Development with Sustainable-Engendered Peace: A Challenge during the Anthropocene

This chapter examines the evolution of the peace concept from its understanding as a negative concept towards a positive, structural, sustainable, and engendered peace. The concept of a ‘sustainable-engendered peace’ refers to the structural factors related to long-term violence, deeply embedded in the patriarchal system and characterized by authoritarianism, exclusion, discrimination, exploitation and violence. This dominant social structure affects values such as equity, equality and justice, and often even threatens the survival of individuals and social groups. Further, this dominant system has also concentrated the wealth of earth within a small group of oligarchs who manage multinational enterprises. The sources of threats have been consolidated over thousands of years by patriarchal institutions, religious controls, self-identified beliefs and social representations, and totalitarian exercise of power, and have also affected natural resources. Faced with these global threats, the chapter explores the potential of the concept of a sustainable-engendered peace, and attempts to reach an understanding of the deeply anchored links to patriarchy and its war system that are related to the physical, social and cultural threats of the dominant values and behaviour in the Anthropocene. The text also explores the potential for a concept of holistic and cosmopolitan peace that can challenge the root causes of violence and destruction, and it discusses the goal of just and equal power structures for human beings and nature.