9 Towards a Global Ethics of Non-violence Charles P. Webel and Soia Khaydari Introduction About 80 years ago, at the height of the Great Depression, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud engaged in one of the twentieth century’s most famous epistolary exchanges, commencing on 30 July 1932, when Einstein addressed ‘the most insistent of all problems civilisation has to face …: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’ Both Einstein and Freud, who were ‘congenital paciists’, agreed that the selish and rapacious instincts of political and economic elites contribute signiicantly to warfare, and, to mitigate this, a supra-national organisation with the power to tame these belligerents should be created. In 1945, the United Nations came into existence in San Francisco, and central to its peace-making and peacekeeping mission was the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, based in part on the assumptions that non-violent means of conlict resolution are preferable to violence, and that there exist global human values all nations and transnational organisations need to airm and institutionalise. 1 Unfortunately, despite the creation of the United Nations, humanity has not been delivered from its bellicosity, and a ‘global ethics’ in general, with non-violence at its core, is far from realisation. To understand the desirability but seeming fancifulness of a ‘global ethics’ with non-violence as one of its cardinal values, it is helpful to examine the theoretical and empirical foundations, as well as the possible shortcomings, of global values in general and non-violence in particular. his can aid our understanding of human potentials that are everpresent but unseen in ordinary circumstances, in part due to the mass media’s obsession with ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ events and their consequent neglect of the many successes of non-violent resistance, revolution and related forms of peace- making. Since our framework for addressing these questions is generally from the ield of Peace and Conlict Studies (PCS), we will begin by explicating the utility of PCS for global ethics in general and the value of non-violence in particular. 9781472507952_txt_print.indd 153 17/02/2015 13:42