This volume investigates both violent conflicts and non-violent conflict behavior. It addresses a variety of topics, including responsibility and guilt in connection with war, violent conflicts, and terrorist attacks; conflict escalation in disputed areas such as the South China Sea, Syria, and Ukraine; war as an instrument of the United States’ and Russia's global peace policy, and the experiences with non-violent conflict strategies in the Indian independence movement. Furthermore, it presents country studies on Switzerland and Catalonia. Peaceful interethnic relations in multilingual states in Switzerland are examined and juxtaposed against independence movements, such as in Catalonia. Current political challenges faced by the European Union, e.g. divergent refugee policies and the Brexit, are also discussed.

Egbert Jahn is a former Professor of Political Science and Political Sociology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany (1975-1993), Chair/Professor of Political Science and Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim, Germany (1993-2005), Visiting Professor at the Universities of Copenhagen, Irvine, California, and Vilnius, Lithuania (1993-2009), and Research Area and Project Director at the Mannheim Center for Social Research, Germany. Since 2009 he has been a Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.