Conflict Research avant la lettre

Political conflict grew in salience in the 19thCentury as war became more important as a curse of human kind. Other traditional curses, such as famine and the plague, were yielding to the application of scientific rationality to our human and social environment, especially in Western and Central Europe and the Atlantic seaboard of North America. The Agrarian Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the growth of capitalist enterprise and a Eurocentric globalisation, were all reflected in an alteration in mental attitude,so that change was welcomed and became virtually an ideology.This, in turn, led to major societal reform, mass production, globalisation and the establishment of the welfare state at home, as exemplified first by Bismarck’s Germany, which created an atmosphere of rationality and progress. The world was getting to be a better place! But war can, and did, threaten it all. In the 19thCentury war became industrialised as exemplified by the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and later the First World War. In addition, another revolution, besides the Agrarian and Industrial, added fuel to the flames, in the shape of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, which became the precursor of the growth of nationalism throughout Europe. There was global integration at one level through capitalism, and at another level, national separation as nationalism led to integrated but separated nation states.

War was on the agenda in a new way. A systemic war could threaten the Eurocentric global civilisation, and in the shape of the First World War, it did. But we must ask first how the 19thCentury handled the threat of war. Major Powers, beginning with the Quadruple Alliance[1]in 1814 created a system of global governance in a 19thCentury style, to deal with their rivalries and difficulties that arose as a result of clashing ambitions. This successfully obviated a system-wide war between 1815 and 1914, but it was unable to deal with a major systemic threat which was the non-viability of multinational empires due to the rise of nationalism. An example of this, the question of Serbia, was the trigger for the setting in march the events which led to the Great War.

At a second level, globalisation required the establishment of technically-based functional public unions, for post, telegraph, health, education, intellectual property and the like,The number of international institutions expanded from approximately five in 1815 to hundreds a century later, and it pointed to world-wide functional integration, arising from the increasing globalisation due to the spread of Eurocentric capitalism. But international organisations also gave States a role in that, while they facilitated the movement of good services, ideas and people, States could act as gatekeepers since they controlled the institutional framework.

In addition to the Concert system of the great Powers handling their rivalries, and the growth of functional public unions, there was also the development of the civilisation of war which took the shape, first of all, in the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, in which arms control and the normative rules of war were set out. In addition to this, there was the protection of civilians, which build upon the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other activities through which civil society made an impact on international relations, such as the abolition of slavery, and later that of the slave trade. In short, the 19thCentury was revolutionary in the agrarian, industrial and national senses, and this revolution was taking place in a wide framework of the growth of globalisation and the attendant need for some form of global governance, which we can see through the Concert system, the spread of international organisation and a growing interest by the rising middle class in having a new world order.

The 18thCentury and the 19thCentury were the high points of the manipulation of the balance of power by Kings, Princes and the aristocracy, to further their own dynastic and class needs. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a bourgeoisie whose political position was that of liberal internationalism. To that extent they proposed and then tried to impose a new world order in 1919. But it was not only the bourgeoisie which developed an interest in global affairs, there was also the establishment of a Marxist tradition, through which the working class of the world was unitingin its interests to bring about a global revolution. The upshot was that nationalism undermined the validity of multinational dynastic empires. A liberal internationalist world was created to thwart the new revolutionary ambitions of Soviet Russia and provide a political framework for a new liberal international world order to protect capitalism and the quickening process of globalisation.

This gave rise to a literature of quality, dealing with the question of the causes of war and the conditions for a sustained peaceful world order. Many of these authors are presently being rediscovered and appreciated once again.[2] Names such as Angel, Woolf, Bourgeois, Toynbee, Noel-Baker, Zimmern, Mitrany and Webster are now current again, and we must not forget the massive political and intellectual influence of Woodrow Wilson. This literature was common to the new field of International Relations as an academic discipline, which had been founded in 1919, and whether or not acknowledged as such, it was also common to the early conflict researchers. It was a literature that was both analytical and activist in that it was an intellectual contribution to the making of a better world.

The liberal internationalist world crumbled with the failure of collective security as it had been embodied by the League of Nations, and a new challenge arose to the notion of liberal democracy, nation-states, and a League of Nations based on a perceived harmony ofinterest, kept in line by a global public opinion.This new threat was social Darwinism, and fascism, which were the negation of the liberal democratic world order, and a challenge that could be met only on the battlefields of the Second World War. However, despite the calamitous nature of the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Second World War, there were two founding fathers in the area of conflict research, who were not dismayed, and indeed, their interest was quickened by the catastrophes which were befalling the international political system and the moral degradation of genocide.

Two Founding Fathers

Two founding fathers were writing either before, or during, the Second World War. Lewis Fry Richardson was a meteorologist by profession and a Quaker by conviction. He put his scientific training and skill into the collection and writing of two volumes which were published postpostumustly in 1960, namely Statistics of Deadline Quarrels and A Mathematical Theory of War.[3] At the time of their publication there was a fertile ground for such research in both Britain, and especially, the United States. This led to institution building in the UK, in the form of the Richardson Institute, and appealed to those in both countries of a scientific bent, who were increasingly concerned with war and conflict. Nuclear physicists and mathematicians, especially, shared Richardson’s political concerns. Hard science was coming to conflict research! In Britain Richardson was essentially isolated and, in fact, apath breaker before his time. Quincy Wright, on the other hand, was more in the American mainstream as a leading Professor of International Law at Chicago. His massive Study of War[4] not only provided a path-breaking database, but it was interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on history, anthropology, demography and its publication in 1942, went further to inform the planning for peace. It is a magisterial work. Peace and conflict conflict research had gained two founding fathers, one British the other American, whose work still bears consideration in the 21stCentury.

Setting-up Shop

The years immediately after the end of the Second World War were curiously quiet for the development of conflict research. Perhaps this was due to a number of factors, such as, the practical concerns of rebuilding Europe physically and morally after the degradation of destruction, occupation and genocide. Much effort was also being put into building a better world in the form of welfare states throughout the European peninsula, and by 1960 the European economy had recovered from the worst effects of the Second World War. Moral numbness at the catastrophe of war and genocide had lessened and the testing of the first H-bomb brought about a reaction, or a political awakening, as did the costs of colonial wars, whether it be in Indo-China, both for the French and the United States, Suez for the British and French, the British in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, the French in Algeria and the Dutch in what was to become Indonesia. All of this suggested that there was an important question to consider, why did big States lose small wars?[5] The general environment was one of fear. Fear of the Cold War, and fear of the nuclear consequences of that Cold War, such as wasexemplified by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such questions quickened an interest in conflict research in the 1950s and 1960s.

First was the question of nomenclature. Were we talking about peace research or conflict research, and did the two mean the same? In fact, over time a difference in emphasis began to develop. Peace research tended to be activist-oriented concerned with education, and had a reputation for being ‘left wing’, indeed fellow-travelling, such that peace became, in the minds of some, a dirty word. In order to get a clearer, less prejudiced, consideration of the issues that were being raised, the phrase conflict research proved to be less provocative to the mainstream. It also indicated a more academic status, rather than an activist status. The second issue was whether conflict should be studied under the rubric of strategic studies, or indeed, conflict research.

Strategic studies inherited the mantle of the realist school. Indeed, a strategist was the manipulator of threats and military hardware inthe context of the balance of power in the Cold War. The dominant writers in the field of international relations were for the most part realists who saw power politics as inevitable due to the security dilemma, the ambitions of great Powers, and indeed, the individual drive to dominate. Writers such as Morgenthau, Schwarzenberger, Carr, Niebuhr, and others, provided the general framework for the strategists. The strategists themselves, varied between the enlightened explorations of the nuclear world of Brodie to the machinations of the Doomsday Machine by Kahn. There was also an important intellectual contribution by practitioners, such as Sir John Slessor, Sir Anthony Buzzard, and in France, General AndréBeaufre.

The enormous power of the hydrogen bomb also pricked the conscience of anelite, both in the military and civilian life, many of whom, exhibiting Christian concerns,took the lead to set up what was later to become the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in the late 1950s. This was followed in Sweden by the setting up of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute by the Swedish Government a decade or so later. Both institutions were concerned with disarmament, the arms race and arms control, but the IISS tended to be more from a Western, NATO, centre-right perspective and SIPRI from a non-aligned centre-left perspective. In the meantime, conflict researchers felt ill at ease in this realist-strategist framework, and pointed to the changed nature of the world in which cooperation could be possible, as for example, where Western Europe had been transformed from the cockpit of global war to being a zone of peace as European institutions built up and Franco-German reconciliation flourished. What were the academic developments in conflict research at this time? Much of what follows is historical hearsay and personal experience from someone who was in a junior position at that time, but had the good fortune to meet many of the academic leaders. It therefore represents a personal evaluation.

People and Places

This section essentially concerns four principal centres where conflict research developed, namely, in Scandinavia, Germany, Britain and the United States. Two individuals played an important formative role, JohanGaltung and John Burton. We shall come back to Burton later in a tribute to a pioneer. Galtung, by any standards, is an impressive person. He made a major institutional contribution in struggling for the establishment of the First Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Oslo. He organised many conferences and networks emanating from that Chair. His contribution peppers the academic literature and he can be credited with giving currency to the phrase ‘structural violence’. In addition to his intellectual leadership, he was important in establishing a major journal, The Journal of Peace Research. Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Copenhagen proved to have a fructuous intellectual climate for peace and conflict research, with an institute established under Anders Boserup who died at a very young age. Subsequently, the Copenhagen School was established with leading scholars, such as Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde. Like its predecessor it is now defunct. However, there are some lively scholars in Finland, especially gathered around the University of Tampere, where for a while there was a research institute called TAPRI. All of these Scandinavian links formed an invisible college and a network to which others in the three centres mentioned, particularly in Germany, participated.

Coming out of a different framework was SIPRI seeking to celebrate 150 years of peace for Sweden. This really grew out of the Pugwash movement, which in its turn was the result of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of July 1955. In recognition of this long period of peace, the Swedish Government put the money forward for SIPRI, which although based in Stockholm, is international in spirit and was concerned with the collection of information and the furthering of negotiations for disarmament and arms control. Pugwash itself, although its headquarters was in London, nevertheless, had a strong Scandinavian input. It was the place where scientists, social scientists and politicians from both sides of the Cold War could meet for off-the-record discussions primarily about nuclear issues, and coming out of thePugwash movement, was not only SIPRI, but also IPRA, the International Peace Research Association. John Burton proved to be a leading figure in the setting-up of this body, although it has to be admitted that with the passing years it has become somewhat chaotic in its organisation and also split between those on the one hand who are activists and dedicated to peace education, and those who are of a more academic bent. However, it has to be acknowledged that without the Scandinavians, and particularly Galtung, the fate of conflict research would have been different. He gave it an institutional setting, a journal, and important analyses and concepts.

In Germany the political environment was important. Germany was clearly in the front line of the Cold War and a prime candidate for devastation. It also had a past which was reflected in its present, which had strong anti-militarist tendencies and constitutional limitations on the role and the useof armed force. There were, in essence, three centres, one in Frankfurt, one in Bonn and one in Berlin. In Frankfurt was the Hessen Peace and Conflict Research Foundation, in which the leading lights were Ernst-Otto Czempiel and Dieter Senghaas. There were also a number of scholars with a Marxist orientation. In Bonn was the German Society for Peace and Conflict Research (DGFK), which was more concerned with the question of nuclear weapons and the Ostpolitik. The Hessen Peace Institute (HSFK) is still a lively place, whereas the DGFK has succumbed to cuts of a financial nature. In Berlin there was the Science Centre, for a while under the direction of Karl Deutsch, where several scholars from the United States also gathered who formed teams with German scholars which were clearly in the tradition of American social science, with its emphasis on collecting data and testing hypotheses. This was not, however, the major inclination in other peace and conflict research centres in Europe, with some individual exceptions, such as Michael Nicholson in the UK. David Dunn in his survey of conflict research after 50 years describes the German situation as a “mix of American social science, Scandinavian Peace Research, general philosophy and Marxist scholarship, not to mention Critical Theory”.[6] The overwhelming tone of the German conflict research community was left wing, anti-Cold War and with a Marxist tinge, and as suchit produced some exciting work.

In Britain, the Richardson Institute at the University of Lancaster founded in 1962 was the beginning of the institutionalisation of conflict research in the UK. The Richardson Institute, which was influenced greatly in its early days by Paul Smoker, moved eventually to London under the directorship of Michael Nicholson and the Deputy Director was Andrew Mack. It proved a home for a number of visitors from the United States and elsewhere, such as Bruce Russett, Cynthia Enloe and British scholars such as Adam Curle. The latter at that time was preparing his manuscript Making Peace[7] and then went on to be the first Head of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Bradford became a major centre of research and influence in the area of peace and conflict studies. It survived numerous broadsides in public and private from Mrs Thatcher, and has, over the years, had significant influence over British policy makers and the military, as well as the media. In some ways it acts as a counter to the more establishment IISS or military RUSI. However, before Bradford, John Burton had secured funding to set up a Centre for the Analysis of Conflict (CAC) which became fully active in 1967. A number of conflict researchers joined its network with Burton and John Groom, including, Chris Mitchell, Michael Banks, Michael Nicholson, Frank Edmead, Denis Sandole, and others. The Centre grew out of meetings organised by Anthony de Reuck at the CIBA Foundation, in which two scientists from University College London, Burton and others met to discuss the interaction between social scientists and physical scientists over the study of conflict. What resulted from this was not only the CAC, but also the Conflict Research Society. This society was meant to bring together scientists, social scientists and others who were interested in conflict, and it still exists, and holds regular conferences and seminars. At the same time the CIBA meetings led to the publication of a book entitled Conflict in Society[8]edited by de Reuck and Julie Knight. It included manyof the great and the good of conflict research on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Kenneth Boulding, AnatolRatoport, Harold Lasswell, Johan Galtung, Herbert Marcuse, BernardRöling and Karl Deutsch, and its proceedings were translated into German by Dieter Senghaas.