ABSTRACT
The central concerns of peace studies – the reduction and eventual eradication of war and the control and resolution of violent conflict by peaceful means – do not self-evidently mark it out as a distinct field. Such concerns have also
threaded through the discipline of International Relations (IR). Indeed, most histories of IR start by identifying its ‘idealist’ origins in the wake of the carnage of the First World War. Although the supposedly naive aspirations of IR’s liberal founders were supplanted by a more hard-headed realism after the Second World War, even a realist-dominated IR discipline could plausibly claim war and peace at the heart of its concerns.
