José Manuel Pureza
Teresa Cravo

Critical margin and legitimation in Peace Studies (pp.5-19)
Historically constituted as critical knowledge and, thus, as an alternative to normal science in International Relations, Peace Studies came to be coopted, in the 1990s, by the regulatory structures of the international system as the foundation for many of the options put into practice, especially in postwar reconstruction processes. In this context, the recovering of the critical lineage of Peace Studies today involves two radical options. The first is the qualification of the intended peace as sustainable peace. The second is the epistemological decolonization of Peace Studies.

Håkan Wiberg

Peace Research: Past, present, future  (pp.21-42)
The trajectory of affirmation of peace research as a discipline has been marked at different moments by identity crises, expressed in dense epistemological debates. As a result of its dilemmatic growth, Peace Research is today still dominated by three fundamental questions which this text attempts to discuss. The first is its orientation towards specific values and policies; the second is related to its place in a contested cognitive territory; the third involves the importance given to non-violence in processes of political change.

Vicent Martínez Guzmán

Philosophy and Peace Research (pp.43-62)
As human beings, we have skills for organizing our relationships that make use of war and other types of structural, cultural and symbolic violence that presuppose the marginalization, exclusion and death of human beings and the degradation of the environment. But we also undoubtedly have skills for organizing our relationships in a peaceful way: expressing tenderness and care in interpersonal relations or creating local, state or global institutions of governance that promote human relations based on justice, as well as relations with nature based on sustainability. In this context, the philosophical challenge of Peace Studies involves the normative reconstruction of our peacemaking skills.

Johan Galtung

Three forms of violence, three forms of peace. Peace, war, and the Indo‑European social formation (pp.63-75)
In social formations, forms of violence coexist with forms of peace. This article analyzes the coexistence, in the Indo‑European social formation, of cultural violence (the production of ideas that justify the other forms of violence) with cultural peace (cooperation and empathy with all forms of life); of direct violence (physical elimination of the other) with direct peace (non-violent forms of control, with positive sanctions); and of structural violence (systemic mechanisms of injustice and death) with structural peace (the fulfillment of basic needs and the distribution of goods and services).

Tatiana Moura

Newest wars, newest peaces. Conceptual and political challenges  (pp.77-96)
This text gives an account of the emergence of a new type of organized armed violence (newest wars), which occurs at an increasingly micro level, but manifests itself, like the new wars, at the global level. The discussion has two aims: first, to make visible and “real” contexts that have been seen as marginal, and that may constitute a prelude to an even more disseminated conflictuality in the future; second, to stimulate thinking about new ways of responding to the insecurities brought on by this type of newest war.

Rodrigo Tavares

Why is Europe a peaceful region? A new framework for analysis (pp.97-112)
Although the pacification of Europe is a process that was set into motion in the early 1950s, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that sparked a flurry of publications that aimed to describe and explain how such an achievement was possible. After this initial theoretical enthusiasm, the current decrease in the research output is proportionally inverse to the growth of integrative linkages in the European Union. This article argues that the old epistemological tools for understanding the pacification of Europe are becoming obsolete as they are embedded in a regional context that no longer exists. In order to overcome this shortcoming, this article introduces a new interpretative framework based on the idea of regional peace and security complexes (RPSC). European RPSC is approached from a comprehensive historical perspective.

Elísio Estanque

Labor, social inequalities and trade unionism (pp.113-140)
In recent years, the world of labor has been affected by a vast array of changes in the context of the global economy in which we live and under the effects of different transnational forces and institutions. Resorting to examples from recent empirical studies carried out by the author, the present paper analyzes and discusses the ongoing processes of change, starting from problems related to the world of labor and connecting them to the broader issue of inequalities and social classes. The main aim is to make a diagnosis and a critical interpretation of some of those changes in Portuguese society, showing their relevance, significance and implications for trade unionism. Thus, after a critical reflection on the new lines of segmentation of the labor market and social inequalities, the text points to a set of questions concerning trade unionism, offering points for further critical reflection and analysis of the experiences and problems which it currently confronts.

Hermes Augusto Costa

The international policy of CGTP and CUT: Stages, themes and challenges (pp.141-161)
Although it exists within national trade union organizations, international relations policy (IRP) is like a “poor relative” of national trade unionism. The first part of this text makes a brief description of some of the current obstacles to the construction of an IRP; the second part addresses the space that the two major union confederations of Portugal and Brazil (CGTP and CUT, respectively) have been giving to an IRP. Based on research conducted in the last five years on these union confederations, the author proposes a distribution of IRP stages for CGTP and CUT, summarizing, in the third part, the similarities and differences between the two in what concerns this issue.