View and download these valuable papers authored by Dr. Riane Eisler for progressive policy makers:
The Politics of Partnership: Four Cornerstones
Policy-makers who believe that top-down domination systems are the only option recognize the foundational importance of early human relations. For them, “return to the traditional family” — an authoritarian, male-dominated, highly punitive family — is a top priority.
Progressives, by contrast, have marginalized parent-child and gender relations as “women’s and children’s issues,” leaving the base for domination systems to rebuild themselves in place.
The Politics of Partnership focuses on four cornerstones: childhood, gender, economics and narratives/language. These are the cornerstones that regressives have successfully focused on as the foundation of their domination politics. Rebuilding these four cornerstones with the values of partnership, is the long-term work that must start now to build a solid foundation that supports more equitable, sustainable and caring societies.
Partnership and Domination Societies
Partnership and domination societies describe two contrasting social configurations that support either equitable or inequitable relations in all spheres of life. These categories are also known as Partnership Systems and domination systems.
In the paper, The Partnership and Domination Societies published in the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace & Conflict, Dr. Riane Eisler introduces Partnership Systems and domination systems as new social categories needed for a successful social, economic, and political agenda, beginning with four cornerstones for an equitable and sustainable Partnership system. These cornerstones, which are laid out in this article, are: childhood, gender, economics, and narratives/language (Eisler, 2002; Eisler and Fry, 2019).
Family Structure and Family Violence
In this article, Family Structure and Family Violence, Laura A. McCloskey and Dr. Riane Eisler explore the social conditions and changes in family structure which serve to shield or expose women and children to abuse. The research on family violence focuses on the harm people do to one another rather than the potential support they provide. Families reveal the best and the worst of human social potential and this article explores how family structure, kinship relations, and the lens of culture shed light on such dynamics.
Cooperative and mutually supportive families have been achieved despite ideologies that construct adversarial sexual relations and men’s domination as the chief organizing principle. Still, if the dominant culture is rooted in a set of beliefs of women’s inferiority, the walls are well mortared against intimacy and communication across strict gender boundaries.
The Caring Family Policy Agenda
As practical as it is principled, the Caring Family Policy Agenda is based on the shared core moral principles of religion and humanism: caring, compassion, justice, and nonviolence. Its Partnership principles and programs are easily articulated and have powerful emotional appeal.
The Caring Family Agenda has three interacting components:
- Children's Bill of Rights
- Caring Family Values
- Family-Friendly Economy
The Family Security Agenda
The Family Security Agenda recognizes the economic value of the care work provided for free in families and low-wage jobs. This is key to reducing family stress, cutting through cycles of poverty, and producing the “high quality human capital” needed for the new postindustrial age.
The Center for Partnership Systems’ Family Security Agenda provides hard working, self respecting American families real support for the work of caring for children, seniors, and other family members and prepares the next generation with an education that can meet the challenges of our new, automated world.
Truly valuing family, the Security Agenda will greatly reduce the immediate expenses of healthcare, addiction, crime, courts, prisons, and lost human potential that often fall to the tax-paying public.
Protecting the Majority of Humanity: Toward an Integrated Approach to Crimes against Present and Future
In the wake of the World Health Organization’s report showing that violence against women and girls is a global health problem of epidemic proportions, the publication of Riane Eisler’s chapter "Protecting the Majority of Humanity: Toward an Integrated Approach to Crimes against Present and Future Generations" in the new Cambridge University book Sustainable Development, International Criminal Justice, and Treaty Implementation edited by Sebastien Jodoin and Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger is both timely and practical.
Continuing her work of placing the rights, problems, and aspirations of the majority of humanity — women and children — on the international agenda as integral to a sustainable and just future for all, Eisler proposes that the international legal foundations of the Rome Statute and R2P (Right to Protect) can, and should, be used to end traditions of violence that not only take the lives of millions of women and children but also have very adverse impacts on economic and social health.
Social Wealth Economic Indicators: A New System for Evaluating Economic Prosperity
The Social Wealth Economic Indicators (SWEIs) developed by the Center for Partnership Systems demonstrate the enormous economic benefits of investing in the work of caring for people and our environment.
Unlike conventional measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and unlike most GDP alternatives, the SWEI demonstrates the substantial financial return from caring for people and nature – and the enormous costs of not doing so.
Social Wealth Economic Indicators also differ from other metrics in that they not only measure where we are (outputs) but also what investments (inputs) are needed for a healthy and sustainable economy and society.
Unlike other measures, the SWEI pay attention to the status of the majority of the population (women and children) and how this affects everyone’s well-being. It are essential for a strong and sustainable economy and to reduce the disproportionate poverty of women and children worldwide.
The Social Wealth Economic Indicators reveal that the U.S. lags badly behind other developed countries in investing in its human and natural capital provide policy makers with the missing tools to steer us in healthier, more realistic directions.
Building a Caring Democracy: Four Cornerstones for an Integrated Progressive Agenda
Why do people vote for “strong” leaders who condone violence, debase women, and stoke fear and scapegoating? If free elections alone are not the answer, what will it take to build a caring democracy that promotes the wellbeing and full development of all people?
This paper examines these questions from a perspective that takes into account the connection between politics and economics, on one hand, and what children first experience and observe in their family and other intimate relations, on the other.
It describes the study of relational dynamics, a multidisciplinary method of analysis that reveals social categories that transcend conventional ones: the Partnership System and the domination system. It looks at modern history through the lens of the Partnership-domination social scale, focusing on the struggle between the movement toward Partnership and regressions to domination.
It compares the integrated regressive worldview and political agenda with the fragmented progressive one. It identifies four cornerstones for Partnership or domination systems: family/childhood, gender, economics, narratives/language. It then details how to build these cornerstones so they support a more humane, caring, and sustainable future, and provides practical resources for this urgent task.
The Real Wealth of Nations: From Global Warming to Global Partnership
In a speech delivered September 16, 2009 in New York City, at the United Nations' special meeting on climate change hosted by the Caribbean island-country of Grenada, Riane Eisler proposed a new approach for prevention and mitigation of global warming. She placed our climate change crisis in its social and historical context. She highlighted the connection between high technology and an ethos of domination in bringing on our current crises, and why successfully resolving them requires an understanding of the configurations of the domination system and the Partnership System as two underlying social configurations.
These social configurations transcend conventional categories such as right vs. left, religious vs. secular, or Eastern vs. Western, which fail to take into account the crucial interactions between the cultural construction of our basic childhood and gender relations and politics and economics.
As a result, regressions to the domination side of the Partnership/domination continuum have punctuated our forward movement, including a disregard for both people and nature. She showed that going back to the old "normal" is not an option, and outlined how, together, we can build a new normal in which caring for people and nature is a top priority.
Nurturing Children's Humanity: Partnership Education
This article proposes that the unprecedented challenges of our rapidly changing world require more than piecemeal educational reform. It describes partnership education as an integrated template for redesigning the three main components of education: content, process, and structure. In addition, it provides examples of how various elements of Partnership education can be incorporated into current classrooms, both in schools and universities. It illustrates how Partnership education can help young people develop their full potentials, not only preparing them to navigate through our difficult times but providing them the knowledge and skills to help build a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable future.
