Peace and Conflict Studies

Perspectives from South Asia

Anindya Jyoti Majumdar, Shibashis Chatterjee, Anindya Jyoti Majumdar, Shibashis Chatterjee

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000170818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Frieden & globale Entwicklung

This volume explores how we theorize, politicize, and practice peace and conflict discourses in the social sciences.

As concepts, peace and conflict are intricately interwoven into a web of complementary discourses where states and other actors are able to negotiate, deliberate and arbitrate their differences short of the overt and covert use of physical violence. The essays in this volume reflect this eclecticism: they reflect on concerns of contemporary conflicts in world politics; the dissection of the ideas of peace and power; the way peace studies join with global agencies; peace and conflict in connection to geopolitics and identity; the domestic basis of conflict in India and the South Asian theatre including class, social cleavages and gender. Further they also process elements like globalization, media, communication and films that help us engage with the popular tropes and discursive construction of the reality that play critical roles in how peace and violence are articulated and acted upon by the elites and the masses in societies.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political science, international relations theory, peace and conflict studies, public policy and area studies. It will also be a key resource for bureaucrats, policy makers, think tanks and practitioners working in the field of international relations.

1

Peace and Conflict Studies

A prolegomenon

Rakhahari Chatterji

War is as old as human history and so also is the search for peace. Two of our ancient historiographers wrote chronicles of war: Herodotus writing about the wars between Greece and Persia and Thucydides writing about the Peloponnesian war. They did so because they found wars so devastating and caused by human folly. As Thucydides explicitly pointed out the purpose of his work at the outset,

if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

(Thucydides, 1951)

That is to say, if his work could help future generations understand war so they can avoid mistakes made by their predecessors, he would consider amply rewarded (Allison, 2017).

Learning from past mistakes is perhaps the most difficult thing in life, individual or collective, which is why we go through ups and downs in life and nations rise and fall. After the two tragic wars of the past century and the discovery of the terrible nuclear weapons, we as humans wanted to do better. To prevent the recurrence of past tragedies we thought we needed to delve deeper and deeper into the causes of war in order to enhance the possibilities of peace.

War is a particular form of conflict; its extreme, most violent and devastating form. Although sometimes euphemistically we say ‘individuals/families at war against each other’ or two teaching departments of a university are ‘at war’, basically the referent of war is the violent conflict between two collectivities, the most common form of which in our times is the state/nation-state. Similarly and relatedly, peace also has meant primarily peace between or among states/nation-states. As a result, the central focus for peace and conflict studies has also been the arena of international politics.

Philosophical background

Philosophically, the idea of peace and conflict studies goes back to Immanuel Kant who in his celebrated tract, Perpetual Peace (1795), dealt with the question of how global peace could be achieved. His answer was if republican government could be the universal model all over the world then peace would be secured for if a republication government goes to war it must receive the people's consent and that consent is unlikely to come easily as war would require a lot of sacrifice from the people. “A major cause of war over history, in Kant's view, is that states going to war has generally been determined by princes for whom war does not entail much in the way of sacrifice” (Bennett, 2016).

A whole body of literature on democratic peace theory, also known as “mutual democratic pacifism” or “inter-democracy non-aggression hypothesis”, which argues that liberal democracies do not go to war against each other, has, in fact, been rooted in Kant's idea of republican peace. It does not mean that democracies are inherently peaceful; it means that established liberal democracies share some common values and commitments to their own people which make them less likely to fight against each other.

This theory proliferated during the 1960s and 1970s with considerable debate on whether democracy leads to peace or peace to democracy. Peace research scholars such as J. David Singer found some truth in democratic peace theory but could not find any significant statistical relation, whereas realists like John Mearsheimer argued that the number of democratic states were too insignificant during the past two centuries to permit discovery of any significant relation (Bremer, 1993; Doyle, 1983; Small and Singer, 1976; Mearsheimer, 1990).

European or western attitude to war and peace came under critical examination after World War I and peace came to be prioritized through the establishment of the League of Nations. Yet till the end of World War II war was regarded as a legal right of states, which is why governments could still unashamedly maintain departments of war. It was only after World War II that, with the establishment of the UN illegalising war by individual states, departments of war were transited to departments of defence.

Institutional and intellectual foundations

If philosophically peace and conflict studies goes back to Immanuel Kant, institutionally, if a date has to be mentioned, it started from 1959 with the founding of the Peace Research Institute at Oslo followed by Peace Science Society(1973), International Peace Research Association (1964), Peace and Justice Studies Association (2001), and Institute of Economics and Peace (2007). These associations also started to publish a number of specialized journals such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, International Interactions, International Security etc. The Institute for Economics and Peace constructed a Global Peace Index for developing metrics to analyze peace and to quantify its economic value. Started by Australian technology entrepreneur Steve Killelea in 2007, it measures countries by peacefulness by “developing global and national indices, calculating the economic cost of violence, analyzing country level risk and understanding positive peace” (Global Peace Index: Wikipedia). In its 2018 report, it measured 163 countries on peacefulness (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2018).

Like these specialized institutions, some scholars also came to be identified with peace research. If the Norwegian academic Johan Galtung is considered as the father of contemporary peace and conflict studies, several other scholars like Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rapoport, J. David Singer, David Mitrany, Edward Azar and John Burton also came to be closely associated with promoting this field of study and research.

Presently, the area/field of peace and conflict studies is pursued both as a pedagogical activity and as research activity. Pedagogically, teachers teach students to transmit knowledge of the past, present and future of peace and conflict and the appropriate methodology of understanding and analyzing them; as research activity, scholars try to generate new knowledge about peace and conflict and try to disseminate that in the community of scholars and also among state actors for influencing public policy.

It may be mentioned here that the first undergraduate academic programme in peace studies in the United States was developed in 1948 by Gladdys Muir at Manchester University, a liberal arts college at North Manchester, Indiana (Peace and Conflict Studies: Wikipedia). But it was in the late 1960s with a heightened student concern and protest about the United States’ increasing involvement in the Vietnam War that many more colleges and universities in the USA as well as in Western Europe started offering courses in peace studies either as a separate discipline or within an existing field of study. It continued with its focus on international conflict/war through the 1980s in the face of continued threat of a nuclear confrontation between the Super-powers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, however, the focus of peace and conflict studies shifted from negative peace (prevention of war) to positive peace (conflict resolution and sustainable peace) on the one hand, and from international conflict to various sources of internal strife and broadly conceived human rights issues.

As a natural corollary to these changes in focus, what we find is that, on the one hand, peace and conflict studies which had a natural association with political science and international relations and was regarded as a branch of these well-established disciplines is now being mainstreamed into the social sciences as a separate discipline by its own merit. On the other hand, almost every other social science discipline is now paying some attention to the issues raised by peace and conflict studies from its own disciplinary perspective. Ho-Won Jeong's book, Peace and Conflict Studies: An Introduction, is a very good example of the expanding scope of this area of research and teaching. Drawing attention to this new direction, the book makes the point that while concern with prevention of war remains a basic theme for peace studies, during the last two decades it has accommodated themes emerging from the search for an alternative global order which emphasizes sustainable development and the promotion of human rights. Ho-Won Jeong believes that “today's peace research interests lie in uncovering the relationship between inequality, injustice and power asymmetry on the one hand and violence on the other” (Jeong, 2000). Reflecting Jeong's understanding, Chadwick F. Alger, in his contribution to the volume edited by Charles Webel and Johan Galtung, says, “we decided that it would be most useful to provide the reader with concrete examples of the vast range of human involvements in activities that have an impact on peace and conflict conditions” (Alger, 2007).

Taking Johan Galtung's distinction between ‘negative peace’ and ‘positive peace’ as his point of departure (Galtung, 1969), Alger elaborates various dimensions of conflict prevention and peace building, and the thoughts and institutions behind them. He finds in Louis Kriesberg (1998) a very productive elaboration of Galtung's distinction. Kriesberg has argued for “an empirically grounded understanding of how people prevent or stop destructive conflicts but instead wage relatively constructive conflicts”(Kriesberg, 1998). Extending this position, Alger advances the pregnant argument that it “is necessary to seek the termination of some conflicts, but, in the interest of long-term peace, others should be converted into constructive conflicts” (Kriesberg, 1998).

Peace at any cost?

There are peace warriors who take a value position, with peace given the highest value. They tend to prioritize peace above everything and often say peace at any cost. Given the context of post-World War II international politics, where an increasing number of states are producing an increasing number of nuclear weapons keeping alive the possibility of limitless destruction, prioritizing peace appears as the most sensible, as well as moral course. None other than Albert Einstein, as far back as the 1930s, had warned us that

the technical advances of our times have turned this ethical postulate [i.e., peace] into a matter of life and death for civilized mankind today, and made the taking of an active part in the solution to the problem of peace a moral duty which no conscious man can shirk.

(cited in Webel, 2007, 3)

While without doubt this moral position is unexceptionable especially when we are looking at peace as an alternative to war, it is also necessary to remember that between the ‘war–peace’ binary it is possible to tease out several other situations such as conflict with violence short of war, conflict without violence and constructive conflict. Different forms of conflict may vary in terms of their peace potential. Therefore, what is important is not that we must root out all conflicts; the important thing is to transform a potentially violent conflict into one with a window for peaceful resolution. As Galtung says, “Contradictions, conflicts should be welcomed, not avoided. They are challenges to expand our spaces …”. He looks at conflict as containing both crisis and opportunity. The task, according to him, is transformation through transcendence. This is at the core of his ‘Transcend model’ (Galtung, 2007).

Multidimensionality of peace and conflict

An expanded version of peace and conflict therefore does not confine them to the international plane nor merely to the behaviour of states or to international actors. In this perspective, peace is not contrasted only with a single type of conflict, namely, war; rather, various gradations of peace and conflict are identified and explored. Admittedly, both peace and conflict are multi-dimensional. The choice simply is not between perfect peace and all-o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Peace and conflict studies: A prolegomenon
• 2 Peace as power, power of peace
• 3 Mediated reality in peace and conflict: A conceptual navigation
• 4 Conflicts in contemporary International Relations: Management and resolution
• 5 Globalization, income inequality and conflict
• 6 Geopolitics, conflicts and peace
• 7 Identity, conflicts and security
• 8 Armed conflicts and protection of civilians
• 9 Towards sustaining peace: A transformative UN approach
• 10 Social conflict and caste: A security challenge
• 11 The Maoist movement: ‘India's gravest internal security threat’
• 12 Expanding the WPS agenda: Experiences from Nepal and north-east India
• 13 Bollywood on the no-man's land: Bajrangi Bhaijaan