Outline of Areas of Coverage
Outline of Areas of Coverage
The encyclopedia's entries are organized alphabetically. To guide readers to related discussions elsewhere in the encyclopedia, cross-references appear at the end of most articles. As the list of topics suggests, there is considerable overlap with such fields as international relations and, to an even greater extent, international studies. Peace study, peace research, and peace teaching have nevertheless emerged independently since 1945 as more critical, globalist, and holistic alternatives to much earlier international relations or diplomatic history.
When Jeremy Bentham coined the term “international” in l770 two decades after the Encyclopédie began publication, the nation-state system was in its infancy. We live now in a period in which some theorists think the system near extinction. So while the epithet “international” applied to peace adds gravitas and is at present still more appropriate than “global” or “transnational,” it is not without difficulties, because it describes only one way of framing issues of peace. We have also avoided the phrase “world peace” because it carries too much historical baggage from the Cold War and before. In a perceptive remark in the introduction to his biographical Dictionary of Internationalists on this etymology of internationalism and related terms, the late Warren Kuehl distinguished Bentham's “internationalism” (which was intended to improve interstate relations) not only from other forms but also from transnationalism and the decentralism of community theorists, some of whom are covered in this encyclopedia. Nevertheless the “global” and the “decentralist” are not mutually exclusive; some communalist thought is globalist and, by implication, transnational; the reverse is also sometimes true. But unlike most internationalists (except for some socialist internationalists before l9l4), they all seek to transcend the nation-state or diminish its salience. To add to the terminological confusion, the term “multinational” came into wide use in the l970s to describe the spread of global corporate commercial enterprises and this was often wrongly conflated with “transnational.”
In other words, unlike much traditional international relations or political science more generally, the field of peace research and peace studies does not deal with “world” peace (or war or conflict) as largely an international issue, that is, as a problem mainly between, or indeed for, states. Instead, peace as conceived of in this encyclopedia deals with relationships that may also exist across borders and within, or regardless of, states. Therefore, there are unpeaceful groups and communities, and unpeaceful “nations” (and individuals) that often fall outside the scope of the study of interstate relations or war, yet are just as important as the more traditional objects of analysis. To ignore war, which is still one of humanity's primary forms of unpeacefulness and injustice, would, of course, be irresponsible. That is true especially in the context of globalism, as new forms of warfare, especially nonstate and “low-intensity” war and contemporary issues of civil “terror,” emerge as contemporary priorities. But understanding the origins and constrictions of human conflict and “war,” culturally, anthropologically, and psychologically, is equally the province of any work of peace scholarship.
While this is by no means the first major reference work on the topics covered here—peace, conflict, and nonviolence—it is, I believe, the first that attempts comprehensively to reflect these global developments, in both practice and theory, over the last half of the twentieth century. It is presented in clear, accessible language with a minimum of technical jargon and with clear definitions.
Peter van den Dungen has documented previous encyclopedic peace projects and has summarized his work in an entry in this encyclopedia. The original encyclopedic movement (l680–l760) evolved through various attempts and a number of projects before the Encyclopédie emerged. I have followed the lead of its editor, Diderot, who emulated an earlier model that was good, but not good enough—the British Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers (1728). What was needed in 1751—and is needed in the third millennium—was an innovative reframing to meet the need for the further categorization and internationalization of knowledge. That reframing would be useful in both practice and theory and would help policy makers, activists, and practitioners. There was a practitioner's experiential aspect to many of the entries of the Encyclopédie, and we have tried to follow that model in limiting the length and focusing the topics of each entry, producing many economic, compressed summaries, useful for those needing practical information or analysis, or even as a quick reference.
While there is a focus in these volumes on recent scholarship and an emphasis on more contemporary developments, it was also necessary not to overreact to the immediacies of specific dramatic and terrible events: for the eighteenth-century encyclopedists it was the Lisbon earthquake, while for many in the West, it was the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Lisbon disaster, a natural event, was in Diderot's view, to be assessed as relative to other events, natural and constructed, to be dealt with scientifically, not emotionally. September 11 in the United States, an appalling political and human disaster, was, in the view of most peace researchers worldwide, best dealt with culturally, analytically, and internationally, recognizing the social and emotional response to such a grave human loss. In both cases, wisdom and a broad and balanced assessment would be helpful—in 2001 to stay the immediate resort to arms conflict and prejudice and in 1755 to allay pessimism and despair (which are illustrated by the shock of Voltaire and the disenchantment of Rousseau after hearing the news of the earthquake).
In our own recent past, as the Dalai Lama stresses, we have experienced incessant conflict for the past century. Given the continuities of what Eric Hobsbaum termed the short twentieth century (1914–1989), the two World Wars and intervening conflicts, (which enable us to talk of the long [thirty-one years] war); followed by the nuclear-armed “tepid” war from 1945 to 1990 (including the bloody wars in Indochina, Algeria, Korea, and Iran and Iraq), made the twentieth century appear one of total violence. In comparison, the period since the l990s, with the exception of 2001, appears as one of hope and respite; as Nils Petter Gleditsch's introduction to this encyclopedia suggests, this is borne out by statistical evidence of the reduction in the number of wars, deaths, and casualties resulting from mass collective violence generally. Moreover, as the Dalai Lama observes, these years also demonstrated, with the fall of oppressive regimes in many parts of the world, “that even decades of repression cannot crush peoples’ determination to live in freedom and dignity.” This optimism is counterbalanced, however, by a much darker scenario that includes 2001 and is presented in entries such as those by Paul Rogers, showing how the continuing tension and instability in the Near and Middle East could spill over much further and cause widespread armed confrontations in failed states and in other countries, such as Israel, Pakistan, India, and potentially Iran, that possess nuclear weapons. These could in turn draw in additional great-power allies, sponsors, and regional alliances, as well as a host of nonstate actors in a situation similar to that of the Balkans in the decades preceding 1914 in Europe, leading this time to a truly global conflict—with frightening arsenals of destruction and collateral environmental damage—that would far outstrip its twentieth-century counterparts, extending even into armed conflict in space.
The prophetic General Foch denounced the Versailles Treaty of 1918 as enacting a twenty-year armistice that was merely a lull between two major world conflicts. It remains to be seen whether the 1990s and beyond represented a similar temporary armistice, or whether the combination of enlightened civic and intellectual effort, together with moderated leadership, of states, churches, corporations, and other major institutions, has created a new environment.
This has been a period when the peace and conflict research and analysis as a distinct area of scholarship has both evolved through external influences and transformed itself. Such a project as this encyclopedia also reflects and promotes that growth and change—as well as the needs—of burgeoning teaching in this field. Education at the university level—as peace studies courses, programs, even departments have been established and spread worldwide—demonstrates that there is a need for such resources. Moreover, conflict resolution and its various practical approaches to mediation and dispute settlement have become firmly established in policy and training, imparting skills at every level and for every type of conflict, from the interpersonal to the international. This encyclopedia emphasizes strongly this aspect of the field. Furthermore, national governments have, since the late 1950s, turned increasingly to peace institutes for reliable research and statistics, especially in the areas of arms control and reduction, disarmament, and the analysis of the global spread of production and trade in new types of weapons. At the same time, the study of alternatives to war, civilian resistance, and nonviolent approaches to security have advanced, and this is reflected in these volumes, under various headings, as an antidote to global violence. In the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “nonviolence does not mean the mere absence of violence—the true expression of nonviolence is compassion which is not just a passive emotional response, but a rational stimulus to action.”
Since this is neither a biographical dictionary nor a handbook of organizations, the number of individual entries on both is limited. Many individual peace researchers and leaders are included in more general articles (on, for example, the civil rights movement or Nobel Peace Prize laureates). Many organizations and institutes are listed under more general headings (peace research institutions, peace movements). Entries on individuals focus on peace figures no longer living and who are treated less in respect to their biographies than for their ideas and contributions to peace and nonviolence and the evolution of the field. Much the same can be said of the choice of organizations, though the challenges of selection were invidious and difficult.