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by Riane Eisler This essay is based on a paper Riane Eisler authored for the tenth annual congress of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies and the Turku School of Economics. It is excerpted from an article in the January/ February 1991 issue of Futures, an international journal based in Great Britain. All around us, the world-including the workplace- is in flux. There is growing recognition that fundamental changes are needed for economic and perhaps even species and planetary survival. The crisis of centrally planned Soviet and Eastern bloc economies has dramatically highlighted the…continue reading →

by Riane Eisler Adapted from Eisler's book The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life (2002). Spirituality has become the word of the hour. But what is spirituality? What does being spiritual mean? For me, as for many others, spirituality means feeling at one with that which we call the divine. But when I think of the divine I do not think of it as separate from our lives, as otherworldly, as "out there" rather than here. I think of our own most evolved qualities: our profound human capacity for…continue reading →

By Riane Eisler Some say war is inevitable, but Dr. Riane Eisler's research shows that we can build cultures of peace -- partnership cultures. The first step is to examine the position of women in society because a study of 89 nations showed that when the rights of women are protected nations thrive! Do wars make us safer or do they create and intensify the cycle of violence that puts us at risk in the first place? In this nuclear and biological age, can we survive if peace is only an interval between…continue reading →

By Riane Eisler in The Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2007 Some nations that rank well in the Global Peace Index are notorious for violence against women and children. Out of 121 countries studied, the United States ranked 96; Israel was 119. But Libya, Cuba, and China – not exactly paragons of human rights – rank 58, 59, and 60. The first-ever study ranking countries according to their level of peacefulness, the Global Peace Index, was recently published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Sensibly, its basic premise is that "peace isn't just the…continue reading →

Reprinted from the September 1995 UNESCO Courier. This article was the lead article for the issue, Women: one half of heaven, highlighting the United Nations Beijing Women's Conference. Riane Eisler is an internationally renowned peace, development, and human rights scholar, president of The Center for Partnership Studies, and author of many books, including the international best seller The Chalice and The Blade, and the award-winning The Power of Partnership. Today's questioning of sex roles and relations is part of a broader movement towards greater democracy and egalitarianism... Men are from Mars, proclaims a…continue reading →

Some people think the vision of a more equitable, less violent future is merely a utopian dream. A goal of my work has been showing it can be a viable model for transformative change and that the key components of such a model can be identified through cross-cultural and historical research. Influences Like everything we do, my research was influenced by my life experiences. Salient among these were my parents' flight with me as a small child from Austria (where I was born) after its takeover by the Nazis, my later childhood and…continue reading →

We all know the word “utopia.” It means a place that doesn’t—and can’t—exist. A "pragmatopia" is a less violent, more humane and equitable place—a place where beliefs and social structures support relations based on partnership. We all know the word “utopia.” It means a place that doesn’t—and can’t—exist. Thomas More coined the term in his 1516 satire-fantasy Utopia by combining the Greek outopia (no place) and eutopia (good place). So then, as now, “utopia” communicated the idea that a better society is impossible— that, literally, it is no place. We need a different…continue reading →