Abstract
The many North American understandings, applications and goals of peacemaking, keeping and building, as well as mediation, sustainable peace, preventive diplomacy, mediation, conflict resolution, sustainable peace and the like, have many different conceptualizations, compounded by their paradigmatic variants. This chapter focuses on how the concept of peace is understood in North American scholarship and policy making; the author has undertaken to represent the dominant analytic approaches. This means that international politics and relations research, all of which discuss peace using both quantitative and qualitative methods, overshadows the influence of peace studies.1 As the editors solicited a chapter that would explain how the term ‘peace’ is actually used in North American theory and praxis, I have the fortunate consolation that peace studies and education and its precursors, such as the World Order Models Project,2 have been well documented.3 While the discussion will regrettably be cursory here, notwithstanding the large size of the peace studies section in the International Studies Association, for example, the large majority of North American academics, and an even larger share of practitioners, analyse peace from realist and liberal interpretive frameworks. Moreover, most North American academics are unfamiliar with the critiques of realism and liberalism, whether from perspectives of Gramscian hegemony, Foucauldian governmentality and/or imperialism.
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Notes
Richard A. Falk, The End of World Order: Essays on Normative International Relations (New York: Holmes and Meier Publications, 1983);
Richard Falk and Saul Mendlovitz, eds, Regional Politics and World Order (San Francisco: Freeman, 1973).
See, for example, Carolyn Stephenson, ‘Peace Studies’, in International Studies Compendium, ed. Robert Denemark (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2010), 5579–5603;
George A. Lopez, ‘An University Peace Studies Curriculum for the 1990s’, Journal of Peace Research 22, no. 2 (1985): 117–128;
Marie A. Dugan, ‘Peace Studies at the Graduate Level’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 504 (July 1989): 72–79. For debates and critiques, see, for example,
James G. Blight, ‘Peace and Security Studies: Should We Seek Professorships or Apprenticeships?’ Political Psychology 9, no. 3 (September 1988): 539–543;
George H. Quester, ‘International Security Criticisms of Peace Research’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 504 (July 1989): 98–105.
David Austen-Smith, ‘Interest Groups: Money, Information, and Influence’, in Perspectives of Public Choice, ed. Denni. C. Mueller (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 296–321;
Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
James Meernik, Rosa Aloisi, Marsha Sowell and Angela Nichols, ‘The Impact of Human Rights Organizations on Naming and Shaming Campaigns’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 2 (2005): 233–256;
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John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (New York: Mentor Books, 1965).
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Saul Mendlovitz and John Fousek, ‘A UN Constabulary to Enforce the Law on Genocide and Crimes against Humanity’, in The International Legal System in Quest of Equity and Universality, eds, Laurance Boisson de Chazournes and Vera Gowlland-Debbas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2001), 449–461.
See Onora O’Neill, ‘A Simplified Account of Kant’s Ethics’, in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986);
Thomas W. Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’, Ethics 103, no. 1 (October 1992): 48–75.
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Irving and William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Robert Kagan and President George W. Bush have epitomized this neo-conservative turn. See, for example, Douglas Murray, Neo-Conservativism: Why We Need It (New York: Encounter Books, 2006). The Weekly Standard is the standard-bearer for this normative ideology and political movement.
John J. Mersheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960).
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
See Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
For a summary, see Steven E. Lobell, ‘Structural Realism/Offensive and Defensive Realism’, in International Studies Compendium, ed. Robert Denemark (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2010), 6651–6669.
Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
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Herz is sometimes credited with the development of the security dilemma concept. John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939).
Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
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Ann Kent, Beyond Compliance: China, International Organization and Global Security (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Hans Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Michael W. Doyle, ‘Liberalism in World Politics’, American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1152.
For one analysis of neo-conservativism, see Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). The movement was started by ex-Stalinist intellectuals like Irving Kristol and has been influenced by political theory students of Leo Strauss.
Part of the confusion is that the term ‘liberal’ in non-academic contexts in the US connotes left-of-centre orientations. Almost no one identifies themselves as neoliberal in US public life, yet most non-US critiques of foreign policy have been of neoliberalism. Neo-conservatives have remained the main alternative to either realism or liberalism in US public discourse, and have not lost much prestige, despite the discredit that would have accompanied US efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Critiques of neo-conservatism include Josh Rogin, ‘James Baker: Realists Have Been Successful Stewards of Foreign Policy’, 9 August 2012, http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/09/jim_baker_realists_have_been_successful_stewards_of_foreign_policy#.UCUJoD_v7sA.email;
Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002);
David P. Forsythe, The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Karl Deutsch, Political Community in the North Atlantic Area (Princeton University Press, 1957).
Dianne Otto, ‘Rethinking the Universality of Human Rights Law’, Columbia Human Rights Law Review 29, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1–46;
see also the contributions by Nathaniel Berman, David Kennedy, Celina Romany, Angela Harris, et al. in On Violence, Money, Power and Culture: Reviewing the Internationalist Legacy, ed. Jonathan Lawrence Hargrove (Proceedings of the 2000 Annual Meeting) (Washington, DC: American Society for International Law, 2000, Vol. 93). Some of these US-based scholars are Europeans,
such as Francois Debrix, Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Maku Mutua, ‘Hope and Despair for a New South Africa: The Limits of Rights Discourse’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 10 (Spring, 1997): 63–114; see also, Vasant Kaiwar and Michael West, eds, Divergent Modernities: Critical Perspectives on Orientalism, Islamism, and Nationalism, Special issue of Special Issues: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 15.1 (Fall 1996).
Matei Dogan, How to Compare Nations (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1991);
John Mueller, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001);
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Andrew J. Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Introduction: Strange Little War’, War over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
This is in distinction to the sense given to the term ‘liberal peace’ by Mark Duffield and Oliver Richmond, which, in my view, characterizes a ‘realist peace’ or a ‘neoliberal peace’. Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Reclaiming Peace in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2008): 439–470;
Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001).
Instead of his thesis in The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), Francis Fukuyama has offered State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile Books, 2005). For a critique of his original view of the rise of liberal hegemony,
see John J. Mersheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability after the Cold War’, International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 5–56.
David M. Malone and Fen Osler Hampson, eds, From Reaction to Conflict Prevention, co-edited by Fen Osler Hampson (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002). For a realist critique of liberalism,
see John J. Mersheimer, ‘The False Promises of International Institutions’, International Security 19, no. 3 (1994–1995): 5–49.
Mark W. Zacher and Richard A. Matthew, ‘Liberal International Theory: Common Threads, Different Strands’, in Controversies in International Relations, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995);
Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Power of Liberal International Organizations’, in Power in Global Governance, eds, Barnett and Raymond Duvall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 161–184.
James Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, The Imperial Presidency (Mariner Books, 2004).
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Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Inter-Dependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little Brown, 1977);
Bruce Russett and John O’Neal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organization (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler and Tony Porter, eds, Private Authority and International Affairs (Albany: State University of New York, 1999);
Thomas Biersteker and Rodney Hall, eds, The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Aaron Rapport, Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
Chadwick F. Alger, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 504 (July 1989): 117, 117–127.
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Carey, H.F. (2016). North America: Peace Studies versus the Hegemony of Realist and Liberal Methods. In: Richmond, O.P., Pogodda, S., Ramović, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40761-0_36
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