Postcommunism as a condition is not restricted to the former communist states but affects the rest of the world. The long after-life of the revolutionary socialist challenge continues to shape Western polities. Even after the dissolution of the communist order and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989–91, the instruments and practices devised to counter the communist and Soviet threat not only survived but radicalised. The Political West, formed in and shaped by cold war, lives on in the form of NATO and the entirety of the cold war security arrangements, as well as the ideological apparatus and the military–industrial complex of the Trumanite state. Nevertheless, the collapse of communism unravelled the consensus focused on Cold War imperatives and opened up the terrain to new forms of contestation. Class politics gave way to culture wars and technocratic ‘third way’ depoliticised governance practices. In international affairs, the cold peace lasted a bare 25 years before full-scale cold war was reignited with Russia in 2014 (over Ukraine) and with China in 2018 (trade war). The notion of cold war is misleading if it simply suggests a rehash of the earlier conflict, but my argument is that cold war entails a certain style of international politics in the nuclear age, a distinctive culture, based on an enduring pattern of hostility between consistently aligned groups of protagonists, contesting not only militarily but also through economic and ideational antagonisms. This in turn has profound domestic effects, reproducing patterns of control, information management and imposed consensus on the key issues of the day. Cold war binaries are restored, in which one side claims to be on the right side of history and to speak the truth while the adversary is historically anachronistic and spews only falsehoods and ‘disinformation’.

Wars of Reality

Cold War II is more amorphous but no less dangerous and pervasive than the first. The regimes of truth established by classical concepts of liberalism and socialism, ‘based on a belief in the limitless power and normative value of the mind’, have dissolved. In the absence of clearcut ideological divisions and the erosion of the civic culture of high modernity, the distinction between truth and falsehood breaks down. Mediatised narratives and the culture of the spectacle themselves became the terrain of contestation.

Writers on pacifism and nonviolence share an implicit assumption that to become nonviolent, as societies, groups or individuals, is actually possible. However, the dominant narrative of human history has focused on violent actions—what historian Francisco A. Muñoz termed “violentology” (Gay 2016 ). This dominant historical narrative is unremittingly deterministic. In other words, that humanity might choose a pacifistic or nonviolent future is unlikely based on human history. As with all deterministic ideologies—whether religious, biological, sociological or historical—free will, the ability to make choices that might result in differing future outcomes that are not predetermined, is a chimera. If the narrative is true, and if it can be demonstrated that the human animal is, in fact, determined for violence rather than nonviolence or pacifism, then the work of nonviolent philosophy and activism is futile.

Historical determinism has been buttressed by biological positivistic frameworks that have suggested that the human animal is, in fact, hardwired for aggression and violence and no amount of wishful thinking will change that fact of nature (Wilson 1975, 2015; Dawkins 1989). I will offer, below, a more hopeful prognosis. I suggest that the possibility of becoming nonviolent is a warranted assumption based on recent studies in the psychology of peace (Christie et al. 2001, MacNair 2003), that humanity has the potentiality and resourcefulness for empathy and nonviolence (Midgely 1995; Rifkin 2009; Pinker 2011; Krznaric 2014) and that a spiritual practice of the habituation of nonviolence suggests a realistic hope for a nonviolent future (Simpkins and Simpkins 2011, 2012). This is, however, not a deterministic viewpoint, and the future remains open. I will not suggest that a nonviolent future is inevitable—humanity may yet destroy itself, and much of the planet with it—but rather, and more modestly, that humanity has the potentiality for nonviolence that is often obscured by the dominant violentological narratives.

However, before that I look briefly at the sometimes conflicted findings of sociobiology, and the more recent field of neurophilosophy, that have presented the most serious challenge to the assumption that humanity might choose nonviolence over violence.

In this chapter, I take a fresh look at that way of being pacifist called nonresistance. I suggest that those of us committed to nonviolence would do well to revisit some of the emphases of this earlier, and now often maligned, movement.

Pacifist Types

First, I need to clarify different ways of being “pacifist.” In the literature, “pacifist” is used in two ways. In older literature, pacifist stood for any ideology or theory that is in some way related to peace. The English word “pacifist” is a transliteration of the Latin pacifici meaning peacemaker (Hershberger 1944 , 172). In more recent literature, it is more common to narrowly define pacifism as an opposition to war. On occasion, though pacifist has meant opposition to war, it has not been an opposition to all forms of violence. For example, war may be opposed, but personal self-defense accepted, as might the violence of the criminal justice system and police violence. At other times, pacifist has stood for opposition to all forms of violence, of which war is only one kind. Pacifism has also been modified, as in “nuclear pacifism.” Here, pacifism is not opposition to “conventional” war, but to war that involves the use of nuclear—and often biological and chemical—warfare. In other words, nuclear pacifism is opposition to war when WMDs would be threatened or used. When people embrace pacifism or oppose pacifism (as in Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology), it is not always clear what way of being pacifist is included.

In any discussion of pacifism, clarity is needed as to the use of the word. In this chapter, for analytical purposes, I suggest four ideal types of pacifism. I am using “types” in the particular and technical sense favored by Max Weber. He suggested that ideal types are mental constructs used to under-stand complex social institutions and to provide for comparative analyses (1949, 89–95). An ideal type is a term applied to an agglomeration of characteristics to which social institutions may be compared. Unlike the Platonic forms, ideal types are rooted in empirical phenomena as observed in human history and social development.

Why Is It Essential to Learn about Leadership?

Unless someone has been rendered comatose and marooned on a deserted tropical island for the better part of two decades, most individuals have a fairly good idea about the importance of leadership. Once our marooned individual finally gets rescued and resuscitated, I would imagine that he or she will immediately grasp the importance of leadership too. On the other hand, you, my gentle reader, probably already know the importance of leadership, especially how essential it is for a person to learn about leadership, and indeed practice effective leadership himself or herself. Why else would you be clutching a copy of this book (or a Kindle unit for the eBook aficionados out there)? Well, it could also probably be due to the Fido factor, but more on that after this early introduction.

Therefore, if for some reason, you need a refresher on the importance of leadership, then this introduction to the book (and indeed the entire book) will serve as one. Leadership is perhaps one of the most valued traits/positions throughout the world, and has invited a lot of attention to it across contexts and disciplines. Books, monographs, and articles on leadership are ubiquitous—a Google, a DuckDuckGo, or a Bing search will reveal millions of results on the topic of leadership. There are hundreds of institutes and universities worldwide that have programs or courses on leadership. Some journals exist primarily to showcase scholarly articles on leadership (e.g., Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Leadership Studies, Leadership, etc.). And of course, there is no real or artificial shortage of leadership book titles either. Many books on leadership exist, and this current volume is one in that number. I myself have written one of those books (that book uses a Harry Potter context to explain leadership). However, there is one aspect that is unique to this book—I allude of course to the canine context, which I have juxtaposed with the leadership context.

Hmm[…] it is also likely that you are a dog lover, as many folks around the globe tend to be. Perhaps, the title of the book caught your attention, and why wouldn't it, after all?

Sometime before war became permanent and before political violence became overtly intertwined with recovering national greatness, joining the US Coast Guard seemed like a reasonable idea. It seemed reasonable partly to extend a life at sea without having to do what we Westies called “humping creates.” From what I saw as a kid from those round-the-clock shifts going on at the port, a longshoreman's existence loading woodchips, cement, rice, and fertilizer, bound for China and Japan, always seemed as exotic as it was forbidding. Better stick with construction on terra ferma and closer to home. If swinging a hammer for living meant rising in the predawn hours and suffering the summer heat, and even with its share of heavy lifting, at least you could go home at night.

Weekends could also be your own. My weekends meant working just a half-day on Friday to make the bus out of the valley to the coast before the evening fog set in. It felt generous of the boss to understand because this kind of work was hardly work at all. A deckhand on a salmon boat in the Pacific Northwest enjoyed remarkable scenery, cool temperatures, salty breezes, innumerable cross-species encounters, and characters galore. Exhaustion never felt as satisfying as it did on the dock after who knows how many hours riding swells. You could fish, trolling for hours, and not catch, but still walk away with some money in your pocket as well as some good stories to tell. If the bite was on and the wholesale price was right, a good weekend's haul could bring in enough to cover a year of state college tuition. And that promised work of still a different kind. The boat meant for me the last bastion of unalienated labor, which is eventually how I thought about professing English once my tuition was paid.

But, as deck hand, I had no need for college; and what's more curious still, no one in my family had ever spoken of college and respectable employment in the same breath. College was at best conceived as a momentary escape from the inevitable grind of people who actually work. Those two terms—college and work—were as alienated from each other as was the idea, once I got toward the end of my first degree, that I’d go on for two more.

This topic was slated for an earlier placement in the book, but then while writing the book, I figured that a previous chapter made more sense to be moved up, so it became prudent to move trust down to this chapter instead. Trust is another quality that is integrally tied to effective leadership. The whole point of leadership is to be able to influence followers, and in optimal cases, be able to influence them without coercion. You have to get them to follow you despite any rewards or punishments—the key to doing that is Trust. When followers trust their leaders, they are more willing to stick up for and support their leader's plans and visions. And ditto for leaders—if they trust their followers, they are more likely to listen to their followers and more likely to practice an empowering style of leadership with them as opposed to the dreary and dread-inducing micromanagement style of leading. which needless to say signals a lack of trust on the leader's behalf, and also ensures that the followers never trust their leader either.

In this chapter, I will focus on the concept of trust, and discuss how important and essential it is in establishing effective leadership. Without trust, one may as well take one's ball home and call it a day. Trust is integral in helping people follow and adhere to a vision set by the leader. There is a plethora of ways by which leaders can help their followers trust them, and I will discuss some of those behaviors in this particular chapter. When it comes to followers, it is important for leaders to trust them as well. It is absolutely suboptimal to have situations or conditions where only followers trust their leaders, but the leaders don't reciprocate the trust back.

Dogs are synonymous with trust—after all, the old saying about a person's best friend being his or her dog exists for a reason. Another human being may betray your trust over trivial or nontrivial matters, but a dog will never do that. Humans trust their dogs for a reason, and dogs too trust their humans (although sadly, in some cases, the trust is misplaced, and many of those humans aren't worthy of that level of trust). But if the humans in question are indeed worthy of that loyalty, then it's pure perfection.

Sometimes a text shows up at the right moment, more or less, so long as one is attentive and willing to connect. William Cullen Bryant's “Thanatopsis” showed up for me when I was 17. The story of why I needed it started several years earlier.

I was standing next to my parents’ bed. Struggling to get up, my father vomited on the sheets, then managed to sit up, his feet flat on the floor. “I hope the hell I’m happy,” he kept saying. I stood there, helplessly watching, and tried to say it wasn't a big deal. “It makes more work for you and Mom,” he declared.

He was battling a cancer already advanced when it was diagnosed a couple of weeks earlier. Within another week, he was dead. He was 53. I was 13.

It was my brother, older than I by 12 years, who woke me in the middle of the night to tell me Dad had died. He gave me a back rub, commented on how skinny I was, and rejoined the others in the kitchen. When someone dies in the middle of the night, people show up. I lay in the dark, listening to them arrive. I thought I should cry, and I really tried, but the tears wouldn't come. Did that make me a bad son?

When I went into the kitchen, my uncle, who was in the hospital room when Dad died, passed along that my father had said I should only be a priest if I really wanted to, not to please him. Back when I told Dad that I was thinking about the priesthood, his response was, “I’d sure be proud.” It was a real gift to get the word, as if from beyond the grave, that it was okay with Dad if I didn't go that way.

It was in high school, American Lit., that I first encountered Bryant's “Thanatopsis.” At the time, I was an indifferent student in quite a literal sense. Decades later, I spoke with the teacher of that class, who described to me what a frustrating student I had been. Reading and writing all the time, I was indifferent to what my teachers assigned. My former teacher generously said he was impressed by what I was reading on my own, though I read only just enough of the class assignments to get by.

Cold War I ended in 1989, but the competitive logic that provoked the conflict was not transcended. The anticipated transformation in the conduct of international politics failed to be realised and instead cold war assumed new forms. This gave rise to the quarter century of the cold peace to 2014. The instruments that had fought the original cold war remained in place. On the Western side, this above all means NATO, which after some hesitation expanded from the 16 members when the Cold War ended to 32 by 2024. NATO is reinforced by the vast military–industrial and security–intelligence complex in the United States, as well as America's extensive network of bilateral security agreements spanning the globe, notably the security treaties with Japan and South Korea.

On the Russian side, the security apparatus inherited from the Soviet Union was reorganised but only partially reformed. The system as a whole remains largely in place. The Lubyanka building in central Moscow remains the headquarters of what is now called the Federal Security Service; the Foreign Intelligence Service inherited the buildings and networks of similarly profiled departments of the Soviet KGB, while military intelligence (the GRU) continues much as before. Destabilised by the Soviet collapse and the profound economic crisis of the 1990s, under Vladimir Putin's leadership the country regained confidence and coherence. The crunch issue between the two sides was NATO enlargement, but this was only symbolic of the larger failure to create an overarching security order encompassing the entire continent from Lisbon to Vladivostok. On assuming the presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin sought to resolve the potential security dilemma by suggesting that Russia should join NATO. This was rejected by Washington, since it would threaten its undisputed leadership of the Atlantic alliance and change the character of the Political West in its entirety. More profoundly, if all the countries of Europe joined NATO, then against whom would the collective defence body defend? If all joined, then perhaps none needed to?

Pragmatism is a deep vein in the American psyche, and not merely the more philosophical kind exemplified in John Dewey and William James. On occasion, as an “expatriate Brit,” I find the everyday American focus on valuing that which works refreshing. Old Europe is full of that which no longer works. And who wants to be bothered with something that doesn't work? Yet, this practical bent refreshes only sometimes. Max Weber's rational irrationality, doing things “just because,” also has its merits. I suspect that it is Weber's irrationality that gives life a sense of meaning—but that is for another occasion. In this article, I want to take a closer look at pragmatism and the war in Iraq. In what sense has it worked?

This seam of pragmatism is, perhaps, why there has been much talk in the U.S. media of whether and in what ways the war in Iraq has worked. It seems the American public is more easily persuaded by pragmatic than idealistic argument. The enormous cost of a prolonged war is only worth it—in dollars, lives and U.S. worldwide prestige—if it can be shown that it has worked. President Bush's “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, was perhaps a clear appropriation of this insight.

Those opposed to the war have been tempted to argue from two different, but still pragmatic standpoints. First, wars never work and, therefore, all wars are wrong. Second, this particular war has not worked and should not have been engaged in. A well-fought war in Afghanistan (or perhaps, Iran) would have worked better.

The first argument is similar to the argument that violence never works. The problem with the argument is that it is quite clear that in some circumstances violence does work. The bully who wants the smaller boy's candy punches the boy and takes his snack. Violence works and the bully repeats the violence as required. A mother wants her obstreperous child to be quiet. The daughter continues to play up. In exasperation, the mother lashes out. The child is hurt but becomes quiet. Violence works. Goals are achieved.

The first time I saw a performance of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, I felt cheated. It's not as if the playwright had not done this before: we never do know what motivated Iago, despite the grab bag of possibilities he offers. And, with Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, we never know why he is so sad. But this time, my displeasure was too strong to ignore: Leontes, who would appear to have had a loving relationship with his wife, now decides that Hermione has been unfaithful, his “proof” her “paddling palms” with Polixenes and her success at persuading her husband's long-time friend to stay. Leontes’ jealousy seemed so sudden—and so unlikely. Was the world's greatest playwright getting lazy, simply telling us that Leontes had become insanely jealous but not troubling himself to dramatize what got him there? Was this literary license, or had the playwright decided, late in his career, that he no longer had to justify his characters’ feelings and deeds? For years, Leontes’ unexplained jealousy and its dire consequences kept me from appreciating the wonder of this play.

I suppose I could have avoided productions of The Winter's Tale, but back in the eighties I was co-editor of Shakespeare Bulletin and felt I should see every production within reach. In the early years of my 20-year editorship, I saw a number of Winter's Tales, but each new production only reinforced my distrust of Shakespeare. Now I was fretting over the playwright's imperfections: There was no seacoast in Bohemia (or so I thought), and I wasn't sure that Bohemia had bears. And so much else was unbelievable: Where, for example, had Hermione been those 16 years? I knew I was ruining my relationship with Will when, instead of being moved to tears by Paulina's command to the statue—“descend; be stone no more”—I found myself moaning, “Oh, you want too much.”

In the eighties, directors were struggling with how to stage Leontes’ jealousy. How could the actor play his jealousy when Shakespeare didn't bother to let us know why he was jealous? I recalled Gitta Honegger's production at the Yale Rep, which began with an interpolated scene.

Assigned readings often solicit the same complaint from students: “It's boring. I can't relate.” Why, the frustrated teacher might be tempted to ask, should a novel or poem cater to you? Is the demand for relatability not a form of narcissism? Of course, the teacher must resist condescension and take the concerns of the student seriously. A teaching moment presents itself: reading, we might profess, is about the experience of otherness. Reading should force the reader to inhabit a specific place, a specific person, and a specific circumstance. Reading should take us beyond ourselves.

There is a long tradition of arguments dating back to the Romantics that corroborate. In the high theoretical register, one can point to the work of Maurice Blanchot, as well as his more widely discussed heirs, who coined the idea of the “space of literature” to describe the sense of alterity that we encounter in the act of reading. Many of our modern masters dramatize the experience. It often occurs when a character confronts a uniquely different individual, encounters a ghost, undergoes a moment of recognition or epiphany, or recalls a powerful memory. Think William Wordsworth, Henry James, or Virginia Woolf.

The experience of otherness causes the stable contours of identity to fissure. Witnessing the ghost or the visitation of a lost memory enables a character to observe an alternative self: who they were, may have been, or could be. They recognize, in other words, the contingencies of life that call attention to the fallibility of their self-assured identity. We call such moments the sublime and value their ability to transform us. They can redress trauma, heal wounds, or simply enable us to learn and grow. We also fear the experience of otherness. It can reopen wounds or spark uncomfortable change. These are experiences of pleasure and pain at once that sometimes go by the name jouissance.

The theoretical stakes of alterity buttress a pedagogical necessity. Reading for otherness does not merely allow us access to a higher self or reveal the emptiness of the self. More broadly, the experience of otherness helps us discover the range of human potentiality.

I begin with the observation that to sustain a life focused on peacemaking and issues of justice—the two are closely related—sustenance for the journey is found, as often as not, within a spiritual tradition. More particularly, it is the practice of spirituality in a MacIntyrean/Aristotelian sense (which I will explain my use of below) that is profoundly important. The intent is not to turn atheists into theists, nor to proselytize for any religion. Rather, the general notion is that for those of religious persuasion, practice (which I emphasize rather than any beliefs or propositions which a religious person may hold) is important in shaping the life of a would-be peacemaker.

Of course, to say so begs the question, “What is spirituality?” In the answer lies the first major problem as any definition will run the gauntlet of being either too particularistic or too reductionist. To sidestep the complexity (as did Weber in his Sociology of Religion refusing to grant a definition before his analysis of substance) and following William James's example, I will develop an understanding which is adequate for this chapter but which is inadequate, perhaps, in other contexts. By “spirituality,” then, I mean a focus on what we might call the “interior life” and those religious, ritualistic activities which sustain each of us in our deepest and truest selves. It may be said that spirituality is a movement toward the true knowledge of the divine (in whatever way conceived—personal, impersonal, the transcendent, and the One) together with the true knowledge of the self. In neo-Platonic terms, “the fully real is fully knowable, not fully known here, but fully knowable” (Inge 1947, 15). James's definition of “religion” comes close as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men [sic] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

This chapter contains my semi-structured interviews’ content and themes analysis. This qualitative research approach involved seven in-depth semi-structured interviews (life stories) of (one each) women from seven tehsils (sub-districts) of the District Swat because my main objective was to carry forward the actual terrifying painful voices of the Pukhtun women in terror and displacement. Due to the sensitivity of the research topic, most of the Swat inhabitants till date are not comfortable conversing about the Taliban and armed conflict. I reassured my sample women that the content of the research exercise would be confidential, and their identity would not be revealed. Therefore, I gave fake names to my sample women to identify them throughout the research process. For the sample women, I randomly selected students from the University of Swat because they were students of secondary and higher secondary education at the time of conflict. All the interviews took place in the university premises; however, they were in touch till the end of postdoctoral studies completion. Thus, the study scrutinises the actual role of women in peace, terror and displacement during 2007–11.

I classified my sample women's experiences into three broad sections: pre-conflict, during the conflict and post-conflict, which are further classified as follows:

• • Education under Peace, Patriarchy and Pukhtunwali

• • Education under Armed Conflict

• • Education under Displacement

• • Education under Burnt Ashes

It is worthwhile to mention here that a comprehensive Appendix of my seven sample women's biographies is added in this book to understand women's own sentiments and voices. The contents and themes analysis evolve around gender dynamic roles, patriarchy and educational provisions under armed conflict. Terror in the valley brought two behavioural stances in my sample women; complete isolation from education and an act of challenging radical courage, ‘I must continue my education by any means’ (Kashmala) by putting life in a dangerous situation.

Education under Peace, Patriarchy and Pukhtunwali

As mentioned earlier the princely Swat state (1917–69) was founded on a modern social structure. The wali (ruler) introduced multiple customary and Islamic laws to maintain peace among the native Pukhtun tribes (Rome, 2008) and developed communication, education and health institutions for boys and girls.