ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the long peace of East Asia from the perspective of pragmatic interests common to peace research. An analysis of this period of peace aims at finding ways to sustain it, improve it and emulate it elsewhere. The chapter aims at producing knowledge that advises us on how to adjust to the social and material realities that surround us and on how to change conflict-prone structures and processes. The ultimate aim is to produce explanations that help the controlling and manipulating of conflict developments, and this sometimes requires not only the understanding of the parts or the totality but also the interaction between the two. Standard, traditional social science analysis aimed at the identification of causal relationships between endogenous factors. Traditional empirical causal analysis tends to limit the investigation of causes to observables. Substantiating claims made on peace and conflict in East Asia have to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of quantitative and qualitative schools.
