Re-imagining peace: Integrating a spiritual peace practice in international affairs

Defining peace simply as the absence of violence does not provide a large enough theoretical framework to explain the nuances and transformations of individual and collective peace development. Wars, genocide, and other civil conflicts are different facets of one single crisis, a crisis of perception. Likewise the mechanisms and technologies used to reach international peace in the past have prioritized political, economic and military power relationships diminishing scholars understanding of peace even further. This research examines the underlying paradigms of peace that inform behavior in international and intrapersonal relations. A combination of qualitative interviews with Foreign Service Officers at the U.S. Department of State, extensive research of scholarly literature about how internal peace contributes to external manifestations of peace and a personal application of specific practices to experience a heightened sense of internal peace, provide evidence for the benefit of individual peace advocates developing a spiritual peace practice.