Peace: a Renewal of an Enlightenment Project
Draft by Nigel Young: Editor-in-Chief
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| | Peace: a Renewal of an Enlightenment ProjectDraft by Nigel Young: Editor-in-Chief |
One can imagine a reviewer new to the field of peace studies inquiring ‘how can one possibly assemble an Encyclopedia on such a broad, diffuse, contested – and often value-laden-theme as 'Peace'!?
Indeed as peace research and peace studies has evolved over the past more than half a century – both in the academy and beyond – teachers and students, scholars and practitioners, have often been forced to ask themselves such questions of the subject. Yet 'peace' has a history, and definite periods of gradual institutionalization – one that is quite different from the long term evolution of other institutions, and until the later twentieth century, mostly in the form of ideas, and cultural changes or social movements, rather than established, formal structures, political, academic, or otherwise.
The International Encyclopedia of Peace represents a further stage in that evolution, as the field develops clearer core topics, themes, theories and professional foci. Like all transdisciplinary projects, its boundaries overlap with other fields and academic traditions, especially International Studies: but insofar as it represents a reaction to the original scope and focus of 'International Relations', it has come of age as a field of inquiry that is neither War Studies nor Security Studies – nor purely Conflict Analysis or Resolution (though those are key dimensions), and as a field that is both global and transnational. As much as it is about relations between states (or ‘nations’), it is moreover one that encompasses peace in communities and between and even within individuals.
Bringing the ‘rest of the world' in therefore means not merely abjuring the study of the narrow foreign policy interests of states alone, but consciously focusing on other relationships – peaceful or un-peaceful – that transcend (or subvert) boundaries of race or territoriality, divisions between social classes and ethnic groups, or the distinctions of gender, or the differences between religious faiths, or disparities between various geo-environmental regions of the world. That indeed is a dauntingly broad canvass to cover, and by limiting the focus to violent and non-violent aspects of these relationships, and transformative actions to ameliorate or change them (conflict transformation), some boundedness is restored; the scope is nevertheless ‘Encyclopedic’ and how to select within it becomes an issue of prioritisation.
In the great enlightenment project of the 'philosophes', the Encyclopedie of l75l and after, there was indeed an entry on ‘peace’ – peace based on reason rather than faith: a peace based on the assumption that human co-operation, social harmony, and the rational and unarmed resolution of conflicts is both possible and desirable – and that the phenomenon of war is not the permanent fate of the species, but a social construction. In the l75l volumes there is also an entry on ‘world citizenship’ based on the cosmopolitan idea of tolerance, equality, and justice as embodying rights that transcend political or military frontiers, and is a universal principle, as applied not to one group, state or society alone. For the mid-l8th century, this was a radical departure, and one of its truest heirs is our contemporary notion of a peace that can be explored, developed, studied, practiced and improved.
In l935, Karl Mannheim wrote an insightful prescient and perceptive essay on ‘political generations’, how a generational experience is shaped by and in turn shapes, political thought and action. Peace itself is a product of such generations: not least the generation of the 'philosophes' – Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Helvetius and the many lesser known contributors to the Encyclopedie. Similarly the key political generations for Peace Studies followed the two world wars – or the continual 3l-year war of l9l4-l945, when inter-state diplomacy was seen to have failed appallingly, both before, during and after l9l4, l9l8 and l939, and when International Relations had arisen in the l920s as a field as a partial answer in the academy.
But the period from the l930s was also bedevilled with various misuses and co-optations of the term peace, to which manipulations I will return at the end – since post 9/ll they still continue. But suffice to say that the gestation of peace study in the l930s and l940s could not have occurred at a less propitious time, yet no other approach seemed to match the demands of an era of the atomic power harnessed by the Manhattan Project – indeed peace needed its own Los Alamos – to develop a survival strategy based on thought rather than fear, knowledge rather than with fulfilment and It was amongst natural scientists – physicists, mathematicians, and biologists – as well as economists and sociologists, that peace research was born.
Although predominantly a response to the transformations, actual and intellectual, of the past two decades, the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace still reflects the pioneering work of these individuals of the l930s, l940s and l950s – who eventually began to assemble in institutional groups mainly in Scandinavia and the English-speaking world. By then, and indeed for 40 years, the nuclear arms race and the Cold War dominated even peace discourse, and for many peace had become a tarnished, devalued concept – associated (often wrongly) with appeasement', the Comintern, or the political outreach of the Soviet Union and Picasso’s dove; or with absolutist pacifism of the sectarian kind which unsurprisingly emerged after the traumas of World War II. It is one reason why some programmes still avoid the term in favour of ‘security’ or ‘conflict’, or some other ‘neutral’ term that will not appear ‘political’, and why it has been so slow to regain legitimacy in former Communist states, especially in Eastern Europe.
The nuclear disarmament movement of the late l950s (as in the l980s) was important insofar as it brought many intellectuals to realize that important and laudable as peace movements themselves might be, they lacked – to paraphrase Kenneth Boulding’s words -- 'the intellectual chassis to support their powerful moral engine'. One could describe the last fifty years as a series of efforts to redress that balance; to give ‘peace’ a developed, systematic basis in theory, knowledge and sober, critical reflection on praxis; or 'experiments in truth' as Gandhi put it.
The generation of the l960s established peace research and, in the l970s, the beginnings of Peace Studies as a field of teaching as well as scholarship, and that project in the context of the l980s, like the overall movement, made significant advances. But despite the success of teaching departments such as Bradford’s, and Peace Research Institutes in Sweden and Norway, the work of institutionalization remains unfinished.
Despite the achievements at the end of the Cold War, there have been setbacks as well as great innovations, and professional advance has been balanced by institutional setbacks. The ‘long march through the institutions’ has proceeded with an uneven pace, more steps forwards than back, but with significant changes in the field – and This Encyclopedia expresses both the pluralism – and incompleteness – of this project: if the first edition is the last edition, it will have stalled.
In conclusion, something needs to be said about the word (or concept) 'peace' – a debased term for many in the l950s and l960s, and for some beyond rescue: the Orwellian 'War is peace' of Big Brother (or was it ‘Peace is war’?). The slogan
'Peace is our profession' (as the US Strategic Air Command described their active nuclear role in preparing, deterring or deferring – or risking – atomic holocaust by a gamble in strategic militarism, was proudly proclaimed outside each nuclear air base, in the Western world.
The generations of peace activists and theorists from the l930s to the l980s inherited a term that for 50 years had been tarnished by political and media predators – the Peace of Versailles, as Foch observed, was no peace, but an interval between mass carnage - ‘the war to end wars’ it was not; though it should have been. Nor was Chamberlain’s 'peace in our time!': that still has the sobering echo of appeasing tyranny. The misuse of the term by the Comintern, and the Soviet Union after that, was almost entirely counter-productive, in the peace fronts of the l940s and l950s, and only finally ended in l990.
In the l960s, the new movements for nuclear disarmament or civil rights, espousing direct action (often trans-national) and civil disobedience, were a refreshing change of course. The ideas and actions of Gandhi were reinstated in the canon and with it methods and strategies of unarmed, or non-violent civilian resistance – itself a continuing key area of study from Gene Sharp’s pioneering work in the l960s, through that of April Carter, Adam Roberts, Michael Randle, Howard Clark and many others more recently. Timothy Garton Ash’s work on the role of people power in the changes of l989 further enhanced this continuing theme in the evolution of peace study, of which it now constitutes a major component.
Looking back from the post 9/11 era to in the early l970s, as when the protracted Vietnam War was still a dominating concern, the launching of peace studies at that time was a brave, possibly premature (even foolhardy) effort to rescue the term. But the experiment was isolated, in the academy, unnecessarily separated from peace research, in tension with peace action and tarred by all the earlier negative associations of the term 'peace'. Nevertheless it survived (Just!).
The idea of peace challenges our understanding and our actions, as much, or more, now than ever; but if it has shed some of these misuses, doublespeaks, and aberrations, to be again the positive, rational, constructive child of the enlightenment that it truly is, then this Encyclopedia will find its humble, but rightful place, as another benchmark in that progression.
Since the l980s, and end of the cold War in l989, the international context has become somewhat more favourable. So has the academic contest: since the l990s cross-disciplinary work is much more acceptable, and concepts of globalism and transnationalist approaches are, after 200l, increasingly accepted in an integral world in which’ international’ seems increasingly narrow as a description of multiple political economic, human and natural non-state relationships and the impact of the post 9/ll world of vulnerability to global climate change, worldwide economic disparities, world terrorism and the spread of acts (and weapons) of terror (mass destruction), the focus of Paul Rogers’ work at Bradford since l98l. Just as in l960, non-proliferation and nuclear abolition is again seriously on the agenda – and 20l0 could be a crucial year for the disarmament process, and the process could still fulfil the promise of the 2009 peace prize award.