Bringing peace back in: Presidential address to the Peace Science Society, 2013

Two recent books, Pinker’s the Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Goldstein’s Winning the War on War (2011), demonstrate that the long-term trend in human society is toward a dramatic reduction in violence. The reductions that they describe range from state-led violence against subjects to crime and to interstate war. This reduction in violence over the long stretch of human history, moreover, is so dramatic that Pinker opines that we should no longer ask the question ‘‘what causes war’’ but rather we should begin to ask the question ‘‘what causes peace’’. This is not a new idea, and in fact recent scholarship is beginning to make inroads (e.g. Goertz et al., 2011; Hoglund and Kovacs, 2010; Wallensteen, 2012), but the idea that social scientists, historically and in general, focus on the wrong question is a key facet of my argument. Peace to us has many faces and it goes well beyond the traditional emphasis on the absence of war, both interand intra-state, to incorporate the conditions under which states have little need or incentive to use violence against their citizens, and conversely, citizens have little motivation or incentive to challenge a state by force of arms. In a perfectly peaceful environment our lexicon would only use words like ‘‘political repression’’, ‘‘genocide’’ and ‘‘civil war’’ in the context of historical discussions about social evolution from our violent past to our peaceful contemporary world. Two main points motivate this paper: (a) that members of the Peace Science community should study peace directly rather than through war; and (b) that we should not let our methodological sophistication obscure the value-laden aspect of our intellectual focus. We should embrace the values that are at the foundation of our subject matter and we should do so without sacrificing rigor. I start with the observation that contemporary social science focuses primarily on the study of war and lesser forms of armed conflict, and unless we study the pathways to peace as vigorously as we study those to war, we might miss the forest because the trees are in our way. Moreover, we should not assume that, because we have some understanding of the pathways to violence and war, we then understand the pathways to peace. Put differently, the methods of achieving peace are probably not simply the negative of the pathways to