ABSTRACT
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once poured scorn on one of our most prestigious universities for having the temerity to open a Department of Peace Studies. An article on the background to that controversy of the 1980s, the second head of that Department at the University of Bradford, James O’Connell, recalled that ‘the Prime Minister had more than once asked her offi cials: “Has that department been dealt with yet?” ’ ( Peace Magazine , 1997: 20). One of her objections lay in what she saw as the far less serious enterprise, maybe even subversive, aim of analysing the conditions necessary for peace, rather than in the much more important understanding of the necessary ways to wage war. But discussing peace invariably means thinking about war. The Roman military writer Flavius Vegetius recognized this inherent paradox almost two thousand years ago. More recently, Geoffrey Blainey has argued that ‘war and peace are alternating phases of a relationship’ (Blainey, 1988 ). Blainey’s work The Causes of War is symptomatic of this
linking of war and peace; war nearly always precedes peace (as in this book), and is also why the motto of an organization which had the capability to destroy the world many times over during the Cold War was ‘Peace is our profession’.
