LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

A Divided Discipline? Mapping Peace and Conflict Studies

Photo from wikipedia

Scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies have long worried that their discipline is divided – between studies of war and war making, and studies of peace and… Click to show full abstract

Scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies have long worried that their discipline is divided – between studies of war and war making, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this by addressing two questions: 1) how is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between its two nominal pillars: “peace” and (violent) “conflict”? and 2) to what extent is there communication and exchange between the two sets of studies? Making use of a unique combination of methods, we find that studies of violence hold a dominant position in the field, although there is also a sizable body of work that explores topics of peace, understood as conflict prevention and/or response. That said, we find limited evidence of intellectual exchange between studies of war/making and peace/making. We also find evidence of gendered, regional, and methodological divides. We argue that such schisms may be preventing scholars of peace and conflict from collectively realizing the founding ontological goal of their discipline, which was to understand the causes of war in order to contribute to an understanding of how conflict can be managed peacefully.

Keywords: conflict; discipline; peace conflict; war; conflict studies; peace

Journal Title: International Studies Perspectives
Year Published: 2018

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.