Peace and conflict studies
Peace and conflict studies is a field of social science that identifies and analyses violent and nonviolent behaviours as well as the structural mechanisms attending conflicts, to understand those processes which lead to a more desirable human condition. A variation on this, peace studies, is an interdisciplinary effort aiming at the prevention, de-escalation, and solution of conflicts by peaceful means, based on achieving conflict resolution and dispute resolution at the international and domestic levels based on positive sum, rather than negative sum, solutions.
In contrast with strategic studies or war studies, which focus on traditionally realist objectives based on the state or individual unit level of analysis, peace and conflict studies often focuses on the structural violence, social or human levels of analysis.
Disciplines involved may include philosophy, geography, economics, psychology, communication studies, sociology, international relations, history, anthropology, religious studies, gender studies, law, and development studies as well as a variety of others. Relevant sub-disciplines of such fields, such as peace economics, may also be regarded as belonging to peace and conflict studies. The study of peace is also known as irenology.
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 condition that ensures justice and social stability through formal and informal institutions, practices, and norms.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 known peace studies course in higher education was offered in 1888 at Swarthmore College, a Quaker school.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. 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.
File:Manchester College Administration Building.jpg|thumb|left|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 associated with the Church of the Brethren. 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 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.
Critical theory 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 violence".
There is now a general consensus on the importance of peace and conflict studies among scholars from a range of disciplines in and around the social sciences, as well as from many influential policymakers around the world. Peace and conflict studies today is widely researched and taught in a large and growing number of institutions and locations. The number of universities offering peace and conflict studies courses is hard to estimate, mostly because courses may be taught out of different departments and have very different names. The International Peace Research Association website gives one of the most authoritative listings available. A 2008 report in the International Herald Tribune mentions over 400 programs of teaching and research in peace and conflict studies, noting in particular those at the United World Colleges, Peace Research Institute Oslo, Universitat Jaume I in Castellón de la Plana/Spain, the Malmö University of Sweden, the American University, University of Bradford, the UN mandated Peace University UPEACE in Ciudad Colón/Costa Rica, George Mason University, Lund University, University of Michigan, Notre Dame, University of Queensland, Uppsala University, Innsbruck School of Peace Studies/Austria, University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin. The Rotary Foundation and the UN University supports several international academic teaching and research programs.
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."
Other notable programs can be found at the University of Toronto, Payap University, University of Manitoba, Lancaster University, Hiroshima University, University of Innsbruck, Universitat Jaume I, University of Sydney, University of Queensland, King's College, Sault College, London Metropolitan, Sabanci, Marburg, Sciences Po, Université Paris Dauphine University of Amsterdam, Otago, St Andrews, and York. Perhaps most importantly, such programs and research agendas have now become common in institutions located in conflict, post-conflict, and developing countries and regions such as, Centre for Human Rights, University of Sarajevo, Chulalongkorn University, National University of East Timor, University of Kabul, on September 11, 2014 University of peshawar, the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan established an Institute with prime objective of offering peace education to the youth who suffered it most since 1979 Afghan war. It is called Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.
As research activity
Although individual thinkers such as Immanuel Kant had long recognised the centrality of 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 1981, a group of professional academic philosophers and scholars formed the Concerned Philosophers for Peace in response to the development of first-strike nuclear war strategies during the Cold war era. In addition to providing scholarly critiques of specific military actions, the organization also endeavors to encourage research into global peace in general and social justice on the international stage by encouraging cooperative research. Presentations of scholarly research are periodically made at divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association.
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.
Institutions like Stockholm International Peace Research Institute are advancing the understanding of peace and development by analyzing the complex drivers of conflict and insecurity. Their approach acknowledges that conflicts are rarely caused by a single factor. Instead, a constellation of economic, social, political, and environmental factors, often reinforcing and exacerbating each other in ways that can lead to sustained violence or, conversely, pave pathways to peace.