Whither Peace Studies? Fragmentation to a New Integration?
In spite of the surface appearance of flourishing, peace studies now faces a crisis of dilution and fragmentation though concerned voices have long warned against it. The root of the crisis is traced back to the years around 1970, when Johan Galtung proposed the theory of structural violence. At that time, there were heated debates about whether to broaden the research agenda to include poverty and underdevelopment or not. It is shown that, though it was a great contribution to peace studies, the theory of structural violence also brought about the excessive expansion of the research agenda of the discipline, because, according to the theory, every important social problem could be a legitimate research subject of peace studies. More than two decades after the debates, however, there have appeared several symptoms which show the reorientation of the discipline toward the original narrower focus on war and conflict. Since a simple return to the past is impossible, it is suggested that, by focusing on the issues of war and conflict, peace studies should try to eliminate one of the major obstacles to the final goal of peace in the broadest sense of the word. To complicate the matter, however, there have recently been debates between the narrower and wider agendas in security studies. The wider agenda in security studies tends to broaden peace studies as well because an issue or problem like environmental degradation is claimed to be a peace studies issue on the ground that it is a security issue. Thus, peace studies will have to tackle with the same problem for some time to come.
Proposals for the Future Development of Peace Education in Hiroshima City - Based on a Comparative Analysis of the Peace Education Curricula of Hiroshima and Dresden
Every year students in schools in Hiroshima City study a unique Peace Education curriculum that came about as a direct result of the unique historical experience of the city. During the Second World War, the city of Dresden in Germany suffered similar levels of destruction to Hiroshima. Due to the fact that the two cities endured similar historical experiences in this respect and also have other significant factors in common, an investigation was carried out to compare and contrast their respective Peace Education curricula. Despite the fact that it was ascertained at an early stage that no directly comparable subject to that existing in Hiroshima was being taught in schools in Dresden, the investigation did identify several areas of commonality between the cases, including a strong commitment at both the city government and popular level towards issues relating to peace and international understanding. Furthermore, it also revealed areas where aspects of the teaching of the subjects of History and Political Science in Dresden schools could provide valuable suggestions for the future development of Peace Education in Hiroshima since the Japanese city has been contending with a complex political controversy over the subject for more than two decades. As a result of comparing the curricula of the two cities, the following two main proposals were drawn up regarding means by which Peace Education in Hiroshima could be developed in future. In accordance with the strengths identified in the Dresden case, the author proposes that: 1) efforts are made to broaden the study of the historical background to the atomic bombing in Peace Education classes, both with regard to classroom study and the large-scale events that take place every year as parts of the curriculum; and 2) efforts are made to facilitate a greater degree of internationalisation within the subject, in order to give students an opportunity to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the events that led to the destruction of Hiroshima and to establish meaningful links with people of other nationalities who hold similar views with regard to issues relating to peace and nuclear weapons. To facilitate these proposals, the author suggests the introduction to Hiroshima’s Peace Education classes of new teaching materials, more student-centred teaching strategies and the development of regular links with
Image Projection in Immersive 3D Visualization Laboratory
In recent years, many centers in the world attempted to build a virtual reality laboratory. The main idea of such laboratory is to allow the user to “immerse” into and move in a computer-generated virtual world. In the paper, the underlying principles of the system of virtual reality (VR) are described. The selected implementations constructed by the research centers of the world are also presented. The cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) installation is planned to be implemented at the Gdansk University of Technology. In this solution, the images will be projected on flat screens arranged in the form of a cube. The user will be located inside a transparent sphere freely rotating inside a cube, which allows simulation of free movement without changing the position of the screens. A walking motion of the user will trigger changes in the computer-generated images on screens surrounding the sphere thus creating an illusion of motion. The problems of visualization in the planned installation are outlined and discussed.