Transcendent International

Interview

Interview with Johan Galtung:

“this Transcendent International organization of which you are, I think, the founder of or at least pretty central to. Can you maybe tell us a little bit of about that? What its function, its purpose is?

We’re just having the 20th anniversary now. It was founded in 1993 and there were four ideas from the very beginning. Transcend peace service – which is essentially mediation, mediation of conflict, of trauma mediation, of building equitable and harmonious relations. In other words positive peace, if you will. The second one is of course education and training so we have transcend peace university online at www.transcend.org. That is where you can find everything and Transcendent University press which has published some 22 books by now on all these kinds of issues and the third pillar is dissemination. We have Transcendent Media Service which has had about 10,000 postings and I write an editorial every Monday which seems to be quite demanded; it’s actually copied one way or the other in about 70 countries. The fourth one is research. Right now we’re working on the octagon model. The world is getting multipolar. It was bipolar for a short period, then it was unipolar during the U.S.-dominated phase, but it is getting very multipolar and we think there are eight and we’re exploring the dangers and the opportunities.” (http://blog.unpacampaign.org/2013/08/johan-galtung-on-the-era-of-accelerated-history-and-a-multipolar-world-order/)