ABSTRACT

Peace studies’ other key focus – the definition of peace itself – is arguably a better basis for distinguishing it from other cognate fields, not least because it highlights peace studies’ overt, and often controversial, normative content. Certainly, in its earlier days, and in spite of considerable efforts by its key figures to present their work as an example of social science, it was the normative commitment to promote peace that principally marked it out from IR as well as such fields as strategic studies. These largely took war and other forms of violent conflict to be perennial, if tragic, features of an anarchical international system of sovereign states. In contrast, peace studies has always presented war as a problem in need of eradication. At the very least, someone who chose to identify themselves as working within ‘peace research’ or ‘peace and conflict research’ (the preferred labels of peace studies’ key founding figures in the 1950s) was signalling a normative standpoint of sorts. In spite of the efforts of the early pioneers to mask their normative leanings beneath a commitment to otherwise orthodox social scientific methods, this was enough to ensure a sceptical or even hostile reception within cognate fields. With the more recent development of post-positivist, critical approaches in IR as well as the emergence of critical security studies, however, such overt normativity alone is no longer a particularly distinguishing or, indeed, controversial feature (see Chapter 7, this volume).