The injection of a western world-view into a research field has never been more apparent than in the study—or rather9 the non-study—of crisis initiation. The status quo orientation of western strategic thought has led to a predisposition to view international crises as generically ‘bad’ and disruptive processes. The utilization of crises as a foreign policy instrument has long been perceived as taboo, despite the enormous diversity of crisis theory and research, and despite the locus of crisis at the ‘center of gravity’ between peaceful and violent interactions among states.

By mid-1947 the division of Europe had acquired clear momentum and definable contours, yet it had not yet fully congealed. The period was a transitional one, moving away from the contexts of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements which anticipated post war great power collaboration in Europe, and moving toward the complete Stalinizatioh of eastern Europe and the concomitant linking of western Europe to an American led economic and security order. Yet despite the recent Soviet backed ouster of Nagy in Hungary in May, some elements of a pan-European fabric remained intact if uncertain The Four Power negotiations over Germany's future were continuing and the allied occupation machinery remained in place. The establishment of the Economic Commission for Europe in May 1947 provided at least an institutional framework for considering recovery problems on a pan-European rather than an east-west basis. And during this pre-Cominform period the east European states appeared to anticipate some independence in foreign affairs, as suggested by the initial expressions of interest by Czechoslovakia and Poland in responding to Secretary of State Marshall's aid initiative.

The recent opening of official archives has permitted many new insights into the complex process which led to the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949. One of these concerns the role of the Scandinavian countries, both as actors in their own right, and as pawns in the policy calculuses of the leading western powers. Recently Geir Lundestad has documented in great detail the role which Scandinavia played in American foreign policy in the 1945–49 period and especially in relation to the Atlantic Pact negotiations. In comparison, the position of Scandinavia in Britain's security policy in the period concerned is very little known.

International Politics has been available as part of the Open University's programme of studies for the best part of ten years. During that time several hundred students have experienced this area of study in the unique form of learning and teaching that has come to be the hallmark of Open University courses. It would be interesting to know how the first generation of graduates with an International Politics course behind them respond to that experience, as they have studied a branch of the social sciences that is regarded as especially difficult and demanding in its scope, so much so that an earlier generation of scholars thought the subject to be unsuited to undergraduate study. We have come a long way since then, however, and the typical Open University student is rather different from the conventional undergraduate, bringing to his study more worldliness perhaps—no bad thing in the study of political matters—and a deeper appreciation of the subtleties of human behaviour But this advantage over the student coming straight into higher education from sixth form or college of further education has to be set against the disadvantages of a probable lack of method and discipline in study and of having to receive and assimilate complex ideas at the end of a day of full-time non-academic work, for Open University students are part-time and will do most of their study in the surroundings of their own homes. These circumstances influence the designers of Open University course. In the market place of adult education the consumer is sovereign. Certainly in large urban areas many different educational bodies compete for the adult student and Open University courses have to be designed with this competition in mind. Programmes of study must be carefully structured to provide for set amounts of material to be mastered in a limited period of time. There has also to be clear direction to courses, with signposts in the form of self-assessment exercises and suitable pauses built into course texts to allow for ‘digestion’ and to ensure that the right route is followed. To achieve these ends packages of learning materials are prepared by Open University staff and mailed to students in their own homes, supported usually by a course reader, some set books, and reinforced by the back-up of television and radio. This form of learning parallels conventional methods only in that periodical tutorials with groups of students are conducted by the Open University's part-time tutorial staff.

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.