IB Global Politics Evolution of Peace and Conflict Studies Notes

Origins of Peace Studies After World War II

1. Peace and conflict studies emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the aftermath of World War II, driven by a widespread determination among scholars and policymakers to understand the causes of war and find systematic ways to prevent future catastrophes.
2. The sheer scale of destruction between 1939 and 1945 - over 70 million deaths, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - created an urgent intellectual demand for rigorous research into the conditions that produce both war and peace.
3. Early peace research was strongly influenced by the Enlightenment tradition and Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace," which argued that republican governments, international commerce, and a federation of free states could create lasting peace between nations.
4. The United Nations (1945) institutionalized the aspiration for peace at the global level, but scholars quickly recognized that simply creating international organizations was insufficient without deeper understanding of conflict dynamics and the structural conditions underlying violence.
5. In the United States, early peace research grew from the intersection of political science, psychology, and mathematics. Lewis Fry Richardson, a British physicist, had pioneered quantitative approaches to studying arms races and war frequency as early as the 1920s, laying groundwork for the statistical study of conflict.
6. The Cold War context shaped the discipline from its inception: the existential threat of nuclear annihilation made peace research not merely academic but a matter of species survival, lending urgency and public funding to the nascent field.
7. The Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) established crucial legal and ethical frameworks that peace researchers would later build upon, linking the prevention of armed conflict to the protection of individual human rights and the principle that states could be held accountable for violence against their own populations.

Johan Galtung and the Founding of Peace Research

1. Johan Galtung, a Norwegian sociologist and mathematician, is widely regarded as the founding father of peace and conflict studies as an organized academic discipline. His work transformed peace from a political aspiration into a rigorous field of scientific inquiry.
2. In 1959, Galtung founded the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), one of the world's first dedicated peace research institutions. PRIO pioneered the use of quantitative methods, cross-national comparison, and interdisciplinary approaches to studying conflict.
3. Galtung's most influential contribution was the distinction between negative peace (the absence of direct violence, such as war or armed conflict) and positive peace (the presence of justice, equality, and conditions for human flourishing). This distinction fundamentally reshaped how scholars and policymakers understood the goals of peacebuilding.
4. He introduced the concept of structural violence in 1969, arguing that social structures causing poverty, inequality, and preventable suffering constitute a form of violence even when no physical force is used. This expanded the definition of peace beyond the mere absence of warfare.
5. Galtung's violence triangle identified three interconnected forms: direct violence (physical harm by identifiable actors), structural violence (harm embedded in social systems), and cultural violence (beliefs and norms that legitimize the other two). Achieving positive peace requires addressing all three.
6. Around the same time, Kenneth Boulding, an American economist and peace researcher, co-founded the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan in 1956 and helped establish the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1957, creating the first major English-language academic outlet for peace research.
7. Boulding contributed the concept of stable peace - a condition where war between particular states becomes virtually unthinkable (as between France and Germany after 1945, or the US and Canada). His work emphasized that peace could be studied using economic and systems theory models.
8. The Journal of Peace Research, founded by Galtung in 1964 and published by PRIO, became the leading peer-reviewed outlet for quantitative and qualitative peace research. Together with the Journal of Conflict Resolution, these two journals established the empirical and methodological standards that distinguish peace studies from political advocacy.
9. By the mid-1960s, peace research institutes had been established across Scandinavia, Western Europe, and North America, creating an institutional infrastructure that ensured the field would survive beyond its founding generation and become a permanent feature of university curricula and policy advising.

From Cold War Security to Broader Human Security

1. During the Cold War (1947-1991), peace studies was dominated by the study of interstate conflict, nuclear deterrence, and superpower rivalry. The central question was how to prevent a third world war, particularly nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
2. Strategic studies and deterrence theory heavily influenced the field during this period. Scholars like Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn analyzed the logic of nuclear strategy, arms races, and the balance of terror, producing frameworks that shaped actual policy during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and arms control negotiations.
3. Peace researchers during the Cold War era focused on arms control agreements such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I, 1972; SALT II, 1979), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1968), and confidence-building measures designed to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war.
4. The end of the Cold War in 1991 transformed the field dramatically. The threat of superpower nuclear exchange receded, but new forms of conflict emerged: ethnic wars, state failure, genocide, and complex humanitarian emergencies became the dominant security challenges.
5. The human security paradigm, articulated in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, shifted the focus from the security of states to the security of individuals. It identified seven dimensions: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security.