Conference on Conflict and Complexity

Conference on Conflict and Complexity

Tuesday 2nd - Wednesday 3rd September 2008

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

A critical approach to the study of conflicts

Lessons from the ‘critical turn’ in Security Studies

André Barrinha

University of Kent, Canterbury

Please do not quote or cite without the author’s permission as this is a work in progress. Comments are most welcome.
Introduction

Until the 1980s, Strategic Studies was seen as the discipline responsible for the study of security issues, back then reduced to military affairs. Since then, Security Studies has become, particularly in Europe, a more widespread label to indicate the discipline responsible for the study of security. Such turn was largely informed by a ‘critical’ approach, where classical paradigms were put into question and new ways of thinking about security advanced. Underlying the vast majority of these new approaches was the idea that security is not a mere technical issue that should be left for experts to discuss, but rather a deeply politically embedded practice in need of careful look.

One of the main compliments towards Peace and Conflict Studies has been, since the 1960s, its capacity to go beyond the mainstream, often to the very deep margins of academia, without fearing academic discredit. The ‘critical turn’ in Security Studies was, to some extent, inspired by the boldness of Peace and Conflict Studies. And still, such inspiring role was not enough for the field in itself to accept and integrate that ‘critical turn’ into its own works. The main argument of this paper is that such critical turn has still to take place within the Peace and Conflict Studies field, and that the fact that it has not, deserves to be carefully studied.

In that sense, this paper will start by discussing what Peace and Conflict Studies exactly mean, and then proceed to its historical evolution in parallel with the most relevant moments in the history of Security Studies. The paper will then focus on the links between the two fields until the end of the Cold War. How divergent/convergent the paths of both fields have been since then and the relevance of the critical turn for the study of conflicts will occupy the last part of this paper.
Conflict studies, Conflict Resolution or Peace Studies?

Conflict Studies evolved, since the end of the First World War, embedded in a complex dialogue with both Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies. Such evolution has often led to a lack of understanding about the scope and length of the field. Indeed, it could be a daunting task to find an academic field where the ambiguities regarding its definition, as well as its limits, are so blurred as in Conflict Studies. There is neither a consensus on what clearly distinguishes Conflict Studies from similar research fields – such as Conflict Resolution or Peace Studies –, nor a notion of its limits. For Heikki Patomaki, for instance, “[t]he identity of peace research has been under discussion for nearly 40 year, yet there has never been any clear and widespread unanimity about what it is, and what, strictly speaking, its tasks are” (2001: 724). In the same vein, one of the field’s founding fathers, Kenneth Boulding argued as far back as in 1978, “I think we can claim that the peace research movement has produced a discipline, which goes by a number of different names”. Both Boulding and Hugh Miall (1999: 12), suggest that the use of a common label, Peace and Conflict Studies, could, to a certain extent put together these different approaches.

By looking at two variables: the object of inquiry and relation between theory and practice, it should be possible to draw some lines between the above-mentioned three conflict-related academic fields, and thus conclude on the usefulness of such suggestion.

Object of inquiry

Even though in different degrees and with different purposes, ‘conflict’, as a social phenomenon, is a common object of inquiry for the three fields of research. For Conflict Studies (or Conflict Analysis), the study of conflicts are its raison d´être, the reason that justifies its existence. Conflict Resolution, on the other hand, focuses more specifically on how to end the conflicts, rather than merely analysing the phenomenon. As highlighted by Ho-Won Jeong, “conflict resolution has to be geared toward finding solutions to the structural causes of problems that are responsible for contentious relationships” (1999: 15). The object of inquiry is, thus, the process of solving conflicts and not the latter per se. Finally, for Peace Studies, it is not so much about conflicts, but about the conditions for peace in which the absence of conflicts is just the starting point. For Paul Rogers and Oliver Ramsbotham (1999), we could identify seven areas of research within Peace Studies: the need to overcome structural inequalities, a point included after the development of Galtung’s concept of ‘structural violence’ (1969); the focus on interdisciplinary approaches; linked to the previous point, the advocacy of multi-level analysis, going from the individual level to the inter-state one; the search for non-violent transformation of conflicts; the rejection of ethnocentric conceptions of peace; the balance between analysis and a normative approach; and finally, as a follow-up of the previous point, the defence of a close relationship between Peace Studies and peace activism. When it comes to conflicts, peace scholars do not study them in order to better understand the phenomenon. Peace is the focal object of research, independently of how it is understood. Therefore, even if the three fields have conflicts as a common object of inquiry, it does not have the same importance for the three of them - central to Conflict Studies, less so for Conflict Resolution and avoidable, when possible, for Peace Research.

Academics and practitioners

Regarding the link between academic work and the practitioner dimension, Michael Nicholson (1992: 23), distinguishes between ‘scientific’ disciplines and ‘normative’/’engineering’ disciplines. In his opinion, “international relations and conflict analysis are disciplines which analyse the world as they find it and are not directly concerned with making recommendations”. Thus, they are ‘scientific’ disciplines, whereas “[p]eace research and strategy are normative or ‘engineering’ disciplines in that they are explicitly concerned with making recommendations, and working out how to achieve specific results” (idem).

Conflict Resolution tends to belong to the second group. As a field of research it has indeed a poor record of theoretical depth, which is related to its direct focus on the end result. As argued by Hugh Miall (2001: 3),

the complexity of these situations [contemporary violent conflicts] contrasts starkly with the relative simplicity of the core theories we can find in conflict resolution (…).

An additional problem related to Conflict Resolution is the development of alternative concepts that a priori would fit within the field, but which in practice do not subscribe to its intentions. A good example is the concept of ‘conflict transformation’ (Miall: 2001). This concept, even though willing to advocate the ending of a conflict, does so by going against the more ‘immediate goals’ of conflict resolution.For the proponents of conflict transformation, conflicts are seen as very complex processes whose consequences go deep beyond the official cessation of hostilities between the parties. Without considering and approaching those consequences, something that requires a much longer time-span than what conflict resolution advocates are usually willing to defend, conflicts will tend to re-surface or at least to help create structurally dysfunctional post-conflict societies (Miall, 2001).

If we take these theoretical and conceptual challenges into consideration (i.e. the lack of theoretical depth and the creation of concepts, such as Conflict Transformation), it does not seem to make much sense to keep pushing forward the expression Conflict Resolution as an academic discipline. It not only is prescriptive in its approach, but also the prescription itself seems to be increasingly challenged from within. In this case, the embedment of its knowledge acquis in an equally prescriptive field of research - the broader field of Peace Studies - might make more sense.

Peace Studies have a clear normative agenda. According to Terriff et al. (1999: 75),

Peace studies is concerned with the liberation of individuals from all dynamics of violence, however insidious, and all impediments to self-realization, and the individual is a more significant unit of analysis than the state, a collectivity or a class.

Research within its context has an unambiguous and focused goal: the promotion of peace. As highlighted by Rogers and Ramsbotham (1999: 742),

nearly all peace researchers insist that theoretical insight must be empirically tested, and many have been more concerned with the policy implications of their research than with its reception among fellow academics.

There is a clear concern with ‘reality’ within Peace Studies, which have left its academic credentials to second plan.

For Conflict Studies, on the other hand, its ‘direct’ practical contribution resides in the analysis and the promotion of a better understanding of the issues at stake, in this case, the dynamics and context of each conflict.

In short, Conflict Studies and Peace Studies have different goals, different objects and different agendas. As already mentioned, not only do they focus on two different areas (conflicts versus the possibilities of peace) they also have a very different view on the role of academic research. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Conflict Studies’ scholars do not do Peace Studies work or vice-versa. The differences are established between disciplines, not between people and there are obvious mutual influences in the development of both fields. As a matter of fact, the history of Conflict Studies would not be complete without the huge contribution provided by Peace Studies scholars, as it will be seen next. In that sense, following Hugh Miall’s suggestion (1999), it might indeed be more reasonable to consider Peace and Conflict Studies as a greater umbrella, which encompasses both the (Conflict) analysis and the (Peace Studies) normative dimension. Putting the two under the same umbrella, while recognising their differences and limitations, is less confusing when analysing their historical contribution for the understanding of conflicts, than establishing clear boundaries that would leave many authors and research in an academic limbo between Conflict Studies and Peace Studies.

A historical narrative of Peace and Conflict Studies and of its links with the study of security

Born from the ashes of the First World War, and expanded after 1945, Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) has so far experienced four different phases (Ramsbotham et al., 2005). A first phase, or generation, that goes from 1918 to 1945, was essentially dominated by the eruption of pacifist movements. This phase would overlap with the origins of International Relations (IR) as an area of research: in 1919 the first university Chair in International Relationswas established - the Woodrow Wilson Chair - at the University of Aberystwyth. Behind it was the goal of educating future generations to analyse the world through different lenses from the ones that had led to the First World War.

This inter-war idealism, would be manifested in other specific measures, such as the creation of the League of Nations, strongly criticized after the Second World War as being at the base of the appeasement policy that allowed Hitler to strengthen before undertaking his expansionary policy. This allowed authors such as Hans Morgenthau (1948) and E.H. Carr (1939; 1944) to argue about the inevitability of conflict and the need to see the world as it is, instead of trying to follow utopian dreams.

The collapse of the ‘peace utopia’ would arguably be at the base of both the emancipation and the search for scientific legitimacy by Peace and Conflict Studies’ scholars in the following decades. International Relations, taken over by the Realist school of thought was no longer a useful framework for those who believed there were more explanations beyond the Realist inevitability of conflicts. In that sense, a second phase in the history of Peace and Conflict Studies (from 1945 to 1965) was marked by the appearance of the first relevant theorists, such as Kenneth Boulding, Johan Galtung and John Burton. For Rogers and Ramsbotham, it was in this period “that peace research, as a formal field of study with its own academic institutions and professional journals, was established” (1999: 740). The study of conflicts, largely restricted to the study of major wars back then, moved away from the idealistic rhetoric, focusing on positivist, scientific research, spurred by Lewis Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960) and Quincy Wright’s re-edition of Study of War (Cusack, 1995: 192), the ‘forerunners’ of Peace and Conflict Studies, as called by Kenneth Boulding (1978: 342). The Center for Research on Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University were among the first programmes created with the specific goal of studying conflicts.

In the search for demonstrating the academic relevance of their work, these scholars resorted to other areas of research such as Economics, Psychology and Sociology mixing them with quantitative analyses in order to produce ‘valid’ scientific contributions. According to Terriff et al. (1999: 69): “It was only through ‘scientific’, ‘value-free’ analysis that peace research could attract funding and gain academic credibility, “ or as highlighted by Heikki Patomaki, “peace research reflected a belief in scientific knowledge and an ability to enlighten humanity” (2001: 726).

Outside the US, Scandinavians and West Germans developed a parallel, but somewhat different, approach. With Johan Galtung, founder of the International Peace Research Institute (Oslo, Norway) and the Journal of Peace Studies, at the forefront, they introduced a “global-cum-structuralist approach and viewed global economic relations based on violence and exploitation as constituting conflictual relations” (Scherrer, 1999: 4).

It could be said that Security Studies also emerged from the end of the Second World War as a sub-field of International Relations (Wæver, 2004: 2), analysing the ways in which states were threatened by other states through the main International Relations theories. This happened as the US was reforming its security apparatus in order to cope with the new ‘realities’ of the post-war era. National Security became part of state leaders’ vocabulary, as the National Security Act was approved in the US in 1947. National Security Studies became part of university curricula in the US, while in Europe the same contents were taught under the ‘Strategic Studies’ label (Wyn Jones, 1999). As security was seen in a restricted way, mainly as a military issue, Strategic Studies were seen as appropriate to tackle international security issues. As mentioned by Buzan “Strategic reductionists [took] the political out of strategy and reduce[d] it to military accounting” (1991: 345).

Untill the 1960s, Strategic Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies broadly shared the same subjects (Dunn, 1991): deterrence, arms control, and game theory, among others. Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did things start to change more substantially, with the latter re-directing its focus to development, colonialism, liberation wars and other unconventional conflicts. We were in the consolidation phase.

The consolidation phase (1965-1985) was marked, in Europe, by the radicalization of peace research. A symbol of that move was Galtung’s concept of ‘structural violence’ (Galtung, 1969), which in more than one ways parted from his previous strong belief in positivist approaches. This concept recognised economic oppression at the base of the impossibility of peace. Overcoming the structure, became, in that sense, attached to the idea of peace.

From then on, for Johan Galtung (1985: 141), the basic concern of Peace Research was “the reduction of violence of all kinds”, and not merely the ‘scientific’ study of conflicts. The goal of his research was the change of the status quo, based on the idea that humanity has a tendency to cooperate instead of being inherently evil. Galtung was basically establishing the grounds for the development of a Peace Research culture, of a research focused on the potential for co-operation rather than on the mere study of violent conflict (Terriff et al, 1999: 70).

This suggested that the fundamental features of inter-state relations were problematic, as they only provided limited security and peace. Such approach led to a further detachment from mainstream IR and Politics, and a decrease of influence within the general public opinion. Only during the early 1980s, with the return of the nuclear as a major political topic in Europe, did Peace Studies become “more visible, vocal and significant.” (Terriff et al., 1999: 76).

This radicalization period was not followed everywhere. Indeed, as mentioned by Terriff et al. (1999: 75) it originated a division within the peace and conflict researchers: while Galtung and his counterparts focused on eradicating structural violence, Boulding and the American school still had disarmament and arms control as their main research focus. Kenneth Boulding (1978: 345) saw such a move as diverging from the core focus on conflict research: