Jane Addams and the Noble Art of Peaceweaving

Throughout her life Jane Addams was critical of military means to solve problems in cities, nations, and international affairs. She often claimed that political and administrative challenges are too often approached with blunt military force. Acting in a quite different manner, she worked to calm tensions and conflicts in her neighborhood and larger environments, never arguing for or using violent methods to deal with friction. She sought to weave peaceful relationships and justice throughout the community. Leaping to today’s world and making use of essential features of Addams’s approach to peaceful communities filled with people of all walks of life, this chapter develops criteria to judge and improve peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN. These criteria, for simplicity’s sake indicated as 4Ps (practical, participatory, pluralistic, and provisional), provide the basis to advance the effectiveness of such missions. In general, Jane Addams’s ideas can be connected to numerous challenges and dilemmas the world faces in 21st-century international relations.