Postmodern peaces co-emerge with the modern ones, as their critical and doubting counterpart. The postmodern state of mind ensues whenever the promises of modernity are no longer believed in. Postmodernity thus refers to the disillusionment, disbelief and fear created by Modernity’s wars and violence (particularly in the twentieth century), when the promises of peace out of security proved to be so harmful and caused so much pain. For finding orientation in this devastation, plurality appears as the key term for postmodern philosophy.
Abstaining from a modern foundation in singularity and embracing plurality, postmodern understandings of peace celebrate the exuberant multiplicity of lived existence without looking for resolving tensions between contradictions but twisting the dogmatism of modernity’s reason, turning its analytical tools on itself. Therefore, postmodern understandings remain small, local and contextual. They do not promise hope for reconciliation in non-dual Oneness, nor do they provide certainties, since there is no source of ultimate authority and hence peaces can only be defined in concrete encounters. Postmodern peaces need to be reinvented and struggled for anew, since they perpetually remain transitory and unstable.
Based on the above, we see how the question of truth gains special importance in postmodern approaches to peace. By refraining from a singular modern truth, postmodern peaces necessarily call for the existence of plural notions of truth. Against the idea of a true modern and rational founding principle, postmodern peaces seek to find the truth in every human encounter, which creates then many different variations of truth relative to each encounter, because only those who are involved in it can define what truth – for them, in their particular context – means to them. This implies that, if for instance a third party would join such encounter, a new truth needs to be found. The result then is a plurality of truths in peace research and practice, hence Many Peaces of the concrete encounter, of ‘you’ and ‘me’, in the here and now.
