Wolfgang Dietrich

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Wolfgang Dietrich (* 13 September 1956 in the Tyrol) is an Austrian peace researcher and political scientist. He is a member of the faculty of the Institute for Political Science at the University of Innsbruck/Austria, visiting professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Vienna and member of the faculty of the Centre for Peace and Development Studies at the University of Castellón/Spain.

He was educated in Austria and England, received a Ph.D. in history and literature at the University of Innsbruck in 1980 and a D.S.J. at the same University in 1984. In 1990 he was promoted to the degree of "Universitätsdozent" in Political Science according to the Austrian Law of Higher Education (UOG).

Wolfgang Dietrich has spent most of the eighties in Central America. He was president of the Austrian section of Amnesty International from 1989 to 1991. In the nineties he did field research in Latin America and the Caribbean, India, Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia. He was director of the European Peace University from 1995 to 1998. Currently he is program director of the MA Program in Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation^[1] at the University of Innsbruck, Austria as well as academic director of the Austrian Institute for Latin America^[2] which operates an MA in Latin American Studies.

[edit] Research Focus

Wolfgang Dietrich’s research focuses on the history of peace studies, peaces and development, peaces and postmodernity, cultures of peaces, theories of peaces, peaces and world system theory, as well as, in his newest works, the contributions of transpersonal psychology to peace studies.

His best known and often quoted contribution to peace studies is the Call for Many Peaces published in 1998 and republished in 2006^[3]. Therein Wolfgang Dietrich dissolves the notion of a homogenous, universal peace in the plurality of the many peaces and thus establishes an approach, which is founded in respect towards the Other, without however deriving thereof the necessity of understanding this Otherness in all its facets or having to share opinions. Peace is thus thought in the sense of “many peaces” as a noun with a plural. He asserts that what peace means differs on closer inspection from culture to culture and the connotations and etymological interpretations of the concept of “peace” do not coincide in different languages, but are an expression of the plurality of worldviews and perceptions of the societies speaking those languages. Peace so no longer signifies an arrival in the utopian paradise at the end of all days, but implies a concretely livable societal process of conflict transformation. Dietrich so further distinguishes between a moral understanding of peace and those cosmovisions which energetically are oriented towards the establishment and maintaining of harmonious relations between humans, nature and cosmos.

This approach inaugurated by Wolfgang Dietrich is didactically implemented and practically applied at the Innsbruck school of Peace Studies^[4].

[edit] Selected Bibliography

Peaces – an Aesthetic Concept, a Moral Need or a Transrational Virtue? in: Asteriskos. Journal of International and Peace Studies, Volume 1/2, 2006, Seite 25-47.
(Ed.): REAL 2006 - Relaciones Europa - América Latina y la cuestión de la pobreza, el desarrollo y la democracia, Wien, Diálogo/25, 2006.
(Ed.): Schlüsseltexte der Friedensforschung/Key Texts of Peace Studies/Textos claves de estudios para la paz, Wien, LIT Verlag, 2006.
La marimba: lenguaje musical y secreto de la violencia política en Guatemala; in: América Latina Hoy - Revista de Ciencias Sociales Vol 35. Salamanca/Spain, December 2003.
(Ed.): International Intervention in the Post-Cold War World - Moral Responsibility and Power Politics; New York/London, 2003.
Farewell to the One Peace, in: Peace Review, Journal of Social Justice, San Francisco, Volume 14/1, 2002.

[edit] Sources

^ http://www.tirol.gv.at/peacestudies/
^ http://www.lai.at/
^ A Call for Many Peaces, in: Dietrich/Echavarría/Koppensteiner (eds.): Key Texts of Peace Studies, Vienna, LIT Verlag, 2006. pages 282-305
^ http://www.tirol.gv.at/peacestudies/