With wars raging around the globe, the study of peacebuilding should be more high profile than ever. Yet for all its relevance and rigour, peace studies has always occupied a contentious position within academia and society that has limited its visibility and impact.

“Peace and conflict studies have never been prominent, though they should be,” reflected Oliver Richmond, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, who founded its master’s programme focused on these subjects.

He argued that its “long and dynamic” body of research “could help in these current wars”. But implementing these ideas would require “fundamental reforms to the international system as well as to foreign policy, which many countries are unwilling to do”, he explained on why politicians haven’t embraced the discipline in the same way as war or security studies.

Peace studies goes beyond the “limited perspective” of nation states agreeing peace via diplomatic deals, usually following military action, said Richmond of how the discipline differs from conventional security studies. Instead, it moves towards a “deeper and broader” perspective of the “conflict-affected citizen supported by global and regional peace-making tools”.

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“Peace studies suggests peace requires giving up and controlling unaccountable power. This is not something that goes down well in an era where the rejection of science in favour of regional domination has become the norm,” said Richmond on why the discipline stands uneasily in the era of presidents Putin, Trump and Xi, all willing to deploy military might to further economic and political interests.

Even leaders who want to avoid involvement in armed conflict are keen to advertise their defence credentials rather than talk up the importance of international bodies such as the United Nations committed to conflict resolution. As a result, politicians and policymakers have tended to lean into security studies rather than the trickier, more nuanced prescriptions from peace studies, said Richmond.

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“There have been plenty of recent academic and impact-oriented publications on Gaza and on Ukraine – they are being ignored in this populist era,” he said, reflecting that this merely continued a pattern in which “academic expertise on peace has been ignored by institutions and governments which were aligned with political interests”.

“Peace is complex and reactive, needs local legitimacy, constitutional design and international backing, and policymakers and citizens are mostly untrained in it,” said Richmond on how peace studies research can help bring about important interventions.

“However, states all over the world are turning away from human rights, democracy, law, development, and back to rearming and regional confrontation as well as flagrant violations of human rights. Obviously, violence will escalate, with global and long-term effects. But we do have the necessary knowledge to do better than this,” he reflected on the rise of nationalism and populism, which has seen the world’s premier peace-making body, the United Nations, sidelined in favour of less tested ideas for ending the Gaza conflict such as Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.

That difficulty in breaking into the policy mainstream is, however, nothing new, with the political establishment viewing peace studies with some suspicion despite its scholarly excellence. Famously, Margaret Thatcher once reportedly asked in 1984: “Has that peace studies problem been dealt with yet?” in a reference to the University of Bradford’s pioneering department, established just over a decade earlier in 1973. With its independent analysis of the Cold War nuclear conflict portrayed in the media and Whitehall as pro-Soviet appeasement, the Department of Education asked the head of the University Grants Council, Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, to investigate standards at the maverick department. After visiting the West Yorkshire university to inspect exam scripts, publications and other outputs, the funding boss gave peace studies a positive assessment.

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That ambivalence about the discipline – and indeed the notion of peace itself – was perhaps put best by a former director of Bradford’s peace studies department, James O’Connell, who noted the “painful paradox” that while “everybody favours peace…peace remains a controversial term”, according to Rhys Kelly, head of what is now Bradford’s department of peace studies and international development.

“In some respects, there isn’t a huge difference between peace and war studies – both of which are concerned with understanding the causes of conflict and violence, though Bradford perhaps has a stronger emphasis on peace-building."

While not the regular stop-off for politicians keen for a photo opportunity, Bradford’s department regularly engages with officials from the Ministry of Defence, UN and other bodies involved in managing conflicts, explains Kelly.

Indeed, peace studies’ quiet influence within the academy over the past 50 years means it is not just policy experts in the field who are listening. Other disciplines are now working in the scholarly space once held by the discipline, Kelly explained. “There’s a lot of overlap with security studies and international relations but, for example, some human geographers work on place-based peace-building, or understanding how conflicts affect patterns of segregation and interaction in cities and so on,” he added.

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Yet today’s volatile times may also see a renewed interest in peace studies in its own right, insisted Kelly, drawing parallels with the Bradford department’s roots in the 1970s. “Back then there was a major conflict in the Middle East and an oil crisis, while studies were starting to question the environmental impact of enormous economic growth,” Kelly reflected.

“The Cold War – alongside conflict in apartheid-era South Africa and Northern Ireland – made peace studies very vital back then, but it is just as relevant now.”

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com

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