This chapter concentrates on those Strategists, Peace Researchers and Arms Controllers who stayed with the military agenda despite the ending of the Cold War, and discusses these together as ‘traditionalists’. It thus collapses most of the main distinctions between Strategic Studies and Peace Research used to structure chapters 4 and 5. This chapter and the next are organised around a new division between traditionalists collectively, and those who wanted to widen and deepen the meaning of security. Our argument that Cold War ISS can be seen as a single conversation as far as military security was concerned remains just as strong, or even stronger, after the end of the Cold War.

Yet one might wonder what produced this convergence between Strategic Studies and ‘negative’ Peace Research considering their heated normative and analytical exchanges during the Cold War? Building on our analysis in the previous two chapters, we would argue that this convergence, illustrated in Figure 6.1, was facilitated in part by the shift towards ‘security’ within Peace Research. As Gleditsch noted in 1989, by then peace was no longer the concept that guided Peace Research (Gleditsch, 1989). In addition, although negative Peace Research understood itself as normatively driven, it was a normativity that entered the analysis through the choice of research subject. Once the research question had been formulated, it was up to social science to determine its validity and the research process was therefore objective as far as the results produced were concerned.