Reimagining Peace through Process Philosophy: An Integrative Transformation to Address the Global Systemic Crisis

This book explores the ways in which process philosophers extend and strengthen peace scholars’ outlines of a paradigm of/for peace. It then illustrates the value of such a peace paradigm through the example of the climate breakdown, showing how process thinking and process metaphysics intervene at the roots of a global systemic crisis. In doing so, it articulates a new inroad to process philosophy, and illuminates an integrative intervention in the systemic crises of climate change and global inequality.

The “static-process framework” developed in this book makes the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the fields he has inspired easier to grasp, and offers a tool to assist in the application of process thought to a multitude of issues. This framework depicts tensions between two modes of thought―static and process thinking―according to five “basic orientations”: abstract/context, closed/open, isolating/relational; passive/generative; one/multi-dimensional. This pattern is mapped across the domains of metaphysics, economics, politics and as the basis for a new mode of living and organising across multiple layers of society.

Juliet Bennett is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, School of Social and Political Sciences, and Charles Perkins Centre, at The University of Sydney.