The Dalai Lama claims that peace is more than the absence of war and he connects his vision of world peace to peacefulness as a state of mind: "peace is a state of tranquility founded on the deep sense of security that arises from mutual understanding, tolerance of others' point of view, and respect for their rights" (Dalai Lama, 202).
Some have tried to distinguish "pacific-ism" from pacifism, where pacific-ism is a commitment to peace and peacefulness that is not strictly opposed to war while pacifism is a more principled or absolute rejection of violence.
This year's Global Peace Index from the Institute for Economics and Peace found that the world had improved in peacefulness for the first time since 2009, a modest indicator since the index has only been running for six years.
Positive peace can be best understood from the tradition of virtue ethics, where peacefulness is understood as a virtue that is connected to other virtues such as modesty, tolerance, and mercy.
"What you can't measure, you can't understand," he says.That, roughly, is the chain of thought which prompted him to order up a new way of assessing countries' general condition: along with GDP, trade balance and so on, it will now be possible to check out a country's ranking by "peacefulness".
Compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think-tank, the index rates 343 local authorities in Britain on their peacefulness by aggregating five indicators: homicide rate; violent crime rate; public order offences; weapons crime; and the number of police officers.
Just as the country seems ready to take its place on the international stage, gaining credit for its peacefulness, its stability and its pluralism, it will find itself under attack, however unfairly, as a vandal on a planetary scale.
More contentiously, the bottom-line-minded businessman and the pacifist in Mr Killelea come together in a conviction that peacefulness, like anything important, can and must be calibrated.
FOR an emerging power that makes much of the peacefulness of its rise, China is engaged in what looks suspiciously like aggression on an alarming number of fronts.
A woman whispers that though Batka has his faults, she won't vote: "it won't influence the weather".Understanding this legacy, Mr Milinkevic emphasises the peacefulness of his campaign, and avoids the word "revolution".
This peacefulness is largely the legacy of Ahmed Sékou Touré, the dictator who ruled Guinea from its independence from France in 1958 until his death in 1984.
