Personal Peacebuilding and COVID-19

Abstract

Personal peacebuilding is a form of nonviolent learning and action associated with self-knowledge, wellness, and positive encounter with others and the nonhuman world. In personal peacebuilding, the “peacebuilder” is the work. This chapter introduces the four facets of personal peacebuilding as complementary avenues or approaches where the act of being-with results in nonviolence. Following a brief exploration of the breadth of peacebuilding and an encapsulation of Encounter Theory, this chapter theorizes personal peacebuilding as physiological, interpersonal, immanent/transcendent/biotic, and social. These four facets generate eight principles of personal peacebuilding including: care, patience, understanding, compassion, inquiry, alignment, reflection, and action. After describing personal peacebuilding, this chapter encapsulates life stresses under COVID-19 including domestic violence, child abuse, gendered inequality of labor, and suicide and then establishes how to actuate the eight principles of personal peacebuilding using the novel coronavirus pandemic as a fulcrum of intervention.