From our own world

Lund, Sweden – December 30, 2017 It’s tomorrow, at December 31, 2017 at 1200 noon CET, that we open The Transnational to the world. It’s a homepage, an archive of some 7000 original research-based articles over more than 30 years. It’s a blog by TFF Associates – the finest and most experienced community devoted to the UN Charter norm that peace shall be created by peaceful means. It’s curated materials from around the world, in easy-to-find themes and menus. It’s links to global news, analyses and inspiration. It’s texts, images, videos, music – culture and art too. Because peace is much much more than just no war. Peace is the basis of the good society. It’s an innovative, multi-dimensional platform for peace – research, analysis, education and policy. It’s factual – in contrast to much else today – it’s critical and constructive. It’s diagnosis, prognosis and solutions. It’s interactive and...

This TFF Associates’ blog became an open archive in December 2017 when TFF launched its new magazine homepage, The Transnational on January 1, 2018. There is also a new, technically updated edition of this 2011-2017 blog that you may access here. In both this old and the new version, you’ll find almost everything posted over these 6 years by TFF Associates, a group of experts on international issues who are committed to the UN Charter norm that peace shall be established by peaceful means. There are more than 1300 articles here. Together with the articles posted on the old 1997-2011 homepage you’ll find an estimated 7000 (mostly) accessible articles. • We believe that this is one of the largest reservoirs of research-based, pro-peace writings published continuously between 1997 and 2017. The Transnational also has a link to TFF’s work 1986-1997 – that is, before the foundation set itself up on the...

Av Jan Öberg På lördag den 2:a december 2017 tilldelas Johan Galtung det alternativa fredspriset, Folkets Fredspris i Enlighet med Nobels Testamente.

Editorial #500 TRANSCEND Media Service & TFF Associate We made it! Five hundred Mondays [from 3 Mar 2008] has Antonio from Brazil-Portugal posted an editorial by me from Norway and the world – sometimes with a coauthor. With the good support of the other members of our editorial committee, Malvin Gattinger from Germany, Naakow Grant-Hayford from Ghana and Erika Degortes from Italy. THANKS! Five hundred times have I had the challenge of exploring what the UN wisely calls a “situation” – unlike me, avoiding the word “crisis”. Five hundred times have I tried to follow what I absorbed from when I was 2 years old at dining tables listening to my physician father and nurse mother–daughter of the director of health care in Norway–the program implicit in the three magic words Diagnosis-Prognosis-Therapy. DPT. Five hundred analyses of something problematic to put it mildly; five hundred efforts to forecast, foresee what...

Six months ago, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) asked Virginia Tilley and me to write a study examining the applicability of the international criminal law concept of apartheid to Israel’s policies and practices toward the Palestinian people. We were glad to accept the assignment, and conceived of our role as engaging in an academic undertaking. ESCWA, one of several UN regional commissions, requested the study as a result of an uncontested motion adopted by its 18 Arab member governments. Almost within hours of its release on March 15, our report [bearing the title “Israel’s Practices Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid”] was greeted by what can only be described as hysteria and derision. Continue reading here on Falk’s blog “Global Justice In The 21st Century” where you can also read the many comments to this affair.

Wikipedia has much to offer under “aging”. Highly recommended are the 10 points by the world’s oldest living man, 114, Walter Breuning. However, older persons, like me at 86, know their own aging best. Less trouble with “oxidant stress” as a major cause, having used anti-oxidants based on blueberry skin – no chemicals – for decades. 20,000 blood stem cells renew my blood, but they are dying. Problematic. Rule no. 1: Keep mind and body active; maintain a good nutrition. Obvious to counteract aging. However, equally important: Rule no. 2: Be open to the positive sides and advantages of aging. Bertrand Russell’s “On Being 90” in the Observer dispenses with the disadvantages as obvious, in favor of his advantage: the overview. At the age of 5 he sat on the knee of a man who had fought Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The longer the lives we have lived, the...

In his book, “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government”, Mike Lofgren called attention to the fact that much of the real power in Washington is not controlled by the President and members of Congress, but is in the hands of multi-billion-dollar organizations that are not only huge, but also unelected and secret, for example the CIA, NSA and FBI. The enormous power of the deep state is undemocratic by definition, since its organizations operate without public knowledge or control. Its power is not only undemocratic but also extremely threatening to the lives of Americans, and also to to the lives of people throughout the world. This serious threat comes from the fact that the deep state seems to be under the control of the Military-Industrial Complex. It promotes aggressive policies that risk nuclear war. Most people of good will in the...

The National Society of High School Scholars, Claes Nobel World Betterment Award The Carter Center I am very grateful for the 2016 Claes Nobel World Betterment Award – Claes being the great grandnephew of Alfred – and to the NSHSS-National Society for High School Scholars, here at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Let me start by praising you for your dedication to Education, focusing on the high school–in the middle, after K and grade school, before college and graduate school–on teachers and students, learning and doing research, treating them with respect, bestowing dignity. Society has institutions, like Family, Work and Economy. Sports get too much attention, Education too little. Politics is about leading and being led, Military is about killing not to be killed. These two get you into trouble. I have heard this afternoon much about leading, leaders, led. Führer and Duce are German and Italian for leader, “duce”...

International Sociological Association Prize New School for Social Research, New York NY, 15 Nov 2016 The West, and Western sciences in particular, have a peculiar way of conceptualizing time; derived from two millennia Christianity. Thus, in the civilizations of Hinduism, Buddhism, China and Japan, to mention some, time flows from eternity to eternity. In the West (and Islam is similar), there is a Beginning (Creation for the religious, Big Bang for the secular), and an Ending, the End Time (Armageddon for the religious, entropy, death, etc. for others). In others, time flows from past into a possibly different future; in the West, the future is continuous with the past. In the natural sciences, “laws” from the past are automatically valid for the future; reality being as stable as the planetary system, the galaxy; astronomy being the model. The Creation has been finished, once and for all. In the social sciences,...

On UN Day and his own 86th birthday The last one hundred years life expectancy has increased by about 25%-from near 80 to near 100-in some countries. But, instead of increasing playful childhood, education, work and retirement by 25%, the age of retirement has moved much less than the age at death. That deprives masses of older people with experience and wisdom of productive work, of being useful, meeting others constructively; reducing them to being playful–bridge or golf as case may be–and just keeping alive. Homo sapiens as homo ludens not homo faber. Longer, but emptier lives. A crime against humanity if there ever was any. However, with two clear remedies: continue working self-employed with pension as salary, or find meaning in dedication to something beyond oneself, some cause, volunteer work. That should be planned well in advance before entering a “career” that peaks before, or at, retirement; the rest...

“War is illegal and immoral, it has to end and it can be ended.’ Speech at the international meeting “Thirst For Peace”, Assisi September 18-20, 2016. Promoted by Community of Sant Egidio and Diocese of Assisi and Franciso Families. Dear Friends, I am happy to be here at this International Meeting and I would like to thank our hosts, for their invitation to attend. I have always been inspired by the lives of St. Francis and St. Clare, whom I believe are Icons of Christian Gospel Peace and Nonviolence. Francis the man of action, steeped in empathy and love for all, and Clare a woman of prayer, whose love of God led her into the depth of mysticism and peace. Francis and Clare lived in a time of violence and war, yet they choose to live the nonkilling/nonviolence of Jesus. Francis as a youth fighting in his local military, knew...

were in the midst of European peace and anti-nuclear activities and a moment of history when one could begin to feel the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact cracking, fragmenting and giving way to something new. Whatever survives this long under very very difficult circumstances of independence and freedom in our world must have some qualities. During these more than three decades, we’ve been witnesses to world history in international affairs such as the end of the first Cold War with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda, NATOs expansion as well as 9/11, the War On Terror and – sadly – all the failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to just mention a few. But we have also seen the world order change, the trend towards a multipolar world, the betterment after the end...