All posts by Ashok Panikkar

Ashok Panikkar has spent more than three decades working internationally at the intersection of culture, conflict, democracy, and critical thinking. After shutting down his organization MetaCulture in 2023, he now runs the Village Idiot Studio (www.villageidiot.studio) to nurture wise citizenship. 
Authors I-Q, Social Issues

Civil Rights: A Most Righteous Hangover – by Ashok Panikkar

4 Comments

How Outrageous Successes of the Civil Rights Movement Weakened Minorities
and Destroyed Liberal Society  

The Nineteen Sixties promised a new chapter in US history, with the election of a young charismatic President, John F. Kennedy. However, the perfect storm of the Vietnam War, multiple assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK, MX), the Cuban missile crisis, and continued segregation in the South, turned it into an extremely turbulent decade. Taken together, the failures of the Reconstruction (1865–77), Brown v Board of Education (1954), and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, shattered America’s self-image as “The City Upon A Hill”, destroyed faith in the political system, and forced the nation to question its foundational assumptions.  

Continue reading Civil Rights: A Most Righteous Hangover – by Ashok Panikkar →

Academic Articles, Authors I-Q, Trends 2024: Divisive World, War

Peacebuilding: Growing Strawberries on Coconut Trees – by Ashok Panikkar  

2 Comments

The Nature of Peace and Peacebuilding in a Collectivist and Illiberal World

This article was originally published in Beyond Intractability 

The only reasonable prediction we can make about the 21st century is that we don’t know what’s coming our way — except that it will be bad.

While triggered by the Israel/Palestine situation, this article is a critical reflection on the role of ‘peacebuilding’ (my umbrella term for all non-adversarial dispute resolution processes) in the 21st century.

To understand why the peacebuilding field has failed to live up to its lofty ambitions, we have to unpack the world we inhabit today. After the heady optimism at the end of the Cold War, the conflicts of the new century have forced Westerners to rethink their short-lived assumptions about abolishing war, making the world safe for democracy and capitalism, and world peace. Hence, I won’t give you a two-point off-ramp for Russia, a five-point plan for the Syrian embroglio, or a seven-point approach for the Israel-Palestine mess. Of course, we should try to make the world safer. However, our attempts should be rooted in hard-nosed realities, not skewered by wishful thinking.

Continue reading Peacebuilding: Growing Strawberries on Coconut Trees – by Ashok Panikkar   →