The Cultural Dimensions of Peace Building

[Ariel Salleh]

  
CRITICAL * RADICAL * AUSTRALIA * EARTH


MARTY BRANAGAN

THE CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF PEACE BUILDING

London, Anthem Press, 2025

Reviewed by Ariel Salleh,  13/6/25

    
https://arena.org.au/the-cultural-dimensions-of-peacebuilding-reviewed/ 1/6

The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding is a dazzling read: well documented and studded with photographic images. But the rst thing that impresses you is the author’s political generosity.

Not a conventional academic text, Branagan reaches out in an everyday voice to bring his readers face to face with our troubled planet. In fact, he gives us a crash course in geopolitics and political economy. If I were a university VC, I’d make the book mandatory for all rst year reading lists – in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in Law, Science, Engineering, and especially IT.

We learn that the absence of peace has many facets – from the military industrial complex – to corporate ownership of the media – dispossession of land and livelihoods in the so-called South – all the way down to the kitchen sink.

Applying a sociological lens, what I see here is a patriarchal-colonial-capitalist system that has unfolded over time, layer upon layer, with each set of practices reinforcing the one before. We can see this in how old-style masculinist behaviours are rewarded by modern economics.

This is the historical context of the violence that surrounds us. Branagan charts its spatial dimensions – ecological and human, economic and cultural, institutional and direct – but he does not labour at this level of abstraction.

Instead, he invites would-be activists to apply their imaginations and hands-on skills, working locally, as well as cross-culturally, to create celebratory peace museums, thriving permaculture gardens, and joyful resistance songs and art performances, as well as giving time to daily mindfulness.

The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding also turns out to be an introduction to feminism, and it is rare to nd the predicament of women – ‘othered’ under the global weight of the patriarchal-colonial-capitalist mega-system – treated so honestly. Why, Branagan asks, are there no public statues for the suragettes? He amplies the role of ‘narrative’ as a determinant of war and peace. Similarly, ecofeminists have argued that modernity is held together by an ancient dualist mythology that institutionalises Man over Woman, White over Black, Humanity over Nature.

Women have long understood that their bodies have been treated as a ‘natural resource’ and free labour. One might even see the peace-making gesture of Lysistrata as an early form of industrial action. Branagan goes on to mark women’s leadership in fostering justice, sustainability and peace; Jessie Street, Rosa Parkes, Elise Boulding, Helen Caldicott, Wangari Maathai, Starhawk and Vandana Shiva are named. He observes that India’s Chipko women were the original ‘tree huggers’, bravely using their own bodies to protect community forests and livelihoods.

For peace is a particular orientation to Life-on-Earth. Here, Branagan cites a nature metaphor from Steiner educators:

[Education] is not so much about gluing leaves of knowledge or information on to a tree’s branches, but watering, feeding and mulching that tree within a safe, nurturing environment so that it thrives.

For sure, there’s a pressing need for de-gendering the dualist narratives that have framed what is now acknowledged as ‘toxic masculinity’. Already LGBTQIA groups explore alternatives here, and ‘straight’ men’s groups as well. It is not always understood that the nation-state itself embodies a crystallization of patriarchal ego. Once, this dominating role was served by the Churches, but today the state provides the executive function for a ruling class whose power is economic rather than religious.

Turning to the colonial sphere, The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding exposes the racial diminishment, if not genocide, that ‘geographically othered’ peoples remain subject to. And land-based resourcing extends all the way from ancient incursions to modern extractivism – like fossil fuels, uranium, minerals for electric vehicles, and biopiracy for Big Pharma patents.

This history – our history – goes forward under a cloud of denial. Unwittingly, scholar Samuel Huntington reveals its hubris in The Clash of Civilizations, 1993: to quote:

[The Muslim world] lacks the core political values that gave birth to representative democracy in Western civilization: separation of religious and secular authority, rule of law and social pluralism, parliamentary institutions of representative government, and protection of individual rights and civil liberties as the buer between citizens and the power of the state.

How ironic to contemplate this as Gaza is obliterated and Trump assumes power. Our generation has taken liberal values as self-evident, yet the Western version has not brought peace, justice and sustainability to Life-on-Earth.

An astonishing appendix to The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding lists common examples of the aggressive narrative taken for granted in everyday life. Thus, we learn to: bite the bullet, hit economic targets, take a stab at something, soldier on, cross a legal mineeld, roll with the punches, and score the blonde bombshell.

The book also contains a powerful exposé of gratuitous screen violence, and its impacts on children. Even the Self/Other dualism of liberal ethics encourages competition at every turn, dispelling the empathic ‘both/and’ logic needed for growing sociability.

The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding draws out several close ties between the media and military-industrial complex. Typically, Exxon and General Electric engaged the US public nightly with a serialised presentation of the Gulf War. Today, Branagan notes, academic spending is increasingly captured by the eld of Defense Science, with Lockheed Martin a corporate leader in this move. In neoliberal Australia, state sponsorship of cultural institutions like art galleries and universities is giving way to funds for training a new ‘space-oriented’ (read ‘militaristic’) workforce.

As well as acknowledging women, Branagan’s de-colonising approach to peace education highlights the life-arming cultures of First Nation peoples and peaceful regions like Bhutan, Iceland and the Semai lands of Borneo. We even encounter TeWhiti, an inspired Maori philosopher who anticipated, by many decades, Gandhi’s approach to peace.

It is a sign of hope, that today, a network called Global Tapestry of Alternatives is in conversation across the world from Mexico to India. They join to explore models of eco-sucient provisioning and community self-governance as an alternative to globalisaion. They seek to build ‘a pluriverse’.

As the social-ecology of slow violence – now digitalised – closes in on us, my own sense is that there will be no peace until the global patriarchal-colonial-capitalist mega- system is reckoned with. I judge Branagan’s book an invaluable companion in this work.


Review based on Prof Salleh’s speech at the Sydney launch of The Cultural Dimensions of Peacebuilding, at ‘Peace and Justice’: 

UNE Peace Studies Conference, 13-15 February 2025, UNE Parramatta campus. Ariel Salleh is a Sydney-based writer and activist: www.arielsalleh.info

[Ariel Salleh]