He was also, throughout his career and after his retirement in 1978, active in peacemaking and mediation, and visited Nigeria and Biafra several times as part of a Quaker contingent during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70.
[1] Their other relatives included the historian Frederic William Maitland, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the author Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell.
[2] Woodhouse argued that Curle's mother was also responsible for the "self-confidence which was to enable him later to make a series of unconventional moves at critical turning points in his life".
[1] Curle served in the British Army for six years during World War II, rising to the rank of Major and becoming a research officer in the Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs).
[1][2][7][8][10] In this role he was involved in the development of a residential rehabilitation programme which provided counselling, skills training, medical and recreational facilities, and opportunities for social contact,[11] and was tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of the CRUs' work.
[15] He resigned from the University in 1961, having reached the conclusion that the institution, which was then predominantly white, was "out of place" in a political context marked by the growth of African nationalism.
[7] Curle visited India and Pakistan as part of a Quaker contingent in the wake of the Tashkent Declaration, the January 1966 agreement which ended the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965.
[17] The team's roles included gathering information, facilitating communication between the Indian and Pakistani sides, offering assessments of the situation, and proposing possible measures for achieving peace.
[22] Known by this time for his work in the fields of pedagogy and development studies, Curle was consulted by governments and charities, and provided mediation in the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70 as part of a group of three Quakers alongside John Volkmar and Walter Martin.
[28] When the Commonwealth Secretariat arranged for public talks to be held in Kampala, Uganda, in May, Curle and his wife Anne were selected to attend as a Quaker delegation.
[29] The Curles' role in the Kampala talks involved mediating between Commonwealth Secretary-General Arnold Smith and the Biafrans and proposing possible terms of settlement.
[30] In Making Peace Adam described his and Anne's role as involving "persuasion, clarification, message carrying, listening, defusing, honest brokering, encouraging, and liaison with the Commonwealth Secretariat".
[39] In London, Curle and Williams met with Smith and a Biafran representative to discuss issues including the possibility of the Commonwealth Secretariat again becoming involved in negotiations.
"[45] Curle's experiences of the Indo–Pakistani and Nigerian conflicts contributed to his interest in the causes of war and informed his research on the relationships between violence, social transformation, and the goals of development.
[46] At Harvard he responded to the 1968 student protests and the emergence of the New Left by teaching history to schoolchildren in a working-class neighbourhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was struck by similarities to the "underdeveloped world".
[49] Among those he appointed were Tom Stonier, who would later head Bradford's School of Science and Society; Aleksandras Štromas, a lawyer and Soviet dissident; David Bleakley, a former Minister of Community Relations in the Government of Northern Ireland; Michael Harbottle, a former chief of staff of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus; Uri Davis, who had been involved in peacemaking among Jews and Arabs in the Middle East; Vithal Rajan, a Gandhian who had worked in India; Nigel Young, a political scientist formerly based at the University of Birmingham; and Tom Woodhouse, who became Curle's research assistant.
[1] In his 1975 inaugural lecture, entitled "The Scope and Dilemmas of Peace Studies", he argued for the necessity not only of resolving individual conflicts but also of addressing the underlying causes of war, which he identified as injustice and inequality.
[1][51] Towards the end of his tenure at Bradford, Curle began to feel the need to return to more direct involvement in international reconciliation, and so left the university in 1978, after five years.
[1][52] After his retirement, Curle continued to practice peacemaking and track two diplomacy,[53] and worked with Quaker Peace and Service as a mediator in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Balkans and elsewhere.
[1] In 1983 a proposal formulated by Curle and others to assess the teaching of conflict resolution in schools was taken up by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as part of a plan to ensure compulsory education contain a focus on non-violent behaviour.
[55] In 1992 Curle co-founded the Centre for Peace, Human Rights and Non-Violence in Osijek, Croatia, a contested area that was the site of significant violence.
[72] Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, he argued that the three poisons (ignorance, greed and hatred) caused social alienation and formed the basis of most violence.
[53] His work with the Osijek Centre for Peace led to the realisation that the model of peacemaking by neutral parties that he had advanced in In the Middle (1986) was insufficiently nuanced to resolve the Yugoslav Wars, and that affected communities themselves ought to play a greater role in the process.
[82] Richard S. Wheeler, reviewing the book in The Journal of Asian Studies, described Curle's assessment of Pakistan's educational problems as "authoritative" and the insight provided into the role of foreign advisors as "rewarding".
[97] Curle comments on alienation, greed, and commercialism as causes of conflict, and proposes ways to combat certain damaging illusions, such as the idea that material wealth results in happiness.
[99] Curle argues here that feelings of hatred, anger, jealousy and the like are not unchangeable features of any individual, but rather the result of failures to understand and develop their own potential.
[77] Michael Hare Duke, in his review for the New Internationalist, acknowledged the importance of the interpersonal phenomena on which Curle focuses, but argued that the book lacked "a clear recognition of the economic realities which lie behind any justice in the distribution of the world's resources.
[105] Tools for Transformation (1990), like Making Peace and Mystics and Militants, frames conflict as a dynamic force capable of effecting changes in individuals and social structures.
[13] Barbara Mitchels and Tom Woodhouse argue that this perspective influenced the development of peace studies by providing a holistic account of conflict that goes beyond merely ending or preventing wars.
"[75] His poem "Indra's Net" (1999), named for the metaphor used in Buddhist philosophy, reflects on the ideas of human interconnection that also formed part of his work on peace.