What follows is from Johan Galtung`s writings.  He says that the vicious cycle of violence can only be solved by a virtuous cycle comprising the problem of reconstruction after direct violence, reconciliation of the conflict parties and resolution of the underlying root conflict.  If you do only one of these three without the other two you will not even get that one.  Reconstruction without removing the causes of violence will lead to its reproduction.  Badly needed is theory and practice combining all three. What does combining mean??  The first model refers reconstruction to `developers`, reconciliation to theologians-psychologists and resolution to jurist-diplomats-politicians.  The second model would fuse the tasks into one, based on a fundamental hypothesis:  reconciliation can best take place when the parties cooperate in resolution and reconstruction.  And this may also be where the road to peace is located, if peace is defined as the capacity to handle conflicts with empathy, nonviolence (here is where we come in) and creativity.

Note: Galtung always speaks of the ABC triangle of any conflict: Attitudes, Behaviours and (the) Contradiction.  For attitudes you need empathy, for behaviours nonviolence and for contradiction, creativity. There is a lot of meat there!!  And this leads me to my favorite present meditation peace: John Paul Lederach`s moral imagination.  He says that to transcend violence we need to generate, mobilize and build the moral imagination which has four components: relationship, paradoxical curiosity, creativity and risk.  I.e, we need to develop a capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies, the ability to sustain a paradoxical curitosity that embraces comnplexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act, and the acceptance of inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond
the far too familiar landscape of violence.

So what do you think?  Isn`t all this thought provoking?
If you want more on Galtung`s theories, there is a lot you can download free
from his web site.

With best regards from Veronica in Buenos Aires, Argentina.