Foundations of peace and conflict research and recent developments.

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 422-423
Author(s):  
Kevin P. Clements
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1555-1577 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA GEIS ◽  
WOLFGANG WAGNER

AbstractOver the last two decades, there has been a ‘democratic turn’ in peace and conflict research, that is, the peculiar impact of democratic politics on a wide range of security issues has attracted more and more attention. Many of these studies are inspired by Immanuel Kant's famous essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. In this article, we present a critical discussion of the ‘democratic distinctiveness programme’ that emerged from the Democratic Peace debate and soon spread to cover a wider range of foreign policy issues. The bulk of this research has to date been based on an overly optimistic reading of a ‘Kantian peace’. In particular, the manifold forms of violence that democracies have exerted, have been treated either as a challenge to the Democratic Peace proposition or as an undemocratic contaminant and pre-democratic relict. In contrast, we argue that forms of ‘democratic violence’ should no longer be kept at arm's length from the democratic distinctiveness programme but instead should be elevated to a main field of study. While we acknowledge the benefits of this expanding research programme, we also address a number of normative pitfalls implied in this scholarship such as lending legitimacy to highly questionable foreign policy practices by Western democracies. We conclude with suggestions for a more self-reflexive and ‘critical’ research agenda of a ‘democratically turned’ peace and conflict studies, inspired by the Frankfurt school tradition.


2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch ◽  
Nils W Metternich ◽  
Andrea Ruggeri

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Galtung ◽  
Arne Næss

Show your opponent trust! Do not take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses! How does that work, you may well ask? Indeed, these are but two of 25 carefully selected guiding principles that the two Norwegian authors Johan Galtung and Arne Næss gleaned from Gandhi’s writings in 1955. They account for the successes Gandhi had in South Africa and India and inspired Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and, for example, Andreas Buro, who kept a brief synopsis of the Satyagraha Norms in his jacket pocket during all of his peace missions. Galtung, the founder of Peace and Conflict Research, wrote his first eminent work in prison as a conscientious objector in collaboration with the great philosopher Næss, who was 18 years his senior. This book had three print runs in Norway but was never translated and so has met with no response from German researchers on non-violence up to now. This first German edition focuses on the key chapters of the original work from 1955, while also offering an overview of it in its entirety. With contributions by Johan Galtung and Arne Naess, with an introduction and footnotes by Reiner Steinweg


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-243
Author(s):  
Margit Bussmann ◽  
Han Dorussen ◽  
Nils Petter Gleditsch

AbstractThe institutionalization of peace research has been a tortuous process and it has proven particularly difficult to establish separate departments for peace research in the universities. The Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University is a spectacular exception. This article honors two outstanding scholars who made it happen against all odds and who received the 2013 Lewis Fry Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award for their contribution to the scientific study of armed conflict. Peter Wallensteen and Mats Hammarström were awarded the prize for their individual scholarly output but above all for their joint achievement in establishing peace and conflict research at Uppsala University with its two pillars, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and the training program for young scholars. They have made a lasting contribution to an institution of world-wide renown that pursues research in the scientific tradition of Richardson.


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