Abstract

The dominant institutional approach to peace is that the nation-state must create peace through unity and homogeneity: one nation, one language, one law, and one national economy. The prospect of diversity implies a chaos that is abhorred, categorized, systematized, and neatly ordered. Yet this process of attempting to create peace through unity suppresses the natural forces of differentiation, and thus creates fertile ground for the escalation of conflicts. Alternatively, the prospect of unending variations seems to create the impossibility of finding any common ground. Peace, in this presentation, is relational, and as this paper assumes that the creation of value also depends on relations and agreements, it seems relevant to focus some light on the role of diversity in understandings of economics, and to question the assumptions of the discourses of economics and development. This discussion intends to suggest that through the acknowledgement of the existence of a plurality of economic systems, the possibility can be created to imagine a peace of dynamic interactions of diversity.