International-Security Criticisms of Peace Research

Abstract

The intellectual community that addresses arms control or international security has a number of criticisms to offer of its colleagues working on peace research or peace studies. The latter are seen as being too optimistic and unrealistic, tending to assume that good things must go together, that domestic and international improvements are always linked, and that disarmament serves all the purposes of humankind. Peace studies teachers are moreover seen as engaged too often in consciousness raising, on the mistaken assumption that many of us do not understand the desirability of peace. Finally, peace researchers are sometimes seen as redefining peace to include justice and social improvement and whatever other causes they favor, so that major confusions can result as to which particular problem we are trying to solve at any particular time.

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References

1. Louis Hartz , The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).

2. For an extended and very worthwhile discussion of these kinds of logic, see Kenneth N. Waltz , Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

3. Best known of his publications is Hans J. Morgenthau , Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1948).

4. Thomas C. Schelling and Morton Halperin , Strategy and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961).

5. For a very critical interpretation of the impact of submarine-based strategic missile systems, see William M. Arkin , “Sleight of Hand with Trident II,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 40(10):5-6 (Dec. 1984).

6. For some discussion of this kind of thinking in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, see John Dos Passos , Mr. Wilson's War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952).

7. Such an approach can apparently be traced to Johan Galtung. See his Peace and Social Structure (Copenhagen: Christian Eljiers, 1978).

8. See, for example, Oskar Morgenstern , The Question of National Defence (New York: Random House, 1959).