Peace Research

Theory and Practice

Peter Wallensteen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136672200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Paz y desarrollo global

Comprising essays by Peter Wallensteen, this book presents an overview of the thematic development of peace research, which has become one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of war and conflict studies.

Peace research began in the 1950s when centres were formed in the USA and Europe, and today there are research institutes and departments on every continent, with teaching and research programs in most countries, and peace researchers contribute to the development of international studies, development research and security analysis. Prof. Wallensteen has been a witness to much of this since forming the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in the late 1960s, and this book brings together thirteen of his articles with five new essays in one volume.

The book presents articles on such key issues in peace research as the causes of war, conflict data, conflict diplomacy, non-violent sanctions and third- party diplomacy. In this way, it demonstrates how basic research can be conducted in fields often seen as 'unresearchable' and 'too complicated to deal with'. This volume shows that it is a matter of developing definitions, creating valid measures and finding ways of collecting information, recognising that innovations of this kind require supportive research environments. Furthermore, the results are not only useful for the growth of research activity itself, but for finding ways of dealing with actual conflicts. Thus, attention is also paid here to conflict prevention, peace agreements, sanctions and third-party activity for preventing and ending armed conflict, and building a lasting post-war peace.

This book will be of great interest to all students of peace studies, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies, development studies and IR/security studies in general.

Part I

Making peace
researchable

1 Making peace researchable

Making peace researchable

The fundamental idea of peace research was to make peace researchable. This would generate lessons from history and provide benchmarks for courses that could lead to peace and away from war. It would give research a voice in the pursuit of peace policies, but on a basis of accumulated knowledge with the use of modern scholarly methods. “Peace,” in other words, would become as researchable as was already the case for “health,” “economic growth,” or “democracy,” all relevant goals to be achieved by society. “Peace” was no different from other problems society faced, many initially deemed to be age-old and “normal” until they had been problematized, were open for systematic thinking, and, thus, could be acted on.

However, it was still no small task to attempt to put “peace” on the national and international research agenda. Such studies could easily be seen as political and normative. There were also interested actors and institutions which regarded this field as their exclusive domain. Other would see peace as part of security, defense, and even industrial activity. The topics to be made researchable were, however, more general and not immediately directed toward particular actors or national policies. The story of how peace research emerged following a series of globally experienced traumas – large-scale, unanticipated human-made calamities – is a longer one. It is sufficient is to say that World Wars I and II, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dangers of the Cold War, the destructive Vietnam War, the genocides of the 1990s, and September 11, 2001, all pointed to the importance of developing peace strategies. In particular this would have to be action based on historical realities and with an ambition to lead toward more durable conditions of peace (Wallensteen 2011). This was a broader agenda of research than what was pursued in particular institutes or university disciplines at the time.

Still, there was a clear focus. The first and still primary concern for peace research is to find ways to prevent the onset of war and identify ways to solve disputes peacefully. After World War I it was a matter of preventing another world war. After World War II, the chief interest was in preventing a nuclear war. It could come about from direct crises between the two sides of the Cold War or through the escalation of wars in the Third World. Since the end of the Cold War, the focus has been on the prevention of internal war, sometimes with regional or global repercussions (civil wars, terrorism, regional wars, genocides and other forms of mass killing). Prevention has to be based on an understanding of the causes of conflict and war. Over the years, the agenda has been enlarged with respect to the core theme of causes of war and conflict resolution. There are now a large number of possible causes and impacts of war, ranging from gender to climate change (Wallensteen 2001, 2011; Pim et al. 2010).

The peace research agenda has always been large and this affects the question of how to make peace researchable. The idea that has turned out to be highly productive is to develop a milieu in which the issues of peace are central. A shared concern stimulates thinking, generates ideas, and provides quality control. It would also make peace researchers professional and proud of this profession. Research at leading institutions, notably in Britain and the United States, was then – and still is – highly individualistic. The individual researcher runs his or her projects, interacts with colleagues, but has a focus on his/her career. Remarkably, many leading universities did not have milieus specifically devoted to peace studies, or even security issues, in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers with a peace concern were found in a diverse set of departments, notably in political science, history, sociology, education, and psychology.

Furthermore, when thinking about the possibility of being relevant for this large problem of “peace” and “war” more concerted action is required. Creating a milieu would not be enough. The research problem has to be more narrowly focused. Modern research requires more precision. Methodological developments have made it possible to ask more exact questions. Data collection has provided more advanced resources for locating information. However, focusing the research problems more narrowly also means that not all milieus can deal with all issues. There will be some issues that are not attended to or deliberately left out from a particular institution or milieu. This is necessary to progress toward good-quality work. In fact, it means stimulating a division of labor. Some milieus will have to deal with some problems, other milieus with others. For instance, there have always been local agendas for peace research (such as a particular conflict, or a particular national security issue), not only general and global issues. This is logical, as research has to respond also to the concerns of the surrounding society. Such concerns also promote a division of work, but without isolating one milieu from the rest. There is a need for creating and maintaining networks, exchanges, and an informal way of jointly guiding research so as to cover the peace agenda as completely as possible. However, strict coordination is not acceptable in peace research, or in any other science.

Another way to say this is that the components of peace have to be disaggregated into researchable elements. Optimistically put, at the time of the beginning of peace research it was thought to mean that a minimum of five or six leading scholars would get together and jointly and deliberately create a milieu with a specific focus. It would be some time before this happened, and this chapter tells the story of the milieu that emerged at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. It is not primarily an exercise in history but a way to illustrate possibilities and possibly provide some inspiration. It is not the only one that has emerged, of course. There is also the School of Peace Studies at Bradford University in Britain and the Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in the USA. Others exist under different headings but with a focus that substantially is “peace” (e.g., at Stanford, George Mason, Yale, Columbia, and New York universities). However, these efforts have been parallel to the Scandinavian story to be told in this chapter.

Making peace research milieus

Peace research came to Sweden in the middle of the 1960s. In 1966 a first seminar was set up in Uppsala, run by the university extension service (Kursverksamheten). It engaged younger PhD candidates and undergraduate students as well as teachers and professors. The first theme of inquiry was into nonviolent means, notably sanctions, an issue we will return to in Part IV of this volume. Whether and how to use sanctions was a central issue in the debate on how a small, neutral country could relate to international concerns, particularly those having to do with developing countries. At the same time similar seminars were formed at Göteborg and Lund universities with their own foci. The inspiration for setting up milieus of peace research was the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). It was founded in 1959, and a decade later Johan Galtung's theory weeks – for a number of years run in the cold Nordic month of January – became an attractive “must-attend” event that generated considerable learning and inspiration. A number of young people who later became formative for peace research in the Scandinavian countries were participants as students and junior researchers at these seminars (Nils Petter Gleditsch, Raimo Väyrynen, Håkan Wiberg, Herman Schmid, to name just a few). Many remained in peace research; others took up careers as activists, publicists, or administrators (Wiberg 2010).

The small group from Uppsala returned with ideas of working for something that would be parallel to what it had experienced. PRIO worked as a milieu in line with how peace could be made researchable. The different elements of the institute's agenda – at least in Galtung's presentations – appeared to be closely connected in a coherent framework of relevance for peace.

However, the visits to PRIO also gave rise to the observation that peace research milieus in the early 1970s largely resided outside the universities. Institutions such as PRIO, as well as SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and TAPRI (Tampere Peace Research Institute, in Finland), were foundations or special units. They had limited connections to regular teaching and, for instance, SIPRI did not directly recruit students or PhD candidates. Only a few academic courses were offered. These institutes also had large shares of their funding from government ministries. They were vulnerable to political fluctuations, as was soon witnessed in Denmark, where one peace research institute was closed down, only to reemerge in a new shape, and again suffering the same fate in the early 2000s. The author of this chapter drew the conclusion that peace research has to reside within the universities in order to be more protected from political pressures but also because it would become stronger qualitatively when building directly on young, aspiring researchers. The challenge from research colleagues as well as from students would help to make peace research a solid discipline that could stand up to the demands of specialization. The arguments for this seemed strong; there was considerable receptivity among students and some researchers for this. Still, reaching the goal turned out to be more difficult than expected.

There was also a need in find a particular focus for a new milieu of peace research. As some institutes already existed, why would there be a need for peace research also within the universities? Like peace research activities elsewhere, the efforts in Sweden had to relate to specific Swedish concerns. The government supported the creation of a peace research institute, based in Stockholm, with international recruitment: SIPRI. It began its operations in 1966 and had a strong focus on roads to decommissioning of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The first chair of the board was Ms. Alva Myrdal, Cabinet Minister for Disarmament and deeply involved in the international nuclear disarmament negotiations. Disarmament issues received considerable attention in the 1960s and 1970s. Myrdal was supportive of having peace research at universities. In her view it would be a way to reach younger generations about the urgency to stop the ongoing nuclear arms race. However, that argument would not be enough to convince skeptics within academia of the need for more peace research. SIPRI may have illustrated the utility of such a focused research milieu for public policy, even in the field of international affairs, but was there really a field of inquiry based on theory and methods that could be taught to students?

Making peace research academic

The challenge was to develop a peace research field also from an academic point of view. It required a concern for theoretical development and empirical testing. The department in Uppsala originated as an informal seminar drawing together students, PhD candidates, and faculty members who were concerned about the need for peace and the university's role.¹ In 1971, the national government created three assistant professor positions at Swedish universities (Uppsala, Lund, and Göteborg). This gave some stability to the existing seminars. In Uppsala and Göteborg the focus was not only on research, but also on developing an educational program at undergraduate level. The courses quickly filled up and the students became an active pressure group for more research and teaching on global affairs from a peace perspective. There was a demand for academic teaching. Research projects were developed. In Uppsala, issues of causes of war, connections between disarmament and development, and matters of global militarization drew interest. This showed that there were relevant issues that were not taken up by SIPRI, nor were they part of traditional defense and security studies. It demonstrated that there were researchable issues waiting to be studied.

The most significant breakthrough was the creation of a peace research chair named after Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish UN Secretary-General. A bill was passed unanimously in the Parliament in his honor twenty years after his untimely death on a peace mission. That decision, in turn, was based on a national plan for developing peace research at Swedish universities, proposed by the Minister of Education. This proposal stemmed from five different parliamentary motions in 1979, from four different political parties, together having a majority and cutting across political divisions. The fact that active milieus existed and had demonstrated the fertility of the field encouraged the minister and the MPs to move ahead in order to stimulate, as it was phrased, broader research and teaching on security and peace.

At the time, a university chair was normally coupled to a PhD program. Thus, this decision would mean the creation of a new basis for the ambition of developing a peace research milieu. This was the beginning of the development of a professional discipline with a strong standing in the research community and at the same time of practical relevance. The parliament had created something new. The national plan, furthermore, included a second chair, based at Göteborg University. The possibilities seemed many and encouraging.

Making peace research at Uppsala University

A new chair for research and teaching was, of course, always welcome at a university. It meant new resources. However, such opportunities are of interest to many and the peace researchers were a small group. They did not have a department of comparable strength to their support, and, indeed, they were new at the power games that go on within universities. For leading spokespersons of political science, well trained in such business, it would, seemingly, not be difficult to turn the chair into one of political science, rather than allowing a new milieu to emerge. A major battle followed, taking place not only within the university but also in national media, in the parliament, and in government ministries. It was a painful period, but in the end the idea of creating a new research tradition prevailed. The present author was appointed as the first holder of the Dag Hammarskjöld chair in peace and conflict research in January 1985. In a follow-up decision by the Board of the Social Science Faculty, a PhD program in peace and conflict research was to start by January 1986. A vision was beginning to take material form.

This meant having to develop a full department from the bits and pieces that existed. There were negative experiences to learn from at the time. The Department of Social Anthropology was regarded as politically radical, but its critics could not close it on that ground. The ethos of academic freedom would be violated. However, the department did not manage its finances properly. It ran into debt, and decisions by the department's leadership could not salvage the situation. The department's position became vulnerable. There were administrative motives for intervention from higher levels. The existing department was terminated, and new one was created with a different agenda. A similar fate also befell the small department of peace research at Lund University.

From such experiences it was clear that the key to survival and progress for a new unit in the university system were four. They continue to be generally valid:

1 Protect the basic idea! It is necessary for a milieu to rule itself as much as possible and use its autonomy to develop the idea of be...