Peace and conflict studies
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.
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.
As the Cold War ended, peace and conflict studies courses shifted their focus from international conflict[7] and towards complex issues related to political violence, human security, democratisation, human rights, social justice, welfare, development, and producing sustainable forms of peace.
[7] 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.
[7] 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.
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.
[11] 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.
Research presented at its conferences and in its publications typically focuses on institutional and historical approaches, seldom employing quantitative techniques.
[14] In 2008, Strategic Foresight Group presented its report on an innovative mechanism to find sustainable solution to conflicts in the Middle East.
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.
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.
The idea was further popularized by then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his 1992 report An Agenda for Peace, published in the aftermath of the Cold War.
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, Robert L. Holmes,[29][30][31][32] Michael Howard, Vivienne Jabri, John-Paul Lederach, Roger Mac Ginty, Pamina Firchow, Hugh Miall, David Mitrany, Oliver Ramsbotham, Anatol Rapoport, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, Oliver Richmond, S.P.
A simplification of these can be phrased as: Appeasement in a strategy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict.
[46] 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.
Many scholars in the area have advocated a more "emancipatory" form of peacebuilding, however, based upon a "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P),[49] human security,[50] local ownership and participation in such processes,[51] 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.
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".
"[65] Regarding his claim that Peace Studies supports violence in the pursuit of leftist ideology, Bawer cited a quote from Peace and Conflict Studies,[66][67] 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.
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.
"[68] Kay and Bawer also specifically criticized Professor Gordon Fellman, the Chairman of Brandeis University's Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies Program, who 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.
"[65][69] 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."
"[70] 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.
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.
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.
[71] Most academics in the area argue that the accusations are incorrect 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.
[74] Finally, peace and conflict studies debates have generally confirmed, not undermined, a broad consensus (in developed world and the Global South) 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).
