What is peace?

At the core of electronic dance music (EDM) is a cosmopolitan philosophy of peace, love, unity, and respect (PLUR). As manifested in EDM, the concept of PLUR is reminiscent of the Kantian notion expressed in the philosopher’s pivotal writing Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view), in which he stressed the exquisiteness of calm and peace in people’s daily lives.

In order to investigate the possible relationship between this Kantian perspective and PLUR, I adopted a participant observation approach while attending some famous music clubs in Ibiza, as well as several EDM music festivals, including the Ultra Music Festival in Miami and Singapore, S2O in Bangkok, and EDC in Tokyo. At the 2016 Ultra Music Festival in Miami, techno music listeners from around the world expressed strong solidarity, and participants were very open to sharing and performing the idea of PLUR.

Conversely, although festival-goers in Bangkok and Tokyo demonstrated a love of EDM music and exhibited high levels of musical literacy, their behaviors were not expressive of the concept of PLUR.

Music always has political meanings. For instance, John Lennonʼs songs promote peace, and reggae music seeks the ideal of “Lastafa.” However, EDM in East and Southeast Asia has been losing its political connotations.

EDM lyrics often proclaim the loneliness and bitterness of the world, as exemplified by the Chainsmokers’ hit. EDM expresses Millennials’ pursuit of the norms of a peace-centered, citizen-oriented society.

In this essay, I derive a model of a peaceful society where diverse people live together in harmony by analyzing the process of the popularization of contemporary music. First, I introduce the American composer Frederick Rzewski and his masterpiece “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” Second, I examine English composer Cornelius Cardew and one of his final pieces, “Boolavogue.” Third, I discuss Japanese composer Yuji Takahashi and his musical band “Suigyu Gakudan,” and lastly, I consider the work of Japanese composer Makoto Nomura and his composition method called “Shogi sakkyoku” (Shogi composition). Rzewski, Cardew, and Takahashi are/were politically leftists and composed and/or played political music based on folk music as well as protest songs, whereas Nomuraʼs works are not political. All four composers allowed nonprofessional artists to participate in the composition and performance process.

These artists attempted to simplify highly complicated Western contemporary music and make it more accessible to a mass audience, particularly the working classes. Their works expressed the following ideas on how to create a peaceful society: (a) the main actors who build social fields are non-professional citizens rather than professionals; (b) citizens need simple and fair rules and principles; (c) new social orders should take into account traditional cultures and people’s everyday behavior; and (d) physical expressions and behavioral practices should sometimes take precedence over languages, ideals, or ideology.

Recently, the role of non-professional citizens has been a focus in jurisprudence and political science. Contemporary music could serve as an abundant intellectual resource for other social fields.

This paper proposes a new framework for analyzing the musical style of Bob Dylan in the field of social science, especially in Peace Studies, by revisiting the thoughts and theories of Paul Williams (1948-2013). First, it criticizes the various approaches that only focus on Dylan’s lyrics to determine their roots and referential or citational relations or to estimate his “true” intentions and messages in his songs. Second, based on the writings of Williams, this paper tries to examine Dylanʼs “sound” during performances, which includes everything he does in his songs (without separating the vocal and instrumental parts) and concentrates on what occurs in the mind or consciousness of the listener and the reason why one is emotionally affected by his performance.

After scrutinizing Williams’ arguments from 1966, when he was just eighteen, to his last writings in the early 21st century, the results in the paper show that there are three essential dimensions in Dylanʼs “sound” : 1) performance; 2) personal and intuitive understanding and experience; and 3) the concept of stopping time. Such aspects explain the interconnected relationship between his “sound” and his listeners, which is a unique but perceivable feature that is generally present in the relationship between great arts and its appreciators.

Finally, this article summarizes its argument and implications on how to deal with arts and culture in social science. According to the text of his speech after receiving the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, Dylan repeatedly stresses the difference between “literature” and “songs,” and always considers his creations as the latter. The implication of the findings is that, to analyze songs in social science, it is important to find different ways to understand culture and use new approaches for dealing with its various dimensions.

Shohei Ooka’s novel Fires on the Plain (1951) narrates the experiences of a Japanese soldier deployed in the Philippines during the final days of World War II. The story is told by an ill private named Tamura, who is soon abandoned by his party and wanders alone through the Philippine jungle, where he confronts extreme hunger and finally suffers from a severe mental disorder as a result of his own acts of murder and cannibalism.

Most critics have interpreted this novel simply a description of a soldier’s traumatic experiences on the battlefield. However, we should not forget that the events were narrated by and express the perspective of Tamura after he had survived the war and was confined to a mental hospital on Tokyo’s outskirts. Tamura is suffering from war neurosis and writing his memoir was a way of treating his disease.

In this paper, I interpret Fires on the Plain as a literary challenge whereby Ooka attempted to identify the nature and origin of war neurosis. Ooka, a former Japanese soldier who had been deployed in the Philippines, felt that an unidentifiable force resided within the body of a soldier who had committed unbearable deeds. His concern was not limited to violence on the battlefield. Ooka also sought to explore the strange force residing within humans who have committed extreme violence against other humans.

The most important challenge of this novel is that war neurosis is described as a violently ethical force that originates in unethical, violent deeds committed by a soldier. Tamura’s act of murder and cannibalism brings him feelings of “nausea” and this existential affect later causes his war neurosis; however, when the Korean War breaks out in 1950, his war neurosis comes back and violently rejects eating, namely, a self-deceptive life of “post-war” Japan, which is trying to survive on another war and colonialism. Fires on the Plain seems to identify “nausea” or war neurosis as a fundamental resistance to ongoing “murder and cannibalism.”

The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Right to Peace was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2016. The right to peace is an individual human right; however, it also implies the involvement of individuals in upholding the rights in the peace and security field. Human rights were originally established as constraints on states, and they cannot be violated by any state power, including members of the UN Security Council.

This paper advocates the effectiveness of a human rights approach in the international peace and security field. The human rights approach differs from that of the national interest, which entails decisions based on general, subjective, and political priorities, whereas the former is rooted in individual, objective, and nonpolitical concerns.

The author has attended UN and non-governmental organization (NGO) meetings involving discussions on the right to peace, for which international NGOs initially launched a campaign for global codification and brought the outcome to the UN Human Rights Council. The author analyzes the discourse of government representatives and NGOs during their deliberations on the UN Human Rights Council from the perspective of the conflict between national security and human rights. In opposing the establishment of the right to peace, most Western countries expressed concerns about possible constraints on states’ exlusive rights to the use of force and self-defense. However, representatives of other countries implied the possibility of developing effective means of establishing the right to peace.

What is peace?

At the core of electronic dance music (EDM) is a cosmopolitan philosophy of peace, love, unity, and respect (PLUR). As manifested in EDM, the concept of PLUR is reminiscent of the Kantian notion expressed in the philosopher’s pivotal writing Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view), in which he stressed the exquisiteness of calm and peace in people’s daily lives.

In order to investigate the possible relationship between this Kantian perspective and PLUR, I adopted a participant observation approach while attending some famous music clubs in Ibiza, as well as several EDM music festivals, including the Ultra Music Festival in Miami and Singapore, S2O in Bangkok, and EDC in Tokyo. At the 2016 Ultra Music Festival in Miami, techno music listeners from around the world expressed strong solidarity, and participants were very open to sharing and performing the idea of PLUR.

Conversely, although festival-goers in Bangkok and Tokyo demonstrated a love of EDM music and exhibited high levels of musical literacy, their behaviors were not expressive of the concept of PLUR.

Music always has political meanings. For instance, John Lennonʼs songs promote peace, and reggae music seeks the ideal of “Lastafa.” However, EDM in East and Southeast Asia has been losing its political connotations.

EDM lyrics often proclaim the loneliness and bitterness of the world, as exemplified by the Chainsmokers’ hit. EDM expresses Millennials’ pursuit of the norms of a peace-centered, citizen-oriented society.

In this essay, I derive a model of a peaceful society where diverse people live together in harmony by analyzing the process of the popularization of contemporary music. First, I introduce the American composer Frederick Rzewski and his masterpiece “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” Second, I examine English composer Cornelius Cardew and one of his final pieces, “Boolavogue.” Third, I discuss Japanese composer Yuji Takahashi and his musical band “Suigyu Gakudan,” and lastly, I consider the work of Japanese composer Makoto Nomura and his composition method called “Shogi sakkyoku” (Shogi composition). Rzewski, Cardew, and Takahashi are/were politically leftists and composed and/or played political music based on folk music as well as protest songs, whereas Nomuraʼs works are not political. All four composers allowed nonprofessional artists to participate in the composition and performance process.

These artists attempted to simplify highly complicated Western contemporary music and make it more accessible to a mass audience, particularly the working classes. Their works expressed the following ideas on how to create a peaceful society: (a) the main actors who build social fields are non-professional citizens rather than professionals; (b) citizens need simple and fair rules and principles; (c) new social orders should take into account traditional cultures and people’s everyday behavior; and (d) physical expressions and behavioral practices should sometimes take precedence over languages, ideals, or ideology.

Recently, the role of non-professional citizens has been a focus in jurisprudence and political science. Contemporary music could serve as an abundant intellectual resource for other social fields.

This paper proposes a new framework for analyzing the musical style of Bob Dylan in the field of social science, especially in Peace Studies, by revisiting the thoughts and theories of Paul Williams (1948- 2013). First, it criticizes the various approaches that only focus on Dylan’s lyrics to determine their roots and referential or citational relations or to estimate his “true” intentions and messages in his songs. Second, based on the writings of Williams, this paper tries to examine Dylanʼs “sound” during performances, which includes everything he does in his songs (without separating the vocal and instrumental parts) and concentrates on what occurs in the mind or consciousness of the listener and the reason why one is emotionally affected by his performance.

After scrutinizing Williams’ arguments from 1966, when he was just eighteen, to his last writings in the early 21^st century, the results in the paper show that there are three essential dimensions in Dylanʼs “sound” : 1) performance; 2) personal and intuitive understanding and experience; and 3) the concept of stopping time. Such aspects explain the interconnected relationship between his “sound” and his listeners, which is a unique but perceivable feature that is generally present in the relationship between great arts and its appreciators.

Finally, this article summarizes its argument and implications on how to deal with arts and culture in social science. According to the text of his speech after receiving the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, Dylan repeatedly stresses the difference between “literature” and “songs,” and always considers his creations as the latter. The implication of the findings is that, to analyze songs in social science, it is important to find different ways to understand culture and use new approaches for dealing with its various dimensions.

Shohei Ooka’s novel Fires on the Plain (1951) narrates the experiences of a Japanese soldier deployed in the Philippines during the final days of World War II. The story is told by an ill private named Tamura, who is soon abandoned by his party and wanders alone through the Philippine jungle, where he confronts extreme hunger and finally suffers from a severe mental disorder as a result of his own acts of murder and cannibalism.

Most critics have interpreted this novel simply a description of a soldier’s traumatic experiences on the battlefield. However, we should not forget that the events were narrated by and express the perspective of Tamura after he had survived the war and was confined to a mental hospital on Tokyo’s outskirts. Tamura is suffering from war neurosis and writing his memoir was a way of treating his disease.

In this paper, I interpret Fires on the Plain as a literary challenge whereby Ooka attempted to identify the nature and origin of war neurosis. Ooka, a former Japanese soldier who had been deployed in the Philippines, felt that an unidentifiable force resided within the body of a soldier who had committed unbearable deeds. His concern was not limited to violence on the battlefield. Ooka also sought to explore the strange force residing within humans who have committed extreme violence against other humans.

The most important challenge of this novel is that war neurosis is described as a violently ethical force that originates in unethical, violent deeds committed by a soldier. Tamura’s act of murder and cannibalism brings him feelings of “nausea” and this existential affect later causes his war neurosis; however, when the Korean War breaks out in 1950, his war neurosis comes back and violently rejects eating, namely, a self-deceptive life of “post-war” Japan, which is trying to survive on another war and colonialism. Fires on the Plain seems to identify “nausea” or war neurosis as a fundamental resistance to ongoing “murder and cannibalism.”

The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Right to Peace was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2016. The right to peace is an individual human right; however, it also implies the involvement of individuals in upholding the rights in the peace and security field. Human rights were originally established as constraints on states, and they cannot be violated by any state power, including members of the UN Security Council.

This paper advocates the effectiveness of a human rights approach in the international peace and security field. The human rights approach differs from that of the national interest, which entails decisions based on general, subjective, and political priorities, whereas the former is rooted in individual, objective, and nonpolitical concerns.

The author has attended UN and non-governmental organization (NGO) meetings involving discussions on the right to peace, for which international NGOs initially launched a campaign for global codification and brought the outcome to the UN Human Rights Council. The author analyzes the discourse of government representatives and NGOs during their deliberations on the UN Human Rights Council from the perspective of the conflict between national security and human rights. In opposing the establishment of the right to peace, most Western countries expressed concerns about possible constraints on states’ exlusive rights to the use of force and self-defense. However, representatives of other countries implied the possibility of developing effective means of establishing the right to peace.