Hilbert Reads Fall 2025: Database Searches

The essay presents the author's reflections on the aftermath of the Virginia Tech school shootings of April 2007 and suggests that schools ought to foster programs encouraging social justice and ethnic peace. The current state of ethnic conflict in American society is mentioned and three elements of supporting social justice are given. Topics include demonstrating a culture of interdependence in the curricula, direct teaching of support in social and civil rights, and institutional research and initiatives aimed towards the social betterment of society at large.

Societies seem to have emotional climates that affect how people feel and act in public situations. Unlike the emotions experienced in an individual's personal life, these modal feelings reflect a collective response to the socio-economic-political situation of the society and influence how most people behave toward one another and their government. A government may foster a climate of fear to ensure social control, or it may encourage the formation of heterogeneous social groups to facilitate a climate of trust between people from different groups. On one hand, emotional climates may be viewed as reflecting the relative peacefulness or violence of a society. Thus, an assessment of emotional climate may provide a subjective index of human security to complement objective measures of democracy, human rights, equality, and other factors that we presume are beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, we may view emotional climates as influences that act to further or to impede the development of the culture of peace advocated by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus, their assessment may have predictive power, and measuring a society's emotional climate may help us to create desirable policy. In this article we show that it is possible to measure some important aspects of the emotional climates of three nations that have different degrees of a culture of peace: Norway, the United States, and India. We show that estimates of the collective emotions that constitute climate can be distinguished from reports of personal emotions in that the former are more influenced by nation and the latter by social class. It is the subjective experience of national emotional climate, rather than personal emotional experience, that appears most related to objective indices for the culture of peace in the different nations.

For a long time, youth have been seen as a driving factor for conflicts or as victims of conflicts. While some literature and research on youth in conflict tend to be overly negative and focus on the danger posed by youth, we argue that these descriptions do not reflect reality: youth are crucial to sustainable peacebuilding and must, therefore, be included in conflict transformation processes. We demonstrate that while youth continue to experience difficulties in overtaking meaningful roles as actors of change in peacebuilding, there is an improvement in the acceptance of their agency. The article explores the case of Sierra Leone where the perception of youth can be seen as a massive change from immediately after the war to today. The article explores different roles that youth can have during and after a conflict, investigates positive impacts youth can have, describes what peace means for young people and how they would describe a desirable future, and finally speaks about how youth respond and interact with international ideas of peace and sustainability.

Recently it has become commonplace in America for commentators and the public to use the terms ‘red’ and ‘blue’ to refer to perceived cultural differences in America and American politics. Although a political divide may exist in America today, these particular terms are inaccurate and reductive. This article presents research from social psychology demonstrating that the increased use of these terms is likely to increase the conflict between political groups in America by making political conflict salient in nonpolitical contexts, reducing the ability of Americans to form multifaceted complex identities, pushing Americans to misperceive political in-groups and out-groups, and contributing to a ‘spiral of silence.’ An alternative model for discussing cultural differences is proposed.

From the perspective of pragmatic diplomatic philosophy, the Peace Corps can benefit the United States, which is an important reason for the domestic support it receives within the United States. Through the volunteers' acculturation experience, cultural exchanges between the United States and host countries are promoted, and awareness of the American society about third world countries is raised, which is the true value of the Peace Corps from the perspective of American interests. As members of American society, Peace Corps volunteers gain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the third world in their host countries, which is not only an important part of improving the awareness of the American society about the third world but is also an important bridge to spread this awareness in the United States. When volunteers return to the United States after finishing their service, they bring their understanding of the third world to different industries and fields in American domestic society. Among them, American education and diplomacy are mostly affected. These are of great significance in improving the international vision and awareness of American education and the reliability of American foreign policy.