The Concept of Positive Peace and Its Relationship with the Interreligious Dialogue

LUCAS EMMANUEL MISSERI

Toowoomba

Seminario; Peace, Interreligious Dialogue and Culture; 2014

Multi-Cultural Centre of the University of Southern Queensland, Campus Toowoomba

The aim of this paper is to show the importance of interreligious dialogue in order to build the foundations for a perennial peace in the global era. My purpose is to do this from a philosophical view and not only a religious one. For this reason I chose two different but complementary peace-conflict theories. One is the Norwegian Sociologist Johan Galtung?s view and the other the Argentine Philosopher Ricardo Maliandi?s one. Both authors started their research on the topic of conflict and from there they made their contributions to peace studies.  After defining positive peace from its opposites (conflict, negative peace), I will show how interreligious dialogue is a fundamental tool to reach that end. However, I will try to maintain that atheists should be included in those dialogues. This is because if one representative of the whole is left outside, positive peace becomes negative peace. As Maliandi asserts conflicts are inherent to social life, however the way of peace, especially in our global era is not in avoiding interaction but in building ways of respect. Dialogue, as based in the word and the acknowledgment of the others as authorized voices, is the perfect tool to build the foundations of a new era of mutual respect and less violence.