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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
Despite the proliferation in recent years of scholarly journals, university and college departments and research institutes dealing with peace studies, it would be difficult to conclude that this area of academic enquiry is as yet firmly established in the wider field of International Relations. It may well be, as one sympathetic writer noted recently, that peace research is ‘alive, vigorous, rapidly maturing and producing a good deal of work conforming to the tenets of social science’. At the same time it remains a fairly new field and one which, over the years, has suffered, and continues to suffer, from internal disputes, particularly about substance and values. In some respects these debates and controversies are a sign of intellectual vigour. It must also be said, however, that in the past the ‘lack of agreed focus and definition ideological divisions, competing disciplinary biasses, ambiguities of priorities and purposes’, have led to ‘an unhealthy confusion and mystification of issues’ which has helped to prevent its wider acceptance within the academic field.
1. Dunn, David J., ‘Peace Research’, in Taylor, Trevor (ed.) Approaches and Theory in International Relations (London, 1978), p. 257Google Scholar
2. Young, Nigel, ‘Educating the Peace Educators’, Bu lletin of Peace Proposals, 2 (1981), p. 124Google Scholar.
3. The works considered include:
Nigel Young's ‘Educating the Peace Educators’, Ibid., and ‘Problems and Possibilities in the Study of Peace’, Peace Studies Papers (PSP) No. 3 (London and Bradford, 1981); Overy, Bob, ‘How Effective are Peace Movements’, PSP, No. 2 (1980)Google Scholar; Barnaby, Frank, ‘The Nuclear Arms Race’, PSP, No. 4 (1981)Google Scholar; Rogers, Paul, ‘A Guide to Nuclear Weapons’, PSP, No. 5 (1981)Google Scholar; Dungen, Peter Van Den, ‘Foundations of Peace Research’, PSP, No. 1 (1980)Google Scholar; Curie, Adam, ‘The Scope and Dilemmas of Peace Studies’ Inaugural Lecture, February 1975, University of BradfordGoogle Scholar; Haavelsrud, Magnus (ed.), Approaching Disarmament Education, (Guildford, 1981)Google Scholar.
4. Op. cit. pp. 257 and 271Google Scholar.
5. See Oppenheimer, M., ‘Peace Research: A Criticism’, American Behavioural Scientist (October 1963)Google Scholar; Galtung, J., ‘Violence, peace and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, No. 3 (1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schmid, H.., ‘Politics and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, No. 3 (1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Adam Curie's Inaugural lecture, op. cit.
6. It's argued that ‘structural violence’ occurs when one person (or group) is able to dominate another, making it impossible for the latter to achieve ‘a degree of self-attainment or self-realisation’. ( Dunn, , op. cit. p. 267Google Scholar).
7. See Young, , ‘Educating the Educators’, op. cit. p. 126Google Scholar.
8. Ibid. p. 129.
9. See Krippendorff, K.‘The State as a focus of peace research’, Peace Research Society, xvi (1970)Google Scholar.
10. Young, , op. cit. p. 127Google Scholar
11. Despite sharing similar and overlapping interests there has been very little dialogue between those two sets of scholars.
12. Given the history of fundamental disagreement between various groups within the field.
13. Dunn, , op. cit. p. 270Google Scholar
14. Russett, B., What Price Vigilance? (New Haven, 1970)Google Scholar.
15. Dunn, , op. cit. p. 276Google Scholar, Emphasis added.
16. Ibid.
17. Peace education and disarmament education although related are clearly not synonymous. The latter is clearly much more limited and more distinctly focused than the former.
18. See Burns, R., ‘Can we educate for disarmament in the present world order?’, in Haavelsrud, (ed.), op. cit. p. 29Google Scholar.
19. Ibid. pp. 29–35.
20. Ibid. p. 49
21. Ibid. p. 36.
22. Ibid. pp. 39–40.
23. Ibid. p. 39.
24. A Malendu Guha, ‘Disarmament education; Why and how?’ in Haavelsrud (ed.), op. cit.
25. Ibid. p. 98.
26. Ibid. p. 92
27. Young, , op. cit. p. 132Google Scholar
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
