The Art of Not Destroying: Mediation, Meditation, and Medication as Practices of Peace

This paper offers a theoretical and interpretive analysis of the relationship between mediation, meditation, and medication, understood as three distinct practices united by a common prudential framework: intervening in a fracture without dominating, hardening, or aggravating it. Mediation is considered primarily in civil and commercial contexts, where it functions as a procedure for preventing, managing, and resolving disputes, grounded in party self-determination, decision-making responsibility, and, in its facilitative form, interest-based negotiation techniques. Meditation is examined as a discipline of the practitioner’s presence, with particular reference to aikido as founded by Ueshiba Morihei, the ki-aikido of Tohei Koichi, and the pedagogical developments of Giuseppe Ruglioni. Medication and wound care are taken as paradigms of prudent intervention through the principle of primum non nocere, galenic formulation, pharmaceutical regulation, and the example of compounded cannabis-based preparations for medical use. The thesis advanced is deliberately limited. Mediating, meditating, and medicating do not constitute a single disciplinary paradigm, nor should legal conflict be spiritualized or medicalized. Rather, they are treated as analogous practices under the profile of responsible intervention: listening before acting, calibrating tools, respecting vulnerability, avoiding secondary harm, monitoring effects, and fostering concrete conditions for rebalancing. The paper also links this perspective to the concept of Positive Peace developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace and promoted, including through its partnership with Rotary International, as a systemic framework for conflict prevention and for the development of the social, institutional, and economic conditions that make peace sustainable.