Helena Meyer-Knapp

Member of the Faculty- The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA USA

Helena Meyer-Knapp

Research 1985 — 2019

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My research centers on peace-making, specifically the factors and dynamics in bringing wars to a real and enduring end.

My dissertation, Nuclear Siege to Nuclear Ceasefire, was completed in 1990. It analyzed the Soviet American Cold War as a genuine war, with combat systems resembling siege warfare of the medieval period. This work presented my first attempts at characterizing the factors and dynamics in peace-making to end a war.

In 2003 I published Dangerous Peacemaking, a description of the ways communities at war decide to end their fighting. It centers on events in the 1990s in Bosnia and Iraq, Chechnya and South Africa, Rwanda and the North of Ireland, and Israel/Palestine. If you want an actual book to hold, it is available through Amazon.com. If you are happy with a digital copy you can download it  here:  DangerousPeacemakingText.

Over a period of seven years was involved in a project entitled History Becomes Heritage. Centered on school field trips to iconic national sites including war memorials and history museums , the research compares the transmission of patriotism and historical consciousness to new generations in Japan, the United States and South Korea. Detailed results on the pages listed to the right.

In 2012 the HORN fellowship program in Hyogo, Japan funded the first phase of the next project: a collaboration with Prof. Yoko Matusda of Hyogo Prefectural University. Our first paper, Improving International Relations at the Grassroots Level: Japanese student attitudes to Japan-Korea Relations”  presents our preliminary findings on the relationship between preferences in popular and consumer culture, intercultural travel/language experiences and Japanese students’ responses to international security tensions in NE Asia.

Another enduring interest is justice and reconciliation in the post-war period. My original topic was post-war amnesty as a pivotal feature of transitional justice. The contemporary political topics in this project include the International Criminal Court and reparations as well as amnesty.

In 2017 I began work on international apologies as a component of postwar peace and reconciliation. Since 2017, I have presented at several conferences on this issue and also written a substantial essay: Discordant Apologies — Feb. 2018. Apologies will be the topic of lectures in Hong Kong in April 2019.

And while peace continues central to all of my research I have contributed a book chapter, based on a presentation I gave two years ago at the Nanjing annual meeting for the Association for Moral Education. The essay explores gardens in four different cultures, Japan, Korea, the USA and the UK connecting a “sense of nature”  to a “sense of civic society.” It has been included in a book on Global Citizenship. “Gardens: Cultivating a Global Citizen

On this web site you can find essays written in response to current events and papers I have presented at academic conferences, as well as links to essays published in books and journals. The most important essay explores the connections between Guns and Suicide in US politics. (Revised October 2013).