In the following text, Ernst-Otto Czempiel
criticizes the field of peace and conflict research, which he accuses of neglecting the development of peace-promoting
strategies:
"This deficit is the thing that sets
present research into peace apart from the peace science of the past, especially that of the 19th
century. While it's true that the aim of past research was not to solve concrete problems - indeed it expressly avoided
this, it did systematically and innovatively put a great deal of effort into developing strategies aimed at promoting
peace. Its greatest contribution was the development of the concept for international
organization, which, for all its weaknesses, has worked excellently since 1945.
This concept's main asset lies in the fact that it is targeted at the instrumentation of the peace rather than the avoidance of war.
Indeed, it is hard to over-emphasize the importance of this distinction. Peace is not synonymous with the avoidance of war, and
does not come as a consequence of the well known (but meaningless) distinction between so-called negative and positive
peace. If people want to replace war with peace, then it is peace rather than the prevention of war that they have to
research.
Other non-aggressive or very-much-less aggressive means of resolving conflict have to be developed and
practiced. A program of this nature is positive and contains its own concrete research tasks;
it is not identical with research into the causes of war which has been attracting the majority of scientific interest
over recent years. Peace has hardly been addressed so far. Indeed, the expansion of peace research in the West has done little to change this
situation. In contrast to literary tradition, especially that of the 19th
century, it is difficult to find any real scientific research into peace as an objective or into the corresponding strategies since 1945. (...)
Peace is not being achieved because no one is dealing with how it might be
achieved. It's not enough to criticize the system of deterrent, while not actively trying to find a system that might replace it. It's not enough to talk about the European peace order, without making efforts to translate it into conceivable and possible circumstances of the European system.
And it's not enough to complain about the lack of armament control, without looking into methods for resolving it. To put it in a
nutshell: it's time that social science finally started to deal with peace, and made a start on analyzing,
describing and developing its strategies. That peace has been slow in developing can also be traced back to the fact that it has been underestimated in terms of its
complexity. (...)
Establishing peace is the most difficult of all political
tasks; this can only be resolved by facing up to the difficulties that it poses."
[Taken from: Ernst-Otto Czempiel: Friedensstrategien, Systemwandel durch Internationale Organisationen, Demokratisierung und Wirtschaft, Paderborn 1986, p. 16-19]
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Peace can be defined as a system within the international system that is characterized by decreasing aggression and increasing distributive justice - Ernst-Otto Czempiel |
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