An anti-war movement (also antiwar) is a social movement,
usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or
carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism,
which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts.
Many activists distinguish between anti-war movements and peace movements. Anti-war activists work through protest and other grassroots means to attempt to pressure a government (or governments) to put an end to a particular war or conflict.
Anti-war rally of schoolchildren in Pilathara, India
Substantial anti-war sentiment developed in the United States during the period roughly falling between the end of the War of 1812 and the commencement of the Civil War, or what is called the antebellum era (A similar movement developed in England during the same period). The movement reflected both strict pacifist and more moderate non-interventionist positions. Many prominent intellectuals of the time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and William Ellery Channing contributed literary works against war. Other names associated with the movement include William Ladd, Noah Worcester, Thomas Cogswell Upham and Asa Mahan. Many peace societies were formed throughout the United States, the most prominent of which being the American Peace Society. Numerous periodicals (e.g., The Advocate of Peace) and books were also produced. The Book of Peace,
an anthology produced by the American Peace Society in 1845, must
surely rank as one of the most remarkable works of anti-war literature
ever produced.
A recurring theme in this movement was the call for the
establishment of an international court which would adjudicate disputes
between nations. Another distinct feature of antebellum anti-war
literature was the emphasis on how war contributed to a moral decline
and brutalization of society in general.
American Civil War
Rioters attack federal troops.
A key event in the early history of the modern anti-war stance in literature and society was the American Civil War, where it culminated in the candidacy of George McClellan for President of the United States as a "Peace Democrat" against incumbent President Abraham Lincoln.
The outlines of the anti-war stance are seen: the argument that the
costs of maintaining the present conflict are not worth the gains which
can be made, the appeal to end the horrors of war, and the argument that
war is being waged for the profit of particular interests. During the
war, the New York Draft Riots were started as violent protests against Abraham Lincoln's Enrollment Act of Conscription
plan to draft men to fight in the war. The outrage over conscription
was augmented by the ability to "buy" your way out; the amount of which
could only be afforded by the wealthy. After the war, The Red Badge of Courage
described the chaos and sense of death which resulted from the changing
style of combat: away from the set engagement, and towards two armies
engaging in continuous battle over a wide area.
In Britain, in 1914, the Public SchoolsOfficers' Training Corps annual camp was held at Tidworth Pennings, near Salisbury Plain. Head of the British Army Lord Kitchener was to review the cadets, but the immenence of the war prevented him. General Horace Smith-Dorrien was sent instead. He surprised the two-or-three thousand cadets by declaring (in the words of Donald Christopher Smith, a Bermudian cadet who was present) that
war should be avoided at almost any cost, that war would solve nothing,
that the whole of Europe and more besides would be reduced to ruin, and
that the loss of life would be so large that whole populations would be
decimated. In our ignorance I, and many of us, felt almost ashamed of a
British General who uttered such depressing and unpatriotic sentiments,
but during the next four years, those of us who survived the
holocaust-probably not more than one-quarter of us – learned how right
the General's prognosis was and how courageous he had been to utter it. Having voiced these sentiments did not hinder Smith-Dorrien's career,
or prevent him from carrying out his duty in the First World War to the
best of his abilities.
With the increasing mechanization of war, opposition to its
horrors grew, particularly in the wake of the First World War. European avant-garde cultural movements such as Dada were explicitly anti-war.
The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 gave the American authorities the right to close newspapers and jailed individuals for having anti-war views.
On June 16, 1918, Eugene V. Debs
made an anti-war speech and was arrested under the Espionage Act of
1917. He was convicted, sentenced to serve ten years in prison, but
President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence on December 25, 1921.
Between the World Wars
In 1924 Ernst Friedrich published Krieg dem Krieg! (War Against War!): an album of photographs drawn from German military and medical archives from the first world war. In Regarding the pain of othersSontag describes the book as 'photography as shock therapy' that was designed to 'horrify and demoralize'.
It was in the 1930s that the Western anti-war movement took
shape, to which the political and organizational roots of most of the
existing movement can be traced. Characteristics of the anti-war
movement included opposition to the corporate interests perceived as
benefiting from war, to the status quo
which was trading the lives of the young for the comforts of those who
are older, the concept that those who were drafted were from poor
families and would be fighting a war in place of privileged individuals
who were able to avoid the draft and military service, and to the lack
of input in decision making that those who would die in the conflict
would have in deciding to engage in it.
In 1933, the Oxford Union resolved in its Oxford Pledge, "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."
Many war veterans, including US General Smedley Butler, spoke out against wars and war profiteering on their return to civilian life.
Opposition to World War II was most vocal during its early period, and stronger still before it started while appeasement and isolationism were considered viable diplomatic options. Communist-led organizations, including veterans of the Spanish Civil War, opposed the war during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact but then turned into hawks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
The war seemed, for a time, to set anti-war movements at a distinct social disadvantage; very few, mostly ardent pacifists, continued to argue against the war and its results at the time. However, the Cold War followed with the post-war realignment,
and the opposition resumed. The grim realities of modern combat, and
the nature of mechanized society ensured that the anti-war viewpoint
found presentation in Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Tin Drum.
This sentiment grew in strength as the Cold War seemed to present the
situation of an unending series of conflicts, which were fought at
terrible cost to the younger generations.
Vietnam War
U.S. Marshals arresting a Vietnam War protester in Washington, D.C., 1967
Organized opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War
began slowly and in small numbers in 1964 on various college campuses
in the United States and quickly as the war grew deadlier. In 1967 a
coalition of antiwar activists formed the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam
which organized several large anti-war demonstrations between the
late-1960s and 1972. Counter-cultural songs, organizations, plays and
other literary works encouraged a spirit of nonconformism, peace, and
antiestablishmentarianism. This anti-war sentiment developed during a
time of unprecedented student activism and right on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, and was reinforced in numbers by the demographically significant baby boomers.
It quickly grew to include a wide and varied cross-section of Americans
from all walks of life. The anti-Vietnam war movement is often
considered to have been a major factor affecting America's involvement
in the war itself. Many Vietnam veterans, including the former Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator John Kerry and disabled veteran Ron Kovic, spoke out against the Vietnam War on their return to the United States.
South African Border War
Opposition to the South African Border War spread to a general resistance to the apartheid military. Organizations such as the End Conscription Campaign and Committee on South African War Resisters, were set up. Many opposed the war at this time.
2001 Afghanistan War
Demonstration in Québec City against the Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan, 22 June 2007
There was initially little opposition to the 2001 Afghanistan War in the United States and the United Kingdom, which was seen as a response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
and was supported by a majority of the American public. Most vocal
opposition came from pacifist groups and groups promoting a leftist
political agenda; in the United States, the group A.N.S.W.E.R.
was one of the most visible organizers of anti-war protests, although
that group faced considerable controversy over allegations it was a
front for the extremist Stalinist Workers World Party.
Over time, opposition to the war in Afghanistan has grown more
widespread, partly as a result of weariness with the length of the
conflict, and partly as a result of a conflating of the conflict with
the unpopular war in Iraq.
The anti-war position gained renewed support and attention in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. Millions of people staged mass protests across the world in the immediate prelude to the invasion, and demonstrations and other forms of anti-war activism
have continued throughout the occupation. The primary opposition within
the U.S. to the continued occupation of Iraq has come from the grassroots. Opposition to the conflict,
how it had been fought, and complications during the aftermath period
divided public sentiment in the U.S., resulting in majority public
opinion turning against the war for the first time in the spring of
2004, a turn which has held since. Many American writers against the war, like Naomi Wolf,
were labeled conspiratorial due to their opposition, with others
choosing to post their anti-war writings anonymously, such as the
anonymous conspiracy author Sorcha Faal. The financial website Zero Hedge offered its anti-war writers the protection of the anonymous pseudonym Tyler Durden for those exposing war profiteering. The American country music band Dixie Chicks
opposition to the war caused many radio stations to stop playing their
records, but who were supported in their anti-war stance by the equally
anti-war country music legend Merle Haggard,
who in the summer of 2003 released a song critical of US media coverage
of the Iraq War. Anti-war groups protested during both the Democratic
National Convention and 2008 Republican National Convention protests held in St. Paul, Minnesota in September 2008.
Protest against U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, New York City, 2017
Arts and culture
English poet Robert Southey's 1796 poem After Blenheim is an early modern example of anti-war literature — it was written generations after the Battle of Blenheim, but at a time when England was again at war with France.
World War I produced a generation of poets and writers influenced by their experiences in the war. The work of poets including Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
exposed the contrast between the realities of life in the trenches and
how the war was seen by the British public at the time, as well as the
earlier patriotic verse penned by Rupert Brooke. German writer Erich Maria Remarque
penned All Quiet on the Western Front, which, having been adapted for
several mediums, has become of the most often cited pieces of anti-war
media.
The second half of the 20th century also witnessed a strong
anti-war presence in other art forms, including anti-war music such as "Eve of Destruction" and One Tin Soldier and films such as M*A*S*H and Die Brücke, opposing the Cold War in general, or specific conflicts such as the Vietnam War. The current American war in Iraq has also generated significant artistic anti-war works, including filmmaker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which holds the box-office record for documentary films, and Canadian musician Neil Young's 2006 album Living with War.
Anti-war intellectual and scientist-activists and their work
Various
people have discussed the philosophical question of whether war is
inevitable, and how much it can be avoided, as well as how this can be
achieved i.e. what are the necessities of peace. Various people have
discussed it from an intellectual and philosophical point of view.
Various intellectuals not only have discussed in public but have
participated or led anti-war campaigns despite it is different to their
main areas of expertise. They went out of their professional comfort
zone to warn against or fight against wars.
Philosophical possibility of avoiding war
Immanuel Kant: In (1795) "Perpetual Peace" ("Zum ewigen Frieden"). Immanuel Kant
booklet on "Perpetual Peace" in 1795. Politically, Kant was one of the
earliest exponents of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured
through universal democracy and international cooperation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
suggests, war can never be ruled out, as one can never know when or if
one will occur. However, A peaceful revolution is also possible
according to Hegel when the changes required to solve the crisis are
ascertained by thoughtful insight and when this insight spreads
throughout the body politic. Some people claim that Hegel glorified war, this is disputed heavily.
This claim has always been based on interpretations only. Hegel's views
are often mistaken with the characters of his books, who are the
subjects in history.
Leading scientists and intellectuals
Here
is a list of people who outside this field have authority and used
their influence and intellectual rigor favour of in the cause of
enlightening against the warmongers.
Linus Pauling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his peace activism (his second nobel prize). circulated multiple petitions among scientists.
Peace and conflict studies is a social science field that identifies and analyzes violent and nonviolent behaviours as well as the structural mechanisms attending conflicts (including social conflicts), with a view towards understanding those processes which lead to a more desirable human condition. A variation on this, peace studies (irenology), is an interdisciplinary
effort aiming at the prevention, de-escalation, and solution of
conflicts by peaceful means, thereby seeking "victory" for all parties
involved in the conflict. This is in contrast to military studies,
which has as its aim on the efficient attainment of victory in
conflicts, primarily by violent means to the satisfaction of one or
more, but not all, parties involved. Disciplines involved may include philosophy, political science, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, international relations, history, anthropology, religious studies, and gender studies, as well as a variety of others. Relevant sub-disciplines of such fields, such as peace economics, may be regarded as belonging to peace and conflict studies also.
Historical background
Peace and conflict studies is both a pedagogical activity, in which
teachers transmit knowledge to students; and a research activity, in
which researchers create new knowledge about the sources of conflict.
Peace and conflict studies entails understanding the concept of peace
which is defined as political condition that ensures justice and social
stability through formal and informal institutions, practices, and
norms.Addo's con firmament
As pedagogical activity
Academics and students in the world's oldest universities have long been motivated by an interest in peace.
American student interest in what we today think of as peace studies
first appeared in the form of campus clubs at United States colleges in
the years immediately following the American Civil War.
Similar movements appeared in Sweden in the last years of the 19th
century, as elsewhere soon after. These were student-originated
discussion groups, not formal courses included in college curricula.
The First World War was a turning point in Western attitudes to war. At the 1919 Peace of Paris—where the leaders of France, Britain, and the United States, led by Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson respectively, met to decide the future of Europe—Wilson proposed his famous Fourteen Points for peacemaking. These included breaking up European empires into nation states and the establishment of the League of Nations.
These moves, intended to ensure a peaceful future, were the background
to a number of developments in the emergence of Peace and Conflict
Studies as an academic discipline (but they also, as Keynes presciently pointed out, laid the seeds for future conflict). The founding of the first chair in International Relations at Aberystwyth University, Wales, whose remit was partly to further the cause of peace, occurred in 1919.
Indiana's Manchester College was one of the first institutions to offer a major in peace studies
After World War II, the founding of the UN system
provided a further stimulus for more rigorous approaches to peace and
conflict studies to emerge. Many university courses in schools of higher
learning around the world began to develop which touched upon questions
of peace, often in relation to war, during this period. The first
undergraduate academic program in peace studies in the United States was
developed in 1948 by Gladdys Muir, at Manchester University a liberal arts college located in North Manchester, Indiana. It was not until the late 1960s in the United States that student concerns about the Vietnam War
forced ever more universities to offer courses about peace, whether in a
designated peace studies course or as a course within a traditional
major. Work by academics such as Johan Galtung and John Burton, and debates in fora such as the Journal of Peace Research in the 1960s reflected the growing interest and academic stature of the field.
Growth in the number of peace studies programs around the world was to
accelerate during the 1980s, as students became more concerned about the
prospects of nuclear war. As the Cold War ended, peace and conflict studies courses shifted their focus from international conflict and towards complex issues related to political violence, human security, democratisation, human rights, social justice, welfare, development,
and producing sustainable forms of peace. A proliferation of
international organisations, agencies and international NGOs, from the
UN, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, European Union, and World Bank to International Crisis Group, International Alert, and others, began to draw on such research.
Agendas relating to positive peace in European academic contexts were already widely debated in the 1960s.
By the mid-1990s peace studies curricula in the United States had
shifted "...from research and teaching about negative peace, the
cessation of violence, to positive peace, the conditions that eliminate
the causes of violence."
As a result, the topics had broadened enormously. By 1994, a review of
course offerings in peace studies included topics such as: "north-south
relations"; "development, debt, and global poverty"; "the environment,
population growth, and resource scarcity"; and "feminist perspectives on
peace, militarism, and political violence."
A 1995 survey found 136 United States colleges with peace studies
programs: "Forty-six percent of these are in church related schools,
another 32% are in large public universities, 21% are in non-church
related private colleges, and 1% are in community colleges. Fifty-five
percent of the church related schools that have peace studies programs
are Roman Catholic. Other denominations with more than one college or university with a peace studies program are the Quakers, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, and United Church of Christ.
One hundred fifteen of these programs are at the undergraduate level
and 21 at the graduate level. Fifteen of these colleges and universities
had both undergraduate and graduate programs."
Norwegian academic Johan Galtung is widely regarded as a founder of peace and conflict studies
Although individual thinkers such as Immanuel Kant had long recognised the centrality of peace (see Perpetual Peace),
it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that peace studies began to emerge
as an academic discipline with its own research tools, a specialized
set of concepts, and forums for discussion such as journals and
conferences. Beginning in 1959, with the founding of the Peace Research Institute Oslo- PRIO – (associated with Johan Galtung), a number of research institutes began to appear.
In 1963, Walter Isard, the principal founder of Regional science assembled a group of scholars in Malmö, Sweden, for the purpose of establishing the Peace Research Society. The group of initial members included Kenneth Boulding and Anatol Rapoport. In 1973, this group became the Peace Science Society.
Peace science was viewed as an interdisciplinary and international
effort to develop a special set of concepts, techniques and data to
better understand and mitigate conflict. Peace science attempts to use the quantitative techniques developed in economics and political science, especially game theory and econometrics, techniques otherwise seldom used by researchers in peace studies. The Peace Science Society website hosts the second edition of the Correlates of War, one of the most well-known collections of data on international conflict. The society holds an annual conference, attended by scholars from throughout the world, and publishes two scholarly journals: Journal of Conflict Resolution and Conflict Management and Peace Science.
In 1964, the International Peace Research Association was formed at a conference organized by Quakers in Clarens, Switzerland. Among the original executive committee was Johan Galtung.
The IPRA holds a biennial conference. Research presented at its
conferences and in its publications typically focuses on institutional
and historical approaches, seldom employing quantitative techniques. In 2001, the Peace and Justice Studies Association
(PJSA) was formed as a result of a merger of two precursor
organisations. The PJSA is the North American affiliate of IPRA and
includes members from around the world with a predominance from the
United States and Canada. The PJSA publishes a regular newsletter (The Peace Chronicle),
and holds annual conferences on themes related to the organization's
mission "to create a just and peaceful world" through research,
scholarship, pedagogy, and activism.
In 2008, Strategic Foresight Group
presented its report on an innovative mechanism to find sustainable
solution to conflicts in the Middle East. It also developed a new Water
Cooperation Quotient,
which is a measure of active cooperation by riparian countries in the
management of water resources using 10 parameters including legal,
political, technical, environmental, economic and institutional aspects.
Multilevel. Peace studies examines intrapersonal peace, peace
between individuals, neighbours, ethnic groups, marriages, states and
civilisations.
Multicultural. Gandhi
is often cited as a paradigm of Peace Studies. However, true
multiculturalism remains an aspiration as most Peace Studies centres are
located in the West.
Both analytic and normative. As a normative discipline, Peace Studies involves value judgements, such as "better" and "bad".
Both theoretical and applied.
There has been a long-standing and vibrant debate on disarmament
issues, as well as attempts to investigate, catalogue, and analyse
issues relating to arms production, trade, and their political impacts. There have also been attempt to map the economic costs of war, or of relapses into violence, as opposed to those of peace.
Peace and conflict studies is now well established within the social sciences:
it comprises many scholarly journals, college and university
departments, peace research institutes, conferences, as well as outside
recognition of the utility of peace and conflict studies as a method.
Peace Studies allows one to examine the causes and prevention of
war, as well as the nature of violence, including social oppression,
discrimination and marginalization. Through peace studies one can also
learn peace-making strategies to overcome persecution and transform
society to attain a more just and equitable international community.
Feminist scholars have developed a speciality within conflict
studies, specifically examining the role of gender in armed conflicts. The importance of considering the role of gender in post-conflict work was recognised by the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325. Examples of feminist scholarship include the work of Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson.
The negative and positive peace framework is the most widely used
today. Negative peace refers to the absence of direct violence. Positive
peace refers to the absence of indirect and structural violence, and is the concept that most peace and conflict researchers adopt. This is often credited to Galtung but these terms were previously used by Martin Luther King in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1953,
in which he wrote about "negative peace which is the absence of
tension" and "positive peace which is the presence of justice." These
terms were perhaps first used by Jane Addams in 1907 in her book Newer Ideals of Peace.
Several conceptions, models, or modes of peace have been suggested in which peace research might prosper.
The crux of the matter is that peace is a natural social
condition, whereas war is not. The premise is simple for peace
researchers: to present enough information so that a rational group of
decision makers will seek to avoid war and conflict.
Second, the view that violence is sinful or unskillful, and that
non-violence is skillful or virtuous and should be cultivated. This view
is held by a variety of religious traditions worldwide: Quakers,
Mennonites and other Peace churches within Christianity; Jains, the Satyagraha tradition in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other portions of Indian religion and philosophy; as well as certain schools of Islam.
Third is pacifism: the view that peace is a prime force in human behaviour.
A further approach is that there are multiple modes of peace.
There have been many offerings on these various forms of peace. These range from the well known works of Kant, Locke, Rousseau, Paine,
on various liberal international and constitutional and plans for
peace. Variations and additions have been developed more recently by
scholars such as Raymond Aron, Edward Azar, John Burton, Martin Ceadal, Wolfgang Dietrich, Kevin Dooley, Johan Galtung, Michael Howard, Vivienne Jabri, John-Paul Lederach, Roger Mac Ginty, Hugh Miall, David Mitrany, Oliver Ramsbotham, Anatol Rapoport, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, Oliver Richmond, S.P. Udayakumar, Tom Woodhouse, others mentioned above and many more. Democratic peace,
liberal peace, sustainable peace, civil peace, hybrid peace,
post-liberal peace, trans-rational peace(s)and other concepts are
regularly used in such work.
Sustainable peace
Under
the conceptions of peace, sustainable peace must be regarded as an
important factor for the future of prosperity. Sustainable peace must be
the priority of global society where state actors and non-state actors
do not only seek for the profits in a near future that might violate the
stable state of peace. For a sustainable peace, nurturing, empowerment,
and communications are considered to be the crucial factors throughout
the world. Firstly, nurturing is necessary to encourage psychological
stability and emotional maturity. The significance of social value in
adequate nurturing is important for sustainable peace. Secondly, in
order to achieve real security, inner security must be secured along
with arranged social systems and protection based on firm foundation.
Lastly, communications are necessary to overcome ignorance and establish
a community based on reliable and useful information. It will prevents
isolation to take place which is critical to bring sustainable peace.
Conflict triangle
Johan Galtung's conflict triangle
works on the assumption that the best way to define peace is to define
violence, its opposite. It reflects the normative aim of preventing,
managing, limiting and overcoming violence.
Direct (overt) violence, e.g., direct attack, massacre.
Structural violence. Death by avoidable reasons such as
malnutrition. Structural violence is indirect violence caused by an
unjust structure and is not to be equated with an act of God.
Cultural violence. Cultural violence occurs as a result of the
cultural assumptions that blind one to direct or structural violence.
For example, one may be indifferent toward the homeless, or even
consider their expulsion or extermination a good thing.
Each corner of Galtung's triangle can relate to the other two. Ethnic cleansing can be an example of all three.
To simply understand these three
• Direct violence = harming or hurting body & mind
• Structural violence= economic exploitation & political repression
• Cultural violence = underlying values & epistemic models that legitimize direct & structural violence
Cost of conflict
Cost of conflict
is a tool which attempts to calculate the price of conflict to the
human race. The idea is to examine this cost, not only in terms of the
deaths and casualties and the economic costs borne by the people
involved, but also the social, developmental, environmental and
strategic costs of conflict. The approach considers direct costs of
conflict, for instance human deaths, expenditure, destruction of land
and physical infrastructure; as well as indirect costs that impact a
society, for instance migration, humiliation, growth of extremism and
lack of civil society.
Strategic Foresight Group, a think tank in India,
has developed a Cost of Conflict Series for countries and regions
involved in protracted conflicts. This tool is aimed at assessing past,
present and future costs looking at a wide range of parameters.
Normative aims
Peacekeeping efforts by armed forces can provide one means to limit and ultimately resolve conflict
The normative aims of peace studies are conflict transformation and conflict resolution through mechanisms such as peacekeeping,
peacebuilding (e.g., tackling disparities in rights, institutions and
the distribution of world wealth) and peacemaking (e.g., mediation and
conflict resolution). Peacekeeping falls under the aegis of negative
peace, whereas efforts toward positive peace involve elements of peace
building and peacemaking.
Teaching peace and conflict studies to the military
One
of the interesting developments within peace and conflict studies is
the number of military personnel undertaking such studies. This poses
some challenges, as the military is an institution overtly committed to
combat. In the article "Teaching Peace to the Military", published in
the journal Peace Review, James Page
argues for five principles that ought to undergird this undertaking,
namely, respect but do not privilege military experience, teach the just
war theory, encourage students to be aware of the tradition and
techniques of nonviolence, encourage students to deconstruct and
demythologize, and recognize the importance of military virtue.
Critical peace and conflict studies: hybridity, trans-rational peace, and elicitive conflict transformation
Scholars
working in the areas of peace and conflict studies have made
significant contributions to the policies used by non-governmental
organisations, development agencies, international financial
institutions, and the UN system, in the specific areas of conflict
resolution and citizen diplomacy, development, political, social, and
economic reform, peacekeeping, mediation, early warning, prevention,
peacebuilding, and statebuilding.
This represented a shift in interest from conflict management
approaches oriented towards a "negative peace" to conflict resolution
and peacebuilding approaches aimed at a "positive peace". This emerged
rapidly at the end of the Cold War, and was encapsulated in the report
of then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace. Indeed, it might be said that much of the machinery of what has been called "liberal peacebuilding" by a number of scholars and "statebuilding" by another
is based largely on the work that has been carried out in this area.
Many scholars in the area have advocated a more "emancipatory" form of
peacebuilding, however, based upon a "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), human security, local ownership and participation in such processes, especially after the limited success of liberal peacebuilding/ statebuilding in places as diverse as Cambodia, the Balkans, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
This research agenda is in the process of establishing a more nuanced
agenda for peacebuilding which also connects with the original,
qualitatively and normatively oriented work that emerged in the peace
studies and conflict research schools of the 1960s (e.g. see the Oslo
Peace Research Institute research project on "Liberal Peace and the
Ethics of Peacebuilding" and the "Liberal Peace Transitions" project at
the University of St Andrews)
and more critical ideas about peacebuilding that have recently
developed in many European and non-western academic and policy circles.
Some scholars have pointed towards the hybrid outcomes that have arisen
in practice, indicating both the potential and problems of hybrid forms
of peace, with an everyday orientation, and suggestive of the emergence
of a post-liberal framework.
The UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies at the University of
Innsbruck/Austria proposed in 2008 a culture-based classification of
peace interpretations: energetic, moral, modern, post-modern and
trans-rational approaches. The trans-rational approach unites existing spiritual interpretations of society and relation
with the mechanistic methods of modern peace. Hence this school prefers
the strictly relational and systemic method of elicitive conflict
transformation (Lederach) to the prescriptive approaches of modern conflict resolution.
Criticism and controversy
Conservative writers Roger Scruton (left) and David Horowitz (right) are among the critics of peace and conflict studies
A serious number of well established criticisms have been aimed at
peace and conflict studies, often but not necessarily from outside the
realms of university system, including that peace studies:
do not produce practical prescriptions for managing or resolving global conflicts because "ideology always trumps objectivity and pragmatism";
are focused on putting a "respectable face on Western self-loathing";
are hypocritical because they "tacitly or openly support terrorism
as a permissible strategy for the 'disempowered' to redress real or
perceived grievances against the powerful" (i.e. ideological
anti-Western concepts developed by social scientists such as Johan Galtung which arguably add a sense of unjustified acceptability which is used in support of radicalism)
have curricula that are (according to human rights activist Caroline Cox and philosopher Roger Scruton) "intellectually incoherent, riddled with bias and unworthy of academic status...";
have policies proposed to "eliminate the causes of violence" are uniformly leftist policies, and not necessarily policies which would find broad agreement among social scientists.
Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post, specifically criticized the views of Norwegian professor Johan Galtung,
who is considered to be a leader in modern peace research. Kay wrote
that Galtung has written on the "structural fascism" of "rich, Western,
Christian" democracies, admires Fidel Castro, opposed resistance to the Soviet Invasion of Hungary in 1956, and has described Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov as "persecuted elite personages." Galtung has also praised Mao Zedong
for "endlessly liberating" China. Galtung has also stated that the
United States is a "killer country" that is guilty of "neo-fascist state
terrorism" and has reportedly stated that the destruction of
Washington, D. C., could be justified by America's foreign policy. He
has also compared the United States to Nazi Germany for bombing Kosovo
during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
In the Summer 2007 edition of City Journal, Bruce Bawer
sharply criticized Peace Studies. He noted that many Peace Studies
programs in American Universities are run by Marxist or far-left
Professors. More broadly, he argued that Peace Studies are dominated by
the belief that "America ... is the wellspring of the world’s problems"
and that while Professors of Peace Studies argue "that terrorist
positions deserve respect at the negotiating table," they "seldom
tolerate alternative views" and that "(p)eace studies, as a rule,
rejects questioning of its own guiding ideology."
Regarding his claim that Peace Studies supports violence in the pursuit of leftist ideology, Bawer cited a quote from Peace and Conflict Studies, a widely used 2002 textbook written by Charles P. Webel and David P. Barash which praised Vladimir Lenin because he “maintained that only revolution—not reform—could undo capitalism’s tendency toward imperialism and thence to war."
David Horowitz
has argued that Webel and Barash's book implicitly supports violence
for socialist causes, noting that the book states "the case of Cuba
indicates that violent revolutions can sometimes result in generally
improved living conditions for many people." Horowitz also argued that
the book "treats the Soviet Union as a sponsor of peace movements, and
the United States as the militaristic, imperialist power that peace
movements try to keep in check" and that "the authors justify Communist
policies and actions while casting those of America and Western
democracies in a negative light." Horowitz also claimed that the authors
discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis without mentioning its cause (i.e. the placement of the Soviet missiles in Cuba) and blame John F. Kennedy while praising Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for "be[ing] willing to back down." Finally, Horowitz criticized the author's use of Marxist writers, such as Andre Gunder Frank and Frances Moore Lappe, as the sole basis on which to study "poverty and hunger as causes of human conflict."
Kay and Bawer also specifically criticized Professor Gordon Fellman, the Chairman of Brandeis University's
Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies Program, whom they claimed has
justified Palestinian suicide-bombings against Israelis as "ways of
inflicting revenge on an enemy that seems unable or unwilling to respond
to rational pleas for discussion and justice."
Katherine Kersten, who is a senior fellow at the Minneapolis-based conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment,
believes that Peace Studies programs are "dominated by people of a
certain ideological bent, and [are] thus hard to take seriously." Robert Kennedy, a professor of Catholic studies and management at the University of St. Thomas, criticized his university's Peace Studies Program in an interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune
in 2002, stating that the program employs several adjunct professors
"whose academic qualifications are not as strong as we would ordinarily
look for" and that "The combination of the ideological bite and the
maybe less-than-full academic credentials of the faculty would probably
raise some questions about how scholarly the program is."
Responses
Such
views have been strongly opposed by scholars who claim that these
criticisms underestimate the development of detailed interdisciplinary,
theoretical, methodological, and empirical research into the causes of
violence and dynamics of peace that has occurred via academic and policy
networks around the world.
In reply to Barbara Kay's
article, a group of Peace Studies experts in Canada responded that
"Kay's...argument that the field of peace studies endorses terrorism is
nonsense" and that "(d)edicated peace theorists and researchers are
distinguished by their commitment to reduce the use of violence whether
committed by enemy nations, friendly governments or warlords of any
stripe." They also argued that:
...Ms. Kay attempts to portray advocates for peace as naive and
idealistic, but the data shows that the large majority of armed
conflicts in recent decades have been ended through negotiations, not
military solutions. In the contemporary world, violence is less
effective than diplomacy in ending armed conflict. Nothing is 100%
effective to reduce tyranny and violence, but domestic and foreign
strategy needs to be based on evidence, rather than assumptions and
misconceptions from a bygone era."
Most academics in the area argue that the accusations that peace
studies approaches are not objective, and derived from mainly leftist or
inexpert sources, are not practical, support violence rather than
reject it, or have not led to policy developments, are clearly
incorrect. They note that the development of UN and major donor policies
(including the EU, US, and UK, as well as many others including those
of Japan, Canada, Norway, etc.) towards and in conflict and
post-conflict countries have been heavily influenced by such debates. A
range of key policy documents and responses have been developed by these
governments in the last decade and more, and in UN (or related)
documentation such as "Agenda for Peace", "Agenda for Development",
"Agenda for Democratization", the Millennium Development Goals, Responsibility to Protect, and the "High Level Panel Report".
They have also been significant for the work of the World Bank,
International Development Agencies, and a wide range of Non Governmental
Organisations. It has been influential in the work of, among others, the UN, UNDP, UN Peacebuilding Commission, UNHCR, World Bank, EU, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, for national donors including USAID, DFID, CIDA, NORAD, DANIDA, Japan Aid, GTZ, and international NGOs such as International Alert or International Crisis Group, as well as many local NGOs. Major databases have been generated by the work of scholars in these areas.
Finally, peace and conflict studies debates have generally
confirmed, not undermined, a broad consensus (western and beyond) on the
importance of human security,
human rights, development, democracy, and a rule of law (though there
is a vibrant debate ongoing about the contextual variations and
applications of these frameworks).
At the same time, the research field is characterized by a number of
challenges including the tension between "the objective of doing
critical research and being of practical relevance".
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