สำนักราชบัณฑิตยสภา

The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Volume II - 2010 Towards A Culture of Peace in Thai Society 10 constraint to maintaining or restoring non-violence and peace. It does provide the ground for and contributes a great deal to creating situations which are already full of conflict or have the potential for conflict. Additionally, where confrontation and strife are rife and constant the situation will become entrenched and long lasting. Their diverse life experiences and life styles compound a situation of dissatisfaction and major discontent that could be precursors of protests, strikes or unrest of many kinds. These root causes of division in Thai society are unlikely to vanish in the foreseeable future. Conflict and Its Lessons It should by now be self-evident that such historical precedents of civil disobedience and other politically motivated non-violence movements as well as of open conflicts need to be studied, to enable a better understanding of motives, triggers, rules or consequences of non-violent versus violent action, and conditions for avoiding open conflict. Important, too, once started what could probably help extinguish a fire and what tends to fan or reignite the flames? Studying points of friction with the potential for escalation into open conflict, as demonstrated with many foreign conflicts, could help formulate realistic responses to the Thai domestic challenge. Amongst the first lessons to heed is that violence comes in various guises and its parameters and depth are wide ranging. Violence, peaking in violent crime and murder, may be committed by an individual or else by a group of people, even in their millions for example rebellion or revolution. For a state to enjoy and remain in peace, the latter is more relevant, however we ought to study the similarities and links between such actions by one person and that of groups of people as well. Is there a link between the individual’s act of violence and that of a multitude in society? This question needs be addressed. Finding answers to such queries could be relevant for predicting and/or preventing an outbreak of mass violence. Violence, even that on mass scale, is harder to prevent if less of its common ingredients and factors are known or understood; also, the typical course of such action needs to be studied systematically. Failing to analyse its causes and tendencies and thus the steps towards emergence and escalation of violence will not be fully understood. What does appear to prepare the ground for (mass) violence and what could have prevented it? Steps in the escalation include conditions on the ground and relations between the opposing sides, with fault lines emerging on the surface,