and abuse; it is apparent that most of his interviewees deal daily with personal demons.

Overall, I would recommend this very readable book for its eye-opening narrative and its ability to keep you involved until its painful ending, which highlights the fact that wars have victims on both sides.

Even physically untouched “victors” can bear wounds forever because of what they did in the context of war.

Charikleia Tsatsaroni, MSc., EdM., from Greece, is the former head of the Department of Human Resource Training and Development of the Greek Organization Against Drugs (OKANA), and is a member of GIPGAP.

Identifying better alternatives (Moral engagement, part 5)

Posted on October 7, 2010May 5, 2021 by kathiemm

Sketch of Alyssa Peterson — U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson (Sketch by Margo Bendery, staff illustrator for Engaging Peace)

Today we introduce identifying better alternatives, the moral engagement counterpart to advantageous comparison.

As discussed in Monday’s post, the moral dis-engagement mechanism of advantageous comparison operates by helping people believe that whatever violence they approve will have a better outcome than not using the violence. Basically they are endorsing the common assumption that what is portrayed as the lesser of two evils is in fact moral.

Identifying better alternatives, according to psychologist Albert Bandura, takes two forms:

Acknowledging that there is never a permanent advantage to using violence in the pursuit of power, and
Recognizing that the greatest long-term advantage to the human race comes from identifying peaceful alternatives to violence.

Regarding the first form, as Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, said in a recent (June 27, 2010) Washington Post article: “Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government.”

Bacevich expressed concern over the so-called “volunteer force” created in the U.S. after the Vietnam War, and warns of the dangers of creating a force that allows the country to engage in conflicts without end: “Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend.”

In our view, it is also a more general sense of moral superiority that allows many Americans to tolerate the aggressions of their government.

History has many surprising examples of people who have chosen better alternatives than violence as a way to achieve security. Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are obvious examples. People in power in various countries have realized the advantages of ending aggression–consider South Africa when it ended apartheid and Northern Ireland when both Protestant and Catholic leaders undertook peace talks.

A tragic example can be seen in the case of Spc. Alyssa Peterson, an Arabic-speaking military interrogator in Iraq who was reprimanded for showing empathy for prisoners. She ultimately chose suicide over participation in the torture of prisoners.

Our government must develop better alternatives for responding to people of conscience who resist engaging in inhumane behavior.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology