The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace

Oliver Richmond, Sandra Pogodda, Jasmin Ramovic, Oliver Richmond, Sandra Pogodda, Jasmin Ramovic, Oliver Richmond, Sandra Pogodda, Jasmin Ramovic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137407610
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Paix et développement mondial

In this handbook, a diverse range of leadingscholars consider the social, cultural, economic, political, and developmentalunderpinnings of peace. This handbook is a much-needed response to the failuresof contemporary peacebuilding missions and narrow disciplinary debates, both ofwhich have outlined the need for more interdisciplinary work in International Relationsand Peace and Conflict studies. Scholars, students, and policymakers are oftendisillusioned with universalist and northern-dominated approaches, and a betterunderstanding of the variations of peace and its building blocks, acrossdifferent regions, is required. Collectively, these chapters promote a moredifferentiated notion of peace, employing comparative analysis to explain howpeace is debated and contested.

Part I

Disciplinary Perspectives

1

Peace in History

John Gittings

A war historian studies the history of war: no one will quibble with that definition. To say that a peace historian studies the history of peace raises more difficult questions. We may disregard the objection of those who believe that peace is merely the absence of war and that consequently the peace historian has very little to work on. All the contributors to this volume, at least, believe that peace is a rich and varied subject and that whole tracts of the subject have yet to be fully explored. We may also resist the criticism that peace historians risk compromising their integrity by becoming advocates of peace. As a generalization, this is no more true than to say that war historians are all advocates of war. Yet the real question for peace historians, and one which complicates the definition of ‘peace history’, is this: to what extent should peace historians confine themselves to the study of peace advocacy and argument in history, and how far should they engage directly with the dominant (and peace-averse) historical narrative of war? Indeed, the subject has been defined in both of these ways. The first task is vast in itself, given the lack of coverage and low visibility of peace advocacy and peace thinking in most orthodox histories. The efforts of the peace societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, still do not feature as prominently as they should in most diplomatic histories of the run-up to the First World War – and are sometimes ignored altogether. The same is equally or even more true of most peace advocacy in earlier ages – as I shall show later in the case of Desiderius Erasmus. The second task requires the peace historian to go further, and often to challenge accepted truths in the established fields of war history and international relations. Both tasks are well illustrated if we consider how peace historians may approach the history of the 40 years and more of Cold War. It is already a major exercise to chart and analyse the influence of the anti-war and peace movements upon the course of the Cold War (as has been done brilliantly by the US historian Lawrence Wittner). It is a separate but equally essential exercise to submit conventional views of the Cold War to rigorous scrutiny and to show how, in many respects, they are flawed. The peace historian, in this instance, has to become a war historian – or at least a Cold War historian.

‘What is peace history?’ asks the peace historian Charles F. Howlett in a recent history of the American peace movement. ‘It is defined as the historical study of non-violent efforts for peace and social justice’.¹ ‘Peace history’ is sometimes regarded as a shortened version of the phrase ‘peace research in history’, which also implies a focus upon peace activism and argument. (The Peace History Society in the US changed its name in 1994 from the original name of the Council for Peace Research in History, chosen when it was first set up in 1963–64.) Peace history has also been defined as the study of ‘ideas, individuals and organisations concerned with the promotion of peace and the prevention of war and international conflict’.² Taken literally, this type of definition can lead to a form of ghettoization of peace history in which the peace advocates of today spend most of their time researching and celebrating the peace advocates of the past. And since the advocacy of their predecessors was usually unsuccessful, this can expose contemporary peace history to the charge of being irrelevant to the ‘real world’. However, it is also realized that the study of ‘[peace] ideas, individuals and organisations’ should lead on to a broader critique of majority historical narratives. The history of peace advocacy in the US, writes its chronicler Charles Chatfield, is part of a challenge to the dominant consensus view of history.³ Another US historian, David Patterson, suggests that ‘the best peace research will be related to questions of broader, more universal concerns’, noting that it has already offered ‘penetrating critiques of the Cold War and its redefinition of national security targets in terms of military power’.⁴

Periodization of peace

There are a number of books in print which offer a history of warfare, or a timeline of wars, sometimes taking the narrative back as far as the late Bronze Age. No one would query the conceptual approach behind such works: wars can be named and assigned to a chronology; the science of war can be discussed and its development can be charted. Questions may be raised, however, if a peace historian adopts the same approach, surveying the science of peace over past millennia, or constructing a timeline of ‘peaces’ (there is no logical reason not to use the word in the plural, and yet it jars). It is easier to regard peace as the interval between wars than to regard war as the interval between peaces, and yet for the peace historian the two propositions are equally valid. Formal ‘peaces’ such as those established by treaty (e.g. the Peace of Nicias, 421 BC; the Peace of Westphalia, AD 1648) may be readily identified. Broader periods of peace in which substantial populations enjoy freedom from war over a significant length of time (the Ptolemaic Peace, 287–225 BC; the European Peace, AD 1818–48) are also visible. Their limitations may be discussed – for instance, the ultimate reliance on armed force, as in the Pax Romana, or the persistence of social violence and local conflict – but they remain periods of predominant peace. When we consider the phenomenon of war in human society, we are entitled to take equal account of the phenomenon of peace. Pioneering work in the quantitative study of war was carried out from the 1930s through to the 1950s separately by Lewis Fry Richardson, Pitirim Sorokin and Quincy Wright, from whose work some conclusions on the frequency of peace may be drawn.⁵ Otherwise, only isolated attempts have been made. One study of peace in the ancient world challenges the view of its history as a tale of unrelieved war: the authors, Matthew Melko and Richard Weigel, identify ten ancient ‘world periods of peace’, starting with the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (1991–1720 BC) and concluding with the Hispanic-Roman period on the Iberian Peninsula (19 BC to AD 409).⁶ An idiosyncratic work by a German scholar in the 1950s, advocating a United States of Europe, sought to show that European Union would be the successor to a series of ‘epochs of peace’ which included long war-free periods in China, Japan and Latin America.⁷ The US peace scholar Kenneth Boulding has attempted a more general definition of war and peace as ‘proportions of human activity’ through calculating the proportion of GDP spent on the war industry (defined very widely) in the US and other major countries, concluding that it is doubtful whether war over time ‘has averaged more than 5 or at most 10 per cent of human activity’.⁸ We may conclude that the periodization of peace (which is only meaningful if allied to a rigorous definition of peace) is a field wide open for further research, though its findings would still be subject to different interpretations. If it is true, for example, that periods of peace in excess of a quarter of a century are extremely rare (as argued by Sorokin), is such a period to be regarded as short or long?

In restoring peace to a historical narrative dominated by war, the peace historian also seeks to counter the bias of ‘democratic peace’ theory, which effectively minimizes the significance of both actual peace and action for peace in the centuries of pre-modern, and largely pre-democratic or less ‘civilized’, history. Exponents of ‘liberal peace’ show little interest in peace thought and argument before Immanuel Kant, who is seen as foreshadowing their theory in his essay on Perpetual Peace. The theory also has a vested interest in showing that peace has become more widespread in more modern democratic and ‘civilized’ times. Influential exponents today include the war historian Azar Gat, for whom liberal democracy has fundamentally reduced the prevalence of war, and the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, whose latest work argues in very broad terms that modernity and culture have brought about a drastic decline in violence.⁹

Further clarification of the periodization of peace will assist the peace historian to investigate the conditions under which peace has been secured and the means by which it is maintained. The reasons for its breakdown are also of obvious interest, although this area is more likely to have been covered by the war historian. The imbalance of studies of societies at war and societies at peace has long been noted, though this has begun to be redressed in recent decades. Publication of A Natural History of Peace (1996), edited by Thomas Gregor, following a conference which brought together scholars from various disciplines, was a significant step forward. In the concluding essay on ‘understanding peace’, John Vasquez argued that ‘a successful peace is not a negative achievement’ but a positive and rational process which established ‘rules of the game’ and combined self-interest with issues of legitimacy and morality.¹⁰ A volume of essays by European scholars has also sought to adopt a more historically sensitive approach to both peace and war on the European continent, rejecting what the editors regard as the ‘essentially ahistorical view of war and peace that dominates most IR theory’.¹¹

Classical peace

The standard view of ancient and classical history has been to regard it as dominated by martial values and chronic warfare, stretching from predynastic China through the empires of the Near East to Greece and Rome. The Greek example has been especially prominent over a whole millennium, from Mycenaean Greece to the Persian, Peloponnesian and subsequent wars of city-state Greece. A recent editor of the Iliad describes Homer’s work ‘as a glorification of war and as the definition of a man as a skilled fighting machine’, while a textbook on warfare in ancient Greece tells us that ‘a hostile relationship was assumed to be the norm between Greek states’.¹² Yet we are faced with what one classical scholar has described as ‘the paradox of war’ in ancient literature: that ‘the prominence of war is disproportionate to its frequency and significance in practice’.¹³ A more nuanced view has begun to emerge in recent classical scholarship, in which war is regarded more as a social than as a purely military phenomenon, and as a result more attention is paid to the ancient Greek concern for peace, and the means adopted to achieve or maintain it.

An early attempt by the Italian scholar-diplomat Gerardo Zampagliano to explore ‘the idea of peace’ in both classical Greece and Rome (1967) is still the only general survey of this topic.¹⁴ However, the conventional view of Homer as wholly concerned with strife and warlike qualities has been considerably modified. More weight is now attached to the peaceful images conveyed in Homer’s famous similes, which provide a pacific counterpoint to his narrative of war. His equally famous description of the Shield of Achilles, decorated for the most part with scenes of peace rather than war, has also received more attention. Homer’s message is that humans aspire not to blood and violence but to such hedonistic pursuits as song and dance, feasting and making love, the Oxford classicist Oliver Taplin has suggested.¹⁵

More emphasis is also placed now on the elaborate institutions of interstate diplomacy in classical Greece, through which considerable efforts were made to keep the peace by truce and treaty. The single-minded Thucydidean emphasis on war, it is noted, says little about periods of peace, and sometimes ignores successful peace diplomacy altogether. Greek drama has also been scrutinized for more insight into popular attitudes towards war and peace; the plays of Euripides, for example, reveal a deep concern with the immorality of war. The murderous behaviour of Sophocles’ Ajax is seen by the classicist (and Vietnam veteran) Lawrence Tritle as showing the symptoms of what we now know as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.¹⁶ By contrast, scholarly perception of early Chinese attitudes to peace and war has hardened in recent scholarship in a more war-oriented direction. The earlier view, strongly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Editors
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Disciplinary Perspectives
• Part II: Regional Perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index