ABOUT

About the Center
  2. About
  3. About the Center

About the Center

About the Center

About the Center

Since the emergence of humankind, peace and well-being have been the most comprehensive process and the ultimate goal that define the essence and existence of human being in its entirety.

This has held true across the individual and the world, nature and religion, and lived reality and scholarship alike.

Background

Beyond the Disciplines:
Toward Integrative Peace Research

  1. 01
    Interstate and International Peace
    Centered on Political Science

    Yet peace research has focused mainly on interstate and international peace, centered on political science. Alternatively, it has developed in fragmented form: social peace in the social sciences, spiritual peace in theology, and bodily harmony and health in medicine. Such disciplinary approaches can neither explain in an integrated way a peace that encompasses the world and the planet, society and the individual, and the inner and the outer, nor offer substantive alternatives.

  2. 02
    Korea’s Living and Human Ecosystems
    in Profound Crisis

    Korean scholarship in particular, despite the painful realities of human life in Korea, has yet to undertake a sustained effort to explain human existence in its entirety in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary manner. As numerous international surveys show, life in Korea today reveals some of the highest levels of conflict and anxiety in the world, both inwardly and outwardly, for individuals and communities alike. Its social conflict index, suicide rate, and birth rate, which rank among the worst in the world, show that Korea’s living and human ecosystems face a profound crisis.

  3. 03
    A Fundamental and Integrated Rethinking
    and Reconstruction, in Scholarship and Practice

    With recurring wars, severe inequality, the coexistence of rapid population growth and decline, the climate emergency, the advent of the AI era, and a civilizational shift, the world and humankind, nature and the planet are entering an entirely new era. This great transformation shows an urgent need for a fundamental and integrated rethinking and reconstruction, in both scholarship and practice.

Human Peace

Human Peace: A Foundational Concept
Across the Dimensions of Peace

To this end, the Center for Human Peace and Healing (CHPH) seeks to introduce Human Peace as a new concept and a new value.

Human Peace is a foundational conceptual framework that cuts across and integrates, on multiple levels, personal peace, social peace, world peace, the peace of humankind, and planetary peace.

Concepts and Practices

  • Health
  • Freedom
  • Equality
  • Recovery
  • Salvation
  • Healing
  • Well-being
  • Safety
  • Stability
  • Survival
  • Harmony
  • Coexistence

It is an attempt to restore and reconstruct the primordial and ultimate character of the concept of peace, one that embraces at once the concepts and practices of health, freedom, equality, recovery, salvation, healing, well-being, safety, stability, survival, harmony, and coexistence.

Scales

  • Personal PeaceInner and outer peace; peace of mind and peace of body
  • Social PeacePeace within communities and states
  • World PeacePeace among nations and peace of the world
  • Planetary PeacePeace with nature and with non-human entities

Provisionally, Human Peace encompasses personal peace (inner and outer peace; peace of mind and of body), social peace (peace within communities and states), world peace (peace among nations and peace of the world), and planetary peace (peace with nature and with non-human entities). Yet even bodily peace alone is connected across every scale, from the mind to the planet. Human Peace therefore takes as its central task the elucidation of the biological, natural, environmental, and cosmic conditions of human existence across every scale, from the personal and social to the world and the planet, and of the order of the entire living ecosystem.

Five Axes

Five Central Axes

This is a rather ambitious attempt to restore, connect, and comprehend the grand system of human, biological, natural, and cosmic existence handed down since classical antiquity; that is, to grasp the system of systems, the order of orders, and the peace of peace. In short, CHPH weaves together inner and outer peace with social, world, and planetary peace, and explores in an integrated way the essential conditions and the essence of being as a whole.

01 / 05

Life · Biology · Climate · Nature

The Center conducts its research around five domains as its central axes: life, biology, climate, and nature; spirit, faith, and religion; medicine, health, and healing; economy, society, welfare, and population; and politics, law, and institutions.

Optimal Peace

Optimal Peace / Optimal Well-being

optimal peace / pax optimus

Through interdisciplinary synthesis and imagination, CHPH explores and designs the conditions, composition, and architecture of a multilayered Integral Peace across living, human, and planetary ecosystems. Beginning with an inquiry into human nature and proceeding through an in-depth analysis of the desires and systems of individuals and societies, it seeks to reconstruct holistically the dimensions of conflict and coexistence that extend to the state and the world order, together with the formation and forms of institutions.

We inquire into the human conditions, circumstances, and institutions of optimal peace / optimal well-being (pax optimus).

We envision the creation of a perpetual optimal state (optimatio perpetua), our highest goal.