Overview of Peace Psychology in Asia: Research, Practice and Teaching

A recent landmark paper on peace psychology punctuates the need to anchor the discipline in geohistorical settings (Christie, Tint, Wagner, & Winter, 2008). This volume presents peace psychology in a regional context that includes East, South, and Southeast Asia. In order to understand the social landscape that plays into the psychology of peace in Asia, one may need to view peace-related subjectivities through telescopic rather than microscopic lenses. This chapter is divided into three sections, each corresponding to a proposition about peace psychology in Asia. First, social peace and violence are embedded in more macro-layers beyond the individual, like politics, history, and culture. Second, direct and structural peace interact contingently with each other. Further, the discipline takes an ethical position to pursue nonviolence (direct peace) on all layers and to stand on the side of..