Carolyn M. Stephenson

Peace Studies, Overview

Peace studies is an interdisciplinary field encompassing systematic research and teaching on the causes of violence and war and the conditions of peace. It focuses on the causes of increase and decrease in violence, the conditions associated with those changes, and the processes by which those changes happen. While there is disagreement over the exact content of the field and even over the definition of peace, most would agree that peace studies began to be identified as a separate field of inquiry during the first few decades after World War II. This article examines debates over the conceptualization of peace, relationships between peace studies and other fields of study, and the evolution of peace studies. It argues that there have been three waves of peace studies, beginning approximately in the late 1940s/early 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, with a period of stasis in the decade after the end of the Cold War and a possible fourth wave after 9/11. It argues that the relationship between peace and justice remains a central question in the field.

The Need for Alternative Forms of Security: Crises and Opportunities

The breakdown of models of security which have been widely conceived of as protecting people and nations appears to be imminent. At the same time, there are developments that suggest that new models of security are viable and possible. It may be time for a massive research and development effort on the functional alternatives to war. This article outlines both the arguments that “push” us from the old models and those that “pull” us toward the new, identifies key elements in new models, and argues that more integrated development of a new security system would be far more appropriate than piecemeal and fragmented attention to individual methods.

Elise Boulding and peace education: theory, practice, and Quaker faith

Elise Boulding wrote academically to help to create and influence the field of peace education, and lived a life that exemplified it. Her life integrated theory and practice and exemplified peace praxis as the ‘craft and skills of doing peace’ and ‘the integration of thought and action’. For Boulding, peace education occurred at all levels, across academic disciplines, across time, and across boundaries of cultures, states, class, race, age, and gender. As one of the founders of the field of peace studies, she became a sociologist to ‘do’ peace, and was especially oriented to peace education and activism and to futures studies and to studying women and children and cultures of peace. Her spiritual roots were in the values and testimonies of Quakers, especially simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality. She saw that of God in all, and lived the ‘inner light’ important to Quakers.

Alternative International Security Systems

are exploring the relationship between disarmament and security and disarmament and development. This paper focuses on the inclusion of the study of alternative international security systems in disarmament education. The relationship between disarmamellf arzd security is a complex one. On the surface, many view disarmament as a withdrawal of security, consistent with a view of the maintenance of security through arms. To others, the arms race, and particularly the nuclear arms race, is a threat

Paradigm and Praxis Shifts: Transitions to Sustainable Environmental and Sustainable Peace Praxis

The diffusion of both paradigms of sustainable environmental practice and sustainable peace practice has quickened in the last thirty to forty years, but has occurred unevenly across time and space, across regions, and even within individual countries and subregions of countries. Some disciplines have been more hospitable to one or the other. In large part, until recently, environmental studies has not found peace issues relevant, nor peace studies environmental issues. The beginning of the coming together of these paradigms and their practice is a significant change. This chapter examines the evolution of the separate paradigms of sustainable environment and sustainable peace, and their gradual but as yet incomplete engagement with each other. It also examines texts at the level of global governance, particularly at the United Nations, with respect to the same issues, asking how and why UN and other documents and conceptualizations in the 1970s have increasingly begun to reflect the linkages between these issues.

Gender Equality and a Culture of Peace

While the norms of gender equality have developed both in individual states and in the international system, the realization of gender equality remains far behind in most states. The first wave of the women’s movement in the 1800s eventually led to women’s suffrage, but it did not lead to full gender equality, nor did it lead in the short term to increases in other forms of equality and justice, as some had hoped and some had feared. Norms of gender equality were further strengthened when, in 1945, the preamble to the United Nations Charter reaffirmed a faith in “the equal rights of men and women,” with Chap. 1 stating as one of the purposes of the UN “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.…” Women’s equality, later gender equality, continued to be important as part of the basic human rights approaches within the UN, from the initial 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the proclamation that “women’s rights are human rights” in the context of the UN’s 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights and 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. The interweaving of women’s social movements for equality and efforts in the United Nations has been an important part of the changing norms of gender equality. Women’s political participation, in the various forms of voting and standing for election, was not realized until almost the start of the twentieth century. Most

International Relations, Overview

International relations is both the practice and the study of the relations of nation-states and other entities in the international system. This article reviews both of these. Traditionally, international relations focused primarily on state-to-state relations, but today the field focuses as well on other actors such as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations (MNCs), and even individuals. Thus today these interactions and their study are often termed global politics or world politics. While international relations as a field of study originated largely within political science and remains centered there, it is also an interdisciplinary field, encompassing the study of economic, social, and cultural interactions as well. While international relations has tended to be dominated by those who term themselves realist theorists, liberal or idealist theories continue to abound, and radical theories of many varieties also exist. While international relations began as a field largely in the United States, today it is studied widely all over the world in different ways.