Foreword

For much of the profession and research field of peace studies, if I may use a provocative metaphor, we seem stuck in the era of silent films. We have ignored the soundscape, the ever present, surrounding and penetrating presence of vibration within human experience, through which the perceptive, emotional, and interpretive schemes that shape the human search for meaning and response emerge, adapt, and respond. As mentioned in a previous work, Jacques Attali located this issue in a much larger context when he wrote: ‘For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for the hearing. It is not legible, but audible’ (2004, 10)…