Peace for All Time

The last few days I have been finalizing my dissertation proposal and rather than subject you all to the extraordinarily dry nature of psychological academia as well as my propensity for "overly eloquent" writing I will give it a nice little summation here:

Cultural Values of Non-Violent Political Movements

I am going to be studying the values of Tibetan refugees living in Dharamsala, participants in the struggle for freedom from apartheid in South Africa and active participants in the civil rights movement in the United States to determine whether or not there exist cultural universals across these political actions.

From the speeches and writings of leaders in these movements there emerge a set of values that are consistent at least at a theoretical level. I am going to be conducting a fairly thorough literature review into these leaders including the work of H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandella, and a few others. I will be basing my hypotheses on their ideas as well as previous work that has been done in the fields of psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.

As far as values I am going to look at the following six things: Compassion, Individualism, Collectivism, Spiritualism, Linked Fate (a belief that your actions have consequences for everybody and vice versa), and something called "Consideration of Future Consequences " (which basically looks at how long term your thinking is). And I am going to also look at the effect those values and the culture have on people's definitions of non-violence.

So there it is in three paragraphs, it's obviously much more complex, because it has to be. But I am excited and I feel good about it, ethical, open-minded, me. I think it could have some implications that would contribute to a better understanding of an important topic.

I am really quite excited.

"...not merely peace in our time
but peace for all time."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy-