Peace Studies has always been about human security and I write this from the perspective of what may await us in the years ahead. I have spent the last three years researching and writing a report on the necessity of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Arctic Communities adopting modern, low carbon energy policies, and developing their on energy resources and energy security. I quickly realised that in researching energy one cannot ignore climate change as the two are inextricably linked, and in researching climate change one quickly realizes the potential conflict triggers inherent in all these areas. Climate change may very well lead to water security issues, which in turn impinges upon food security. Climate change and warming temperatures lead to sea level rise from (a) expansion and (b) melting ice caps and glaciers. This in turn may well lead to massive refugee flows and may also cause some SIDS to disappear completely. Climate change is also inextricably linked to economic growth and as Tim Johnson said in  ‘Prosperity without growth? The transition to a sustainable economy’ http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/ ‘every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100. This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.‘  As Kenneth Boulding stated “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”. We have, to quote Richard Heinberg, in his soon to be forthcoming book The End of Growth,  ‘We must convince ourselves that life in a non-growing economy can be fulfilling, interesting, and secure. The absence of growth does not necessarily imply a lack of change or improvement. Within a non-growing or equilibrium economy there can still be continuous development of practical skills, artistic expression, and certain kinds of technology. In fact, some historians and social scientists argue that life in an equilibrium economy can be superior to life in a fast-growing economy: while growth creates opportunities for some, it also typically intensifies competition—there are big winners and big losers, and (as in most boom towns) the quality of relations within the community can suffer as a result. Within a non-growing economy it is possible to maximize benefits and reduce factors leading to decay, but doing so will require pursuing appropriate goals: instead of more, we must strive for better; rather than promoting increased economic activity for its own sake, we must emphasize whatever increases quality of life without stoking consumption. One way to do this is to reinvent and redefine growth itself.‘

I think the most important practical problem, which may be more of an engineering challenge than a scientific one, is to build economically viable nuclear fusion power stations, as well as all the other alternative technologies, wind, solar (photo-voltaic and solar-thermal), geothermal, tidal and small distributed nuclear such as the Toshiba Westinghouse 4S and the Travelling Wave reactors. All of the reactors have very low proliferation risk, with the Travelling Wave burning depleted uranium. If we haven’t dealt with our world’s increasing appetite for energy by the end of this century, I think we will be in very deep trouble indeed. Brian Cox, physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider, stated in an interview (with Stephen Hawking) reported in the Guardian Sept 11 2010 “I share that view, that the provision of clean energy is of overwhelming importance“. On November 9^th the International Energy Agency (IEA) released their 2010 World Energy Outlook, which admits that Peak Oil is inevitable. According to the IEA, from now until 2030 the world oil consumption will rise by about 60%. Transportation will be the fastest growing oil-consuming sector. By 2030, the number of cars will increase to well over 1.25 billion from approximately 700 million today. Consequently, global consumption of gasoline could double.  This will affect all sectors of society, including the world’s armed forces, it has been suggested that the US military get ready for tomorrow’s challenges, that their Department of Defense ensure that it can operate all of its systems on non-petroleum fuels by 2040. This 30-year time frame reflects market indicators pointing toward both higher demand for petroleum and increasing international competition to acquire it. However, apart from the energy security implications, the climate change consequences do not bear thinking about. The continued output of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere may also lead to a drastic decline in ocean life caused by the acidification of the planet’s oceans. Ocean acidification refers to the ongoing decline in oceanic pH resulting from the uptake of atmospheric CO_, and this will start affecting the lowest end of the food chain first which in turn will reach throughout the oceanic food chain. “Ocean acidification is widely viewed as an emerging threat to coral reefs,” said Rosenstiel School graduate student Rebecca Albright. “Our study is one of the first to document the impacts of ocean acidification on coral recruitment.” http://goo.gl/FwGTF Albright and colleagues report that ocean acidification could compromise the successful fertilization, larval settlement and survivorship of Elkhorn corals. Given that seafood makes up a large part of the diet of many countries this has a serious implication for global food security. Overall, 1 billion people around the world rely on fish as their primary source of protein http://goo.gl/mdOm. With ocean acidification we may see a decline in fish catches with dire consequences for many nations that rely on the ocean for much of their protein. The author was recently in Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles and was impressed by the vast range of fish on sale in the local market. On a small island with very little land on which to conduct agriculture a drop in their fish catch would be disastrous. The same applies to Arctic communities and SIDS globally. The other looming problem is water security. Today Reuters had an article reporting on farmers in Yemen leaving their land and moving to the city as the country grapples with a drying climate, a rapidly growing population and falling water tables. All of these growing resource shortages are exacerbated by a lack of sustainable practices. The results in years to come could either be conflict, or we can try and implement sustainability and prevent conflict from arising. Therefore to me, besides the prevention and resolution of conflict, peace studies can, at a very basic level, be about sustainability and human security.

Nicholas B Robson, CSCM, MA

Director-General – Cayman Institute

Advisory Committee Member – Many Strong Voices

Chief Coordinator – South Asian Strategic Stability Institute

This is a free event but registration is required.  The registration form is available to download through this link – Peace Studies Forum Invite .

Please return the form to us at peacestudiesforum at gmail.com

Paul Rogers has also reflected on What Peace Studies is about (especially at Bradford) on You Tube.

What do you think Peace Studies is?

Please respond in any format: videos, photos, quotes, text, audio…

Watch out for Roberta and Benita and their video camera around the University of Bradford campus to answer the question What is Peace Studies? as we prepare for our forum event on 1st October.

As pointed out in previous posts, the substance of Peace Studies constitutes one of the challenges of its consolidation as a discipline. This challenge is related to both the meaning of “peace” as well as to the understanding of what “study” entails.

I would like to briefly explore three issues in this post.

First, what’s the fuzz about the ontological discussion? Do we need a clear definition of ‘peace’? My background in International Relations just makes me think that defining the object of a discipline is probably a never-ending process and this is not necessarily a weakness. It is actually amazing that the label International Relations is still used when some of the objects of study are far from inter-‘national’. Still, I don’t think anybody would diminish the relevance of this field of study and its actual influence in the shaping of our lives in direct or indirect ways. So, if ‘ok’ for IR, why ‘bad’ for Peace Studies?

Of course, the ‘need’ to define the boundaries is a constant in sciences in general. Looking back, I can easily remember the pages where Hans Morgenthau, in 1948, tried so hard to define the boundaries of what he would call “International Politics” and why this was different from Law, Economics, etc. Still, some of the issues that are classically put under the umbrella of IR were also stressed by James O’Connel while summarizing some of the mains topics covered in Peace Studies in 1984 (notably, arms control and the nuclear issue). Of course, it can be argued that the approach is different. But the object of reference is not.

On this, it should be questioned what is the relevance and what the purpose of discipline boundaries. The way social sciences are organized today is not a smooth and uncontested issue and a look into history would at least raise doubts about what may seem a clear rationale today (see, for instance, Wallerstein 2005, or Foucault, 2004). Further, even if a clear distinction existed between social science disciplines’ domains, reality takes place within multiple dimensions and what drive human behaviour is not circumscribed by the ontological conventions of academic disciplines. Peace (and conflict) permeates different domains of social reality. In my view, one of the strengths of Peace Studies is precisely the fact that, contrary to IR, it openly embraced multidisciplinarity since the beginning. By doing so, it simply embraced the complexities of real life, instead of trying to frame reality within artificial boundaries. In other words, if a lack of consensus of the meaning of ‘peace’ makes our (academics’) lives more difficult, it is a very efficient reminder that “that’s how social reality is” and an ‘elegant theory’ quite often is just not as efficient as elegant!

This leads me to the second point: what about “studies” in the Peace Studies? The issue of multidisciplinarity brings us to the deepest epistemological discussion on what are the ‘correct’ ways to produce knowledge as well as the more normative question of what’s the purpose of knowledge in the first place.

Allow me again a parallel with IR. When Morgenthau was writing Politics Among Nations, in the 1940s, not only was he concerned with the definition of boundaries of what would later be IR, but also with the recurrence of patterns in history and what is so much praised in mainstream social sciences: objectivity.

As my PhD colleague Heather so clearly pointed out in her post, quite often PS academics are criticized because of the clear expression of their normative values. It would be naive to expect that an epistemological consensus would ever rise in Social Sciences (it never did in Philosophy, which is much older…), but it should be at least recognized that there is no clear objective criteria to state that a non-normative[1] theoretical approach to social reality is more efficient that a normative one.

Whichever our epistemological preference, if our commitment is to a better understanding of social phenomena, we should at least be open to seriously consider the qualities of alternative ways of researching in social sciences. A different posture would risk the consolidation of dogmas or disguised forms of theology within science.

Here I come to the third and last point. I have no doubts that a ‘consensus’ on what ‘peace’ or Peace Studies means would make the academic work in the area much easier and consistent. But because such a task is at least extremely difficult, it does matter to at least acknowledge and, if possible, understand, the varieties of meanings underneath the labels.

Ultimately, people (organizations, states, etc.) will act in accordance to what they perceive as being the meaning of these labels. And ‘peace’ (and even ‘studies’ – or ‘science’, for the matter) varies not only in the historical context, but also geographically, as Galtung (1981) pointed out years ago.

For me, Peace Studies is a project which entails multiple ways to analyse human relationships and the factors that influence these relationships to move towards oppression (violence) or liberation. It does so because it is driven by the concern with human beings’ liberation from any kind of oppression (including oppression from their inner selves).

What is Peace Studies for you?
What is the first thing that comes to your mind?

References

Booth, Ken (2007). Theory of world security. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morgenthau, Hans J.[1948] (1993) Politics among nations: the struggle for power and peace. New York; London : McGraw-Hill.

Galtung, Johan (1981). Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace. Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 18, No. 2, Special Issue on Theories of Peace (1981), pp. 183-199.

Foucault, Michel (2004). Society must be defended. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandra Fontana. Translated by David Macey. Penguin.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (2005). World systems analysis. An introduction. Duke University Press.

O’Connel, James (1985). Towards an understanding of concepts in the study of peace. In: O’Connel, J. & Curle, A. (1985). Peace with work to do. New Hampshire: Berg Publishers.

These can be questions  that you would like guests or panel to think about on the day. Or questions that feed into the ongoing discussions regarding the redefinition of Peace Studies and the future of Peace Studies, and the building process of the Peace Studies agenda.

To start with, I just want to say that I don’t intend here to do a survey of what topics have been researched so far or may be researched under the name of Peace Studies. A good start for anyone interested in this would be to look at Alger (2000). Rather, I want to reflect on what Peace Studies is and its status as an academic discipline and try and identify some questions that may be important to consider for peace researchers.

Since March, a group of students in the Peace Studies department (Uni. Of Bradford) has been meeting to discuss issues around peace research methodology, if indeed there is such a thing. We found ourselves grappling with a very wide range of issues but a question that keeps coming up is: What is Peace? How do we define it? We must acknowledge that there has been a range of definitions, often contradictory, throughout history. So can we ever agree on a definition? I don’t know. And the words of Andrew Murray in his introduction to the special issue of Peace Review on the future of Peace Studies seem to go with this idea too. He writes conversations and debates amongst peace researchers tend to come to the same conclusion, “that in the context of Peace Studies it is not possible to articulate a focus or to identify a methodology beyond the generic ‘to make a better world by whatever method or methodology is appropriate.’” (Murray, 2002)

I’m actually not sure that the question of giving a definition of peace for everyone to agree on is the most relevant. Rather, I believe that the crucial thing is to have these debates about what peace means and these conversations to unpack our individual understandings of peace. In that sense, “what is peace?” becomes a guiding question for a journey, an exploration of what peace might be that peace researchers should engage in as a community. I think it is an important task for peace scholars to take on as it is part of defining one’s identity as such scholar. A peace researcher should be able to account for how his/her research contributes to peace and an exploration of what peace might be can only precede this.

Another thing that has struck me in my conversations with colleagues is the debate surrounding the normative objective of Peace Studies. When reading Adam Curle and James O’Connell inaugural lectures to the Peace Studies department (at Bradford), they both seem to make the assumption that there is an agreement on the normative project of Peace Studies. Indeed, compared to other discipline, Peace Studies is distinctive in its claim of being both academic and practical. This is very much reflected in the mission statement of the department of Peace Studies:

We combine empirical, theoretical and applied research with sustained engagement at international, regional, national and local levels to analyse, prevent and resolve conflicts and develop peaceful societies. We aim for an enabling environment for international research excellence involving diverse and critical approaches.

Peace Studies is rooted in academia but clearly has an objective of going beyond academia to promote a peaceful society. Again, I strongly believe that it is necessary for peace researchers to discuss the question of normative aim so particular to Peace Studies. There is a danger here of assuming that because we research peace we sign up to the normative objective. However, there are many ways of doing normative research and these need to be uncovered.

I know there are many other questions around what Peace Studies is but I hope this will be a good starting point for conversations. I do look forward to hearing from you guys about the points raised here…

Mel Rohse – Peace Studies Research Student

Alger, C. (2000) Challenges for Peace Researcher and Peace Builders in the Twenty-First Century. International Journal of Peace Studies 5(1)

Murray (2002) Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘The Future of Peace Studies’. Peace Review, 14(1), 5-6.

This question comes up a lot when we’re talking about the impact of academic work, so we thought it would be an interesting one to talk about here.

There is a definite fear that activism means we are ‘biased’ in some way, that we won’t be doing ‘independent’ or ‘objective’ research.

I think though that everyone does research for a reason, and it’s totally compatible to be motivated to do research for reasons of social justice or wanting to change something. In fact, it’s just being honest about our motivations and intentions – everyone has them!

This is not to say that research is compromised by that – it’s still possible to be an ethical and honest researcher, but be driven by the hope of change.It is a activist statement to return our findings to the people that we’ve worked with, and in a form that’s practically useful, just as it is to research with people collaboratively, rather than doing research ‘about people’. I’m sure there are many ways of being an activist-academic – but I definitely think that it is compatible with being a good academic, that being an activist OR a good academic is not a choice we have to make.

I think activism in research can be present when we choose what research to do and how, when we choose who to work with and how, when we choose how to disseminate our research and who to, and whether we move on or remain committed to the people and places affected by the work we’ve done: in fact all the places where our motivations and values as a researcher inevitably show up, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Also, I think that being an activist-academic is about seeing academic work as a collective project – one contribution to the struggle for social justice – rather than a competitive, individual effort.

That’s one reason I think the Peace Studies Department is important. Obviously, activist academic work happens in lots of places – but there is something unusual and important in a whole department set up with what I would call activist aims. In Adam Curle’s inaugural lecture, he described the motive for establishing Peace Studies as an intellectual and practical field as helping to create a world “in which we are not separated from each other by fear, suspicion, prejudice, or hatred; in which wse are free and equal, considerate and loving with each other”.

I think this is what Peace Studies should be about – applied research to make a difference to the world. When I think of it like that, I wonder how Peace Research can be anything but activist?

What do you think…?

Heather (current Peace Studies PhD student)

J.v.pearce at bradford.ac.uk

What Next? Peace Studies in the 21^st Century

Our challenge therefore is to refocus our energies and to open up to all who share a concern with the elusive ideal of a peaceful world and how to study it.  The task could not be more urgent.  The world faces multiple converging crises of poverty, inequality, climate change and energy depletion as well as the recourse to individual, group and state violence in response to these.  The  appropriate relationship between state and market in addressing these issues is deeply contested, with some stressing market failure and others state failure. Exploitation remains rife in the market and the means to challenge it weak. Capitalism has proved no more capable of solving human problems than communism. States are often authoritarian; the realm of politics instrumental and exclusionary with a constant loss of legitimacy. The role of human participation and agency in the face of structural impediments is still not fully understood nor enabled. Citizens have become consumers and lost their sense of civic agency or citizenship is exclusionary and even claims to citizenship subject to violent repression in many parts of the world. Belief systems often remain mutually closed and even hostile to each other. Women are still far from equal partners in the efforts to transform our political economy, while the poor as a whole are largely voiceless. The will to dominate remains embedded in human interactions and incentives to compete rather than cooperate remain ubiquitous. In short, we still cannot live together without harming each other.

In order to stimulate debate, I am going to focus on the unresolved dilemmas which the field faces. There are many others, and I aspire to keep this contribution as short as possible. I will therefore tackle four key points and pose questions rather than responses and then rejoin the debate at a later stage.

1. Peace as a Normative Project in an Academic Environment

There are many inbuilt tensions in the study of peace within a university environment. Bradford was positively chosen as the site of this unique endeavour by the Quakers, precisely because as a university it sought to make knowledge work for the wider world. But such an aspiration is a value. It needs to be built and developed if it is to become a cultural expectation but not a reified or prescriptive one. It can only do so in a social and socialising way rather than an individual way as is the norm in academia. Values do impede scientific enquiry, but are unavoidable. How then do we find ways of reflecting on the values we bring and/or validating value driven research? The critical point is that peace studies cannot merely proclaim its value driven character. That is only the beginning of the story. A commitment to social justice, for instance, may be a generally agreed assumption, but the meaning of social justice is far from clear. There are real trade offs and complexities around the idea of justice. Peace scholars need to reflect constantly on what their proclaimed values really mean and experiment with ways of moving beyond recourse to weak personal justifications or rigid positions and seek to develop  and test these in argumentation with others who must in turn be open to listening and learning. Can, for instance, a moral community emerge within and academic environment which remains rightly committed to scientific knowledge? If so , how and what are the dilemmas, and how can they be resolved?  While Peace Studies exceptionalism remains grounded in its claims to bring values overtly to its field, it must engage with the role these value play, it must reflect on the relationship between individual scholarship and the claim to be part of a normative field of study which implies some element of cooperation with others in the field. These are questions I throw open for debate.

2. Theory and Practice: Consistency in an Exceptional Environment

The peace field must engage with the competing theoretical frameworks which aspire to explain the world in which we live. These need not become sources of entrenched and mutual opposition as long as the ‘moral community’ (if it exists or wants to exist)  of peace scholars accepts that the search for the means to build peace can never be empiricist, but must in its different and distinct components find a means of theoretical conversation and dialogue.  But perhaps Peace Studies has a distinct challenge which is part of its exceptionalism. First of all, it needs to develop the means for theoretical dispute and create the space and relationships which make it possible. Secondly, it must find consistency between theoretical attachments and their implied practice. This is not to say that there is no room for pure theory or philosophical endeavour as intrinsic in their own right to the field of study. But it means that the field of study must be engaged in the wider world as well, and be open to the challenges from that world and to expectations that the study of peace will contribute in some way to greater peace. The study of peace, as O’Connell, said, cannot remain cocooned. And if peace scholars commit themselves to theoretical positions which imply certain practical commitments, they endanger the consistency as well as normative standing of the endeavour if efforts are not make to apply them to practice. In recent years, Peace Studies has begun some important experimentation in ways in which its teaching practice could resonate with its understanding of the meaning of peace and in the way in which research can recognise the value of practitioner and activist knowledges.  These efforts are very demanding on peace scholars in an academic world where status is often granted to those with more distance from the subject of study. Behind these issues for the field, lies Adam Curle’s important reminder (Curle, 1973: 2) : ‘The inescapable conclusion is that that making peace involves a reshaping not only of society and the world order, but also of ourselves’

3. Beyond Positive and Negative Peace and Towards Interdisciplinarity

One of the most problematic consequences of the neglect of building the field of study, is that the productive potential of building knowledge across disciplines has not been fulfilled. It is arguable that the distinction between negative and positive peace  has tended to compartmentalise scholars. There are many time as well as intellectual constraints to cross disciplinary not to mention interdisciplinary work.  The effort emerges most naturally out of the idea of a ‘moral community’of peace scholars, in which it is understood that certain human problems cannot be addressed  through one lens at a time. Multiple lenses are required as well as the intellectual and personal qualities to navigate between them without losing site of the point of departure or the destination.  It does involve dispositions for scholarly interaction as well as individual authorship. The latter drives mainstream academia, but cannot build the learning demanded of a complex field such as peace studies. Of course, the latter matters, but as part of a cooperative endeavour which enables a biologist of positivist persuasion to talk with a sociologist committed to critical theory, for example. One cannot underestimate the challenges of this, but nor the potential gains for the field.

4. Peace : The Substance

So what is the study of peace?  I have implied that the study of peace flourishes best when it is part of a moral community of peace scholars, emphasising that this is not a prescriptive or enforced understanding of ‘moral’, but an agreement of people to come together for a moral purpose (the study of peace aimed at building a more peaceful world) with all their disagreements and plurality of experiences and predispositions brought to bear on a permanent and iterative construction of shared values.  In the process, the meaning of peace becomes increasingly clarified as scholars also commitment themselves to the pursuit of increasing consistency between theory and practice.  Principles of cooperation and mutual respect facilitate the exchange of knowledge and learning. The distinction between negative and positive peace is overcome intellectually as scholars increasingly recognise the mutual dependence of the one on the other.

There are threads which run through the field of peace study in terms of the substance of the project. These begin with Curle’s emphasis on relationships; ultimately social relationships are a starting point for understanding the challenges at stake. Secondly there is the thread of cooperation; what needs to happen in order for social relationships to be based on enabling of the Other rather than dominating the Other,  a theme which takes us from the idea of empowerment (originally a feminist contribution) to that of transforming power. Thirdly, there is the question of violence. What are the conditions and forms of social relationships that enable us to live without violence? Each of these threads has to be unravelled, because each is immensely complex. They do not ignore the structural logics which often impede the efforts of human beings as individuals and in their collectivities to act. But these structural logics are also an embedded outcome of human social interactions over time. We have ceased to reflect on them in this way, and Marx summed up the resulting dilemmas when he said that human beings make history but not in conditions of their own choosing. Peace studies therefore demands that we think about how history is made and who makes it.

These threads remain entangled in this intellectual enterprise. However, there will never be one thread that unravels them all. That is why Peace Studies is such an exciting and worthwhile endeavour.  It is at the heart of the human project because it conjures up the complexity of human interaction. I call upon all those committed to this endeavour to help extend and deepen the normative, theoretical and practical dimensions of the field through a robust but respectful global debate, no less meaningful for being in the virtual world of cyberspace.

J.v.pearce at bradford.ac.uk

Peace Studies 1973-1993: Perimeters and Parameters[i]

Bradford Peace Studies was by no means the first centre for the study of peace in the world, when the Chair was established in 1973. The Center for Research on Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan was set up in 1959, the same year as the International Peace Research Institute, PRIO in Oslo. This was the Cold War, and the study of peace emerged in the midst of the ideological polarisations, the arms race  and the very ‘hot’ proxy wars in the global South (then known as the Third World) of those years.  One of the most influential figures and sometimes called the ‘father’ of Peace Studies was Johan Galtung who in 1964[ii] wrote the editorial for the first issue of Prio’s Journal of Peace Research and challenged the emphasis on war and direct violence as the focus of peace studies, which were coincidentally associated with the dominance of the United States in the emergent field at the time. Galtung, opened the way for Peace Studies to avoid becoming a vehicle for the ‘managers’ of the destabilising conflicts of that time, ( in labour relations  as well as between East and West, capitalism and communism). He counterposed  the idea of ‘positive peace’ to that of ‘negative peace’. The latter focussed on the ‘absence of violence, absence of war’, but was compatible with realist International Relations theory aimed at addressing interstate relations as part of the pursuit of  ‘peace’ . Galtung, proposed that ‘positive peace’ which he first of all described as ‘the integration of human society’ was needed in order to focus on the conditions for peace as well as the conditions for the absence of violence. This meant that peace studies should also focus on peace education, non violence, conflict resolution and international cooperation. Over time, Galtung explored this much further, taking the study of violence away from the agency of the actor alone into the structures which foster violence and the cultural forms of oppression which also impose suffering on others.

Galtung’s extension of the field of Peace Studies shaped the thinking of the future of the Peace Studies project in Bradford but was also questioned from many angles and by other peace thinkers. Had he diminished the importance of ‘negative peace’ by extending the idea of peace into the very complex field of the ‘positive’? Did ‘peace’ remain abstracted from the economic logic of capitalism and other power relationships? A feminist critique would not appear until the 1990s, and has found it difficult to influence the field. Galtung undoubtedly introduced some important concepts, but to what extent did he theoretically advance the field?  Such questions arise from the hindsight of history.

The first two chairs of Bradford Peace Studies, Adam Curle and James O’Connell, brought very different experiences and insights about peace into the Department and both left a strong intellectual legacy. Both came from religious backgrounds, the one a Quaker and the other a Catholic, and had been influenced by their direct experiences in wars in the global South, in particular Africa  but also Asia in Curle’s case, and their practical experience of mediation work.

Curle developed a relational view of ‘peace’ as suggested in the earlier quote, in an effort to invest more robustness in the field. He talked of relationships between individuals, groups and nations:

‘I defined peaceful relationships as those in which individuals or groups are enabled to achieve together goals which they could not have reached separately, or at least do not impede each other (but neutrality of interaction is, in my experience, rare). Unpeaceful relationships are those in which the units concerned damage each other so that in fact they achieve less than they could have done independently, and in one way or another harm each other’s capacity for growth, maturation or fulfilment; or they are relationships in which one party suffers in this fashion even if the other does not and may gain advantage through his conquest’ (Curle, 1985:17)

O’Connell emphasised philosophical questions as much as social relations and in particularly the link between  peace, freedom and justice, in which peace provides the conditions for the  others to survive. Like Curle, he clearly saw the importance of cooperation between people as well as the absence of violence, and recognised the desire for peace as one of the most powerful human urges. Freedom allows people to survive as they want to be, he argued, and this is empty without justice. He saw community as offering the sense of belonging where cooperation can be nurtured and new technologies as overcoming the conflict generating obstacles of scarcity and distance. Like Curle, he was also concerned with the potential of Peace Studies to remain a ‘cocoon of moralism’ (1985:44), and he therefore emphasised the components of ethical reasoning and systematic reflection in which the field of study must be subject to the ‘hard purification of scholarship’ (ibid.:49). O’Connell is credited with enabling Peace Studies to gain acceptability in the academic establishment, in his greater emphasis on scholarship.  He stressed that peace studies is not about human perfectibility  (ibid: 47)and nor should it isolate itself within what Curle  himself had called the ‘pacifist ghetto’ (O’Connell, 1993:7); he was particularly interested in Just War theory.

Under O’Connell, the study of peace began to have much greater influence in the wider world, particularly in the policy community. He emphasised that it was an applied study, and drew parallels to development economics and medicine, though it lacked the professional dimension of medical studies (1985:44) If under Curle, the Department was often paralysed by the intensity of its debates over first principles, such as activism versus academic research, violent and non violent means and reforming or revolutionary ends, under his successor, it had settled down rather than settled these disputes.  As  the Cold War drew to a close, the Department would be well  placed to influence a world with much greater sensibilities around peace. The study of peace was finally an established field in the academic world after twenty years, and it was clearly not going to focus on the absence of war alone. But this  was probably the question which still gained greatest attention from the ‘establishment’, particularly as the field became more scholarly. Negative peace also facilitated unifying components, particularly under O’Connell, as it is easier to focus disparate understandings of ‘peace’ on eliminating the tools of warfare than on the conditions for peace.

These first two decades illustrate how Peace cannot be divorced as a field from the individuals who study it and who reflect the multiple and contesting worldviews and value systems which are present in the wider world. As Curle acknowledged, he and most of his colleagues had not come to their work for primarily intellectual reasons (1985:27).  The interplay between individual values and the building of an academic study with its applied as well as principled aspects would become an ongoing implicit rather than explicit source of tension in the Department. This reflects, however, the substantive nature of the field of study and its deep roots in humanity’s agonising quest for a way of living together without violence and suffering.  It should be an intellectually and practically productive tension. Peace scholars cannot leave their own humanity at the door and step  emotionally and morally naked into a pristine world of harmonious interaction.  The danger is not to recognise this, and to act as if this is possible.  Without debate, contestation, conflict and disagreement, peace study is nothing. The challenge is to create an environment where emotion and reason are both subject to constant personal scrutiny so that everyone is aware of what drives their differences and can shift between moments of consensus and  dissensus. The common commitment to ‘peace’ should be the catalyst, and this is certainly what brings people to the Department and the field. But in practice, it is not enough. There is no pre-existing normative content to the idea of peace. Values are primarily a personal emotional investment in what we each consider good or bad, right or wrong.  Our liberal culture makes us reluctant to take the step from such personal judgements to building a shared moral culture, not a prescriptive externally imposed moral culture, but one that is accepted through the participation of all members of the community in building it. It is an even bigger step to codify this into a non enforceable, non obligatory theory or system of moral values, a peace ethics, for example, which people freely develop and renew.

As Peace Studies became more established, its anarchic origins in which such a process gestated but never fulfilled itself, gave way to the organised professionalism and individual incentives of academia. The perimeters and parameters of the field were set in a way which would enclose its potentially dangerous human ecology.

Peace Studies in the Post Cold War world 1993-2010

The post cold war world ushered in a desperate search for the post war and democratic peace.  Peace Studies began to embrace the wider dimensions of positive peace and at a time when postmodern ideas swept the world, it straddled the emergent debates between the material and the non material, truth and relativism, recognition and redistribution, teleology and the proclaimed end of the idea of progress.  Positivism, Marxism, post structuralism and critical theory were amongst the contesting theoretical positions in Peace Studies as in the wider world. However, Peace Studies avoided the schisms which were the fate of international relations, for example, by claiming a kind of theoretical immunity and focusing on the world of applied research. This was possible because peace scholars brought  critical thinking and deep commitment to a field of enquiry which had become recognised as urgent to the world. They built on a foundation of internal collegiality which gave great strength.  Peace studies scholars began to find their niche in the wider world according to their particular driving passions.  Some focussed on the world of high policy, others on grass roots processes and social movements, some on the emergent intermediary world of NGOs and others on particularly areas of work such as peace museums, peace education and conflict resolution. They brought knowledge of wars, violence and social unrest as well as peacekeeping, mediation and critical education from the local to the global, and raised challenging issues around power, gender and meaningful participation.  The Department took on roles of critique of mainstream discourses of peacebuilding, democracy and development as well as engagement in the highest levels of policy formation.

The Department was very successful in these years and the vast range of publications and the extent of our global and academic recognition are evidence of what were extremely intense years of activity. Our graduates have gone out into the world and they continue to tell us about the significance of Peace Studies to their working and personal lives and the importance of an academic space dedicated to peace. Yet we neglected our field of study. We did not build our field of study. We did not take the immense learning from this period back into the field of study.

[ii] Galtung, J. (1964) Editorial Journal of Peace Research 1(1) pp 1-4 .

Please check back tomorrow for Part 3 of Professor Jenny Pearce’s Inaugural Blog asking What’s Next.  And don’t forget to leave a comment to add your thoughts to these questions.

J.v.pearce at bradford.ac.uk

This inaugural blog is intended to stimulate a conversation across the globe amongst a diasporic peace studies community o f students and scholars.  This community includes all who have been through Bradford University’s Peace Studies programme since the Chair of Peace Studies was set up in 1973; however it also encompasses a much wider range of scholars. There are many individuals in Bradford and other universities and organisations who might already consider themselves peace scholars or might recognise themselves as such as we open up this conversation or at least identify themselves in some partial way with the enterprise.  Indeed, Peace Studies needs the wide debate and interaction to invigorate, refresh and strengthen its field. But Bradford’s own diasporic community is a very good starting point.  The majority of those who have been part at one time or another of Bradford Peace Studies Department would argue that it was not just a degree but an experience! Now, we call on you along with others outside the Department interested in the meaning and practice of peace to contribute your systematic reflections to the question of what might be the agenda for studying peace in the 21^st Century. Help us shape that agenda through an ongoing global dialogue.

This blog, which in keeping with the global approach to peace is being written during a visit to China, aims to be provocative, to encourage new thinking and a renewed but critical and self critical affirmation of the field of peace studies through a wide and inclusive discussion.  It only offers a kick start to a participative discussion not a magisterial and definitive statement. It will need to start with a little background, to remind ourselves about how we came to be where we are. It will then ask, do we know where we want to go? I shall boldly claim that the answer is:  not yet. Peace Studies is at an intellectual crossroads.  We need to revitalise and renew the intellectual project theoretically and normatively.  In hindsight, not enough attention was given to this at the end of the Cold War, making Peace Studies vulnerable to ‘normalising’ rather than ‘exceptionalising’ external pressures. ‘Exceptionalising’ does not run counter to responsibilities to our academic environment (eg professional competence, rigorous approach to research, income generating institutional requirements, collegiality and collaboration), but seeks to frame these within a normative project which emphasises some qualitative differences in our field of study to that of other social sciences. It is that qualitative difference which justifies the claim to exceptionality without exclusiveness and has been the source of a rare sense of belonging amongst the Peace Studies intellectual community.

There was always a danger. Adam Curle, the first Professor of Peace Studies, pointed this out in a paper on ‘teaching peace’ a t the dawn of the Department’s birth:

‘ The first step is to use the word peace with caution: it is both too emotive and too vague and most of us do a mental genuflection before it without defining it. I prefer to speak of peaceful or unpeaceful relationships: these phrases imply a system of interaction to be analysed’[i]

This is a profound and humbling starting point for peace scholars. How does a concept which offers such an apparently undisputed ‘good’ gain meaning, content and appeal across radically different cultures, philosophies and epistemologies? Is it fear of radical disagreement which impedes efforts to deepen the discussion about its content? Should Peace scholars not disagree?  Or rather, should they be at the forefront of innovative and intellectually productive forms of disagreement? Like any other intellectual field, Peace Studies surely requires constant and controversy generating effort to intellectually frame itself, and especially so given that ‘peace’ comes perilously close to being an empty signifier. Yet, what would happen to humanity without a concept of peace?

See Part 2 of Professor Jenny Pearce’s Inaugural Blog for discussion of Peace Studies 1973-1993 and Peace Studies in the Post Cold War Era. And don’t forget to leave a comment to add your thoughts to these questions.