Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories

Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories conducts a comparative investigation into why certain ancient societies produced explicit concepts and theories of peace, while others did not. The volume discusses the possibility that concepts of peace were most likely to develop in regions and periods which experienced higher rates of warfare than usual.

Focusing on case studies from China, India, Egypt, and Greece, an international group of renowned scholars specifically and systematically explore the ways and reasons through which these societies did or did not produce public discourse, specific concepts, and theories of peace. The scholarship in this volume draws on themes from War and Peace in the Ancient World (Wiley, 2007), building out a more comprehensive picture of ancient concepts of peace and the factors that influenced societies to develop these conceptualizations. 

Kurt A. Raaflaub is the David Herlihy University Professor and Professor of Classics at Brown University, Emeritus. His numerous publications include authorship or editorship of 20 scholarly books, in addition to more than 120 articles in journals and essay collections. Raaflaub is the editor of Wiley Blackwell s Ancient World: Comparative Histories series, and is the editor of War and Peace in the Ancient World (Blackwell, 2006).