All

these theories and yet the bodies have stopped piling up1:
Critical approaches to Peace Studies

Jacob Mundy
Colgate University
March 2016
Comments welcome: jmundy@colgate.edu

Prepared for the Peace Studies Section for the International Studies Associations 2016
Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA



Introduction: Critical Peace Studies What Critical Peace Studies?

The theoretical debates that have defined and helped construct International Relations as a
viable social science over the course of the twentieth century have heavily informed the
principle debates within Peace Studies as well. The maximalist/minimalist agenda or the
positive versus negative peace debate within Peace Studies are not all that different from
the framework of Liberalism and Realism that has been at the center of International
Relations. In recent decades, however, there has been a growing acknowledgement of other
voices in International Relations theory. As Robert Vitalis notes in his recent critique of the
racial and imperial roots of International Relations as a discipline, introductory courses in
International Relations always introduce students to the three schools of thought in
International Relations theory: Realism, Liberalism (or internationalism, or idealism), and

1 See Marysia Zalewski, All These Theories and the Bodies Keep Piling Up: Theory, Theorists and

Theorising, in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and
Marysia Zalewski (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 340-353. Zalweski attributes
the quote All These Theories and the Bodies Keep Piling Up to a sign posted in Nicholas Wheelers
office.

a third category no one can ever quite decide upon (Political Economy, Constructivism,
etc). It is, Vitalis claims, a kind of residual category that consists of various persuasions of
critics on the disciplines margins, the serious consideration of which is honored more in
the breach than in the observance.2

In as much as International Relations theory has had an uncomfortable relationship with
these theories of the third kind, mainstream or self-defined Peace Studies has also had little
interest in such Critical approaches. The feeling, however, appears to be mutual: those
same Critical approaches have had little interest in contributing to Peace Studies per se.
Though there are sporadic calls for Critical Peace Studies, there are, as of yet, no
dedicated journals, special journal issues, textbooks, readers, monographs, or collections
on the topic.3 A survey of introductory and tertiary literatures in Peace Studies, particularly
works on Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding, tend to have a normative or practical focus
with little consideration given to Critical theories or approaches.4 This stands in sharp

2 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International

Relations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015).

3 Some notable calls for Critical Peace Studies: Richard Jackson, Towards Critical Peace Research,

in Researching Terrorism, Peace and Conflict Studies: Interaction, Synthesis and Opposition, edited by
Ioannis Tellidis and Harmonie Toros (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2015); Matti Jutila, Samu
Pehkonen, and Tarja Vyrynen, Resuscitating a Discipline: An Agenda for Critical Peace Research,
Millennium-Journal of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2008): 623-640. There is otherwise no
introductory textbook or reader in Critical Peace Studies, apart from a two-book series featuring
works by Johan Galtung.
4 For example, Houston Wood, Invitation to Peace Studies (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,

2016); David P Barash, ed., Approaches to Peace : A Reader in Peace Studies (New York, N.Y.: Oxford
University Press, 2014). In the conflict resolution literature: Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse,
and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The Prevention, Management and Transformation
of Deadly Conflicts, third edition (Malden, M.A.: Polity, 2011); Tom Woodhouse, Hugh Miall, Oliver
Ramsbotham, and Christopher Mitchell, eds., The Contemporary Conflict Resolution Reader (Malden,
M.A.: Polity, 2015). James Schellenberg Conflict Resolution: Theory, Research, and Practice (Albany,
N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996) includes discussions of Marxist and structural accounts of conflict. A few

contrast with the acknowledgement of Critical approaches within International Relations5

and the significant interventions of Critical scholars into a number of related fields,
particularly Security Studies.6

The absence of Critical voices from Peace Studies is also visible in the two leading
professional academic associations in the field, the Peace Science Society (International)
and the Peace and Justice Studies Association,7 as well as their associated journals
(respectively, Conflict Management and Peace Science and Peace and Change: A Journal of

others are geared towards positivistic social science research, such as Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and
John A Vasquez, eds., Conflict, War, and Peace: An Introduction to Scientific Research (Los Angeles,
C.A.: CQ Press, 2013);
5 The following introductory textbooks for International Relations all contain a chapter (or several)

on issues related to critical studies: Karen A Mingst and Ivan M Arregun-Toft, Essentials of
International Relations: Sixth International Student Edition (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2013); Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theories,
third edition (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2013); Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater,
eds., Theories of International Relations (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Jennifer
Sterling-Folker, Making Sense of International Relations Theory, second edition (Boulder, C.O.: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 2013); and, of course, Cynthia Weber, International Relations Theory: A Critical
Introduction. Fourth edition (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2014).
6 This includes leading textbooks on Security Studies: Paul D Williams, ed., Security Studies: An

Introduction (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013); Alan Collins, ed., Contemporary Security Studies
(New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2013); Peter Hough, Shahin Malik, Bruce Pilbeam and
Andrew Moran, eds., International Security Studies: Theory and Practice (New York, N.Y.: Routledge,
2015).
7 The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) has an active Critical Peace and Conflict

Studies standing group that has a membership of nearly forty (see

http://standinggroups.ecpr.eu/cpcs/). And, for what its worth, the social-professional networking
website for scholars, Academia.edu, which boasts over thirty million members, has ten members
following the critical peace studies tag with ten papers tagged as such. Critical Security Studies,
by comparison, has over 6,400 followers and over 1,400 documents with that tag (both as of
January 29, 2016).

Peace Research).8 The fundamental differences between these two groups, as viewed
through their journals, relates somewhat to the minimalist/maximalist debate (or, negative
versus positive peace), which has increasingly shaped the scope of research and, more
visibly, the methods of analysis that are considered real social science. Where Peace and
Change promotes a diversity of research topics, theoretical predispositions, and methods of
analysis, Conflict Management and Peace Science has tended to emphasize positivist and
formalized methods, particularly those that use quantitative and statistical analysis.
Similarly, the leading journals in Peace Studies, The Journal of Peace Research and The
Journal of Conflict Resolution, have, in recent years, been heavily biased towards
scholarship grounded in statistical data and analysis mirroring the increasing formalization
of Political Science and International Relations.9 Security Dialogue and Cooperation and
Conflict, on the other hand, have been more friendly outlets for critical voices due to their
commitments to theoretical and methodological pluralism.

How then to explain this mutual disinterest? Given the proliferation of critical approaches
to various topics within the social sciences, why has a sub-field of Critical Peace Studies
never emerged? At the same time, why have scholars in Peace Studies shown little interest
in Critical approaches towards the issues that define the field? This paper seeks to provide
an initial framework for thinking through these questions by analyzing the contributions of

8 Take Foucault and Marx, for example, arguably the two theorists most central to self-identified

critical scholars. Since its founding in 1973, Conflict Management and Peace Science, which has
produced nearly 100 issues, has published six articles or reviews that mention Marx, the majority
published before 2000; there is only one article mentioning Foucault. Peace and Change has been
more receptive to articles that utilize such critical theorists. In over 130 issues published so far,
Foucault has been mentioned in twenty-five articles or reviews, though none mention Foucault in
the title (one, however, used the term poststructural in its title). Marx gets a better hearing in
Peace and Change, being mentioned in nearly sixty articles.
9 According to the contested metric of the Impact Factor, the Journal of Peace Research ranked

number two among all International Relations journals in 2014, the Journal of Conflict Resolution is
ranked number fifteen Cooperation and Conflict is ranked nineteen, and Security Dialogue is number
twenty (ISI Web of Science Journal Citation Reports for 2014).

Critical approaches to the issues that have traditionally defined Peace Studies. Through an
analysis of the theoretical assumptions, methods of critique, and ethical commitments of
Critical approaches, we can perhaps better understand why peace and Peace Studies have
never been viewed as a problem worth devoting Critical attention towards.


Whats Critical about Critical Approaches to Peace and Conflict?

There are three initial ways in which Critical approaches to peace and conflict are critical.
They are, first of all, critiques of power, whether that power is exercised through
governments, private institutions, social groups, ideologies, individual persons, or other
forms of agency. Like Realism, Critical approaches seek to understand the world as it is,
although the assumptions guiding Critical studies are often radically different than those
assumed by Realists. Where Realism will often put forward an ontology based on anarchy,
international structure, states, or elites, Critical studies will, depending on the approach in
question, centralize other actors or relations in their ontology. For critical political
economy, this might be global relations of production in a given mode of production, and so
how this translates into mass or structural violence. For poststructuralists, this might be
the dominant discourses and their role in the production and reproduction of violence. For
postcolonial theorists, this might be the historical legacies of North Atlantic imperialism,
how it constructed new identities (e.g., tribes, race, and ethnicity), how it heterogeneously
distributed the goods and bads of modernity, and thus set the stage for todays conflicts.
For feminists and queer theorists, it might be either an appreciation of male dominance at
all levels of analysis or the ways in which hetero-normative sexualities intersect with class
and race to perpetuate the root causes of war and structural violence.

The second way in which Critical approaches are critical is a shared commitment to
problematizing the relationship between power and knowledge. For Critical approaches,
there are no sacred cows, including the academy and the Critical approaches themselves.
Indeed, Critical approaches are not merely skeptical about the relationship between power
and the dominant ideologies or discourses that underwrite that power; they are equally

skeptical about the role of knowledge producers in the reproduction of power, from
Washington, D.C., think tanks to institutions of higher education. Critical approaches are
thus critical of the idea that the social and natural sciences produce objective knowledge
that is independent of the regime of power in which that knowledge was arrived at.
Building upon the Marxist concept of ideology (i.e., the system of beliefs that makes
capitalism seem natural and desirable), Critical approaches tend to view regimes of
knowledge and regimes of power as mutually constitutive. This is so even if most
knowledge producers are unaware of this relationship, or misconstrue it in the way that
Realists do (i.e., by presenting a realistic picture of conflict that is actually an ideological
reflection of how power wants to be seen). Historically, Critical approaches emerged in
response to the complicity of Marxist thought vis--vis the totalitarian states that claimed
to be following Marxism. To be critical in the mid-twentieth century was to be equally
critical of all regimes of knowledge and power, whether capitalist or communist. In
regarding knowledge and power as related, knowledge production is thus implicated in
issues of war and violence. Thus Critical approaches view the production and circulation of
knowledge as important sites of research, whether that knowledge production takes place
in the halls of power, in a World Bank report, in the ethnographic researching of a conflict
zone, or between academics at workshops. This commitment to reflexivity that a Critical
researcher must understand her positionality within and contribution towards regimes of
knowledge and power as she conducts her research is one that defines Critical
approaches, particularly post-colonial, race, gender, and sexuality studies.

The third way in which Critical approaches are critical is the sense in which Critical
research ethically engages with pressing, prevailing, or marginal issues that are critical. A
central theme in Critical approaches is resistance: how to understand regimes of power
and knowledge, and thus how to resist them. In much the same way that Liberalism is
viewed as a normative approach, Critical approaches are likewise normative in so far as
they are rooted in a desire to understand oppression, inequality, and violence, and so serve
those who resist those forces. Critical approaches, however, tend to avoid the idealism
inherent to Liberalism; that is, the tendency to first imagine a better world and then to
reverse engineer our political, social, and economic systems to match that imagined ideal.

Critical approaches nonetheless share a close relationship and often come out of
specific political contexts or movements, whether its Marxism and the rise of industrial
labor, postcolonialism and anti-Imperial Third Worldism, poststructuralism and resistance
to Neoliberalism, or queer theory and LGBQTIA movements. It should come as no surprise
that Critical scholars are often identified (and self-identified) with critiques and causes that
are progressive, Leftist, radical, or revolutionary.

There are, however, two problems with this basic overview. The first is described in this
section; the second is described in later sections. First of all, the philosophical
commitments of Critical approaches are as various as the approaches themselves. For
example, poststructuralists will embrace the accusation of relativism (though they then
often deconstruct the allegation itself), yet some Marxists remain committed to the idea
that objective knowledge of capitalism can be constructed within the totalizing structure of
our global capitalist present. As much as poststructuralism was born out of a
disenchantment with Marxist theory and the various despotisms created in the name of
Communism,10 Marxist theorist have sought to disqualify such postmodern thinking as an
effect of late capitalism and the neoliberal academy.11 Some feminists commitments to the
essentials of femininity and masculinity as an explainer of peace and conflict12 is openly
challenged by queer theorists who attempt to denaturalize prevailing notions of sexuality
and gender, including those notions found within feminist thought.13

10 See Michel Foucault, Alessandro Fontana, and Pasquale Pasquino, Truth and Power, in The

Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon, 1984).
11 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review No.

146 (1984): 53-92.

12 For example, see the now classic Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist

Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 [1989]).

13 Feminist women of color were some of the first to critique of the hegemony of mainstream

read: white feminism. See the collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color edited by Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2015[1981]).
Queer theorys assault on mainstream, essentializing feminism is often traced to Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2006 [1990]).


Some of this is by design. Critical approaches are often anti-disciplinarian. That is, they not
only refuse engage in the elaboration of paradigms of thought, they actively seek to expose
the invisible ideological or political projects that might be interwoven into scholarly
endeavors, no matter how modestly, objectively, or neutrally those endeavors are framed.
The unity behind most Critical approaches begins and ends with the three critical
elements describes above (power, knowledge, and resistance). That unity begins to
breakdown once they start to account for relationships of power and knowledge in their
own unique ways, and then describe the politics of resistance informed by those Critical
elaborations of knowledge and power.

Although the idea of Critical Peace Studies has never been explicitly formulated in a
coherent and sustained way (an issue this paper will examine later), traditional Peace
Studies and Critical approaches share some interesting commonalities. For example,
Johann Galtungs insistence that Peace Studies must examine violence in all its forms and at
all levels of analysis, particularly structural violence,14 mirrors the way in which Michel
Foucault criticized Noam Chomsky for failing to account for the totality of powers
operations, operations that would undermine Chomskys idealistic proposals for a better
world.15 Critical approaches, like many in the Peace Studies community, view social

As a relevant example of using queer theory to understand its critique of feminism in relation to
larger issues of peace and conflict, see Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
14 Johan Galtung,"Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, Journal of Peace Research 6(3) 1969: 167-

191.
15 See Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature (New

York, N.Y.: The New Press, 2006).

movements, particularly nonviolent ones,16 as one the primary vehicle through which
effective and constructive forms conflict can be waged against war and inequality.17


Critical Approaches to Peace and Conflict

Critical approaches to peace and conflict draw upon a myriad of intellectual influences,
starting with the Marxist tradition and what is often labeled continental philosophy.18
Within the Marxist tradition, the Frankfurt School of critical studies represents an
important influence on Critical thinking about peace and conflict. Given the emphasis on
issues of knowledge within Critical approaches, the turns towards linguistics and structure
in twentieth century philosophy and social theory are another important set of influences.
More important still are the critiques that emerged in response to the linguistic and
structural turn, particularly deconstruction and poststructuralism. Contemporaneous with
these developments were efforts to develop intellectual, socio-cultural, economic, and
political responses the end of European imperialism and North Atlantic hegemony in world
affairs. What have come to be called postcolonial and subaltern studies emerged in the
crucibles of decolonization and the conditions that confronted recently liberated peoples in
the global south. These theories often utilized Marxist insights while criticizing late
Marxisms eurocentrism (e.g., World Systems Theory); that is, they brought together
concerns about the emergence of a global proletariat and its intersections with race,
gender, and other identities. In the United States, the emergence of Black, African
American, and Africana studies spoke to the unique historical context of North American
colonialism and the legacies of its foundation in chattel slavery. African-American schools

16 e.g., Stephen Zunes, Lester R Kurtz and Sarah Beth Asher, eds. Nonviolent Social Movements: A

Geographical Perspective (Malden, M.A.: Blackwell, 1999).

17 A critical examination of late social movements is exemplified in Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 2005).
18 See Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater, eds., The Continental Philosophy Reader (New York,

N.Y.: Routledge, 1996).

of international thought, particularly the Howard School of the early and mid twentieth
century, produced a number of important influences on Critical approaches to peace and
conflict, from W.E.B. De Bois to Ralph Bunche to Merze Tate.19 Twentieth century debates
within feminist thought, as well as gender and sexuality studies more generally, are also an
important set of influences on Critical approaches to peace and conflict, particularly the
ways in which mainstream white Liberal feminism has been challenged by queer theory,
postcolonial feminism, and feminists of color. With the emergence of environmental
movements and the global climate crisis in recent decades, Critical approaches have
likewise drawn upon sources within critical political economy and political ecology to
develop new understandings of the challenges this crisis poses and to challenge the
dominance of neo-Malthusianism in these debates.20 Given the centrality of scientific
knowledge, institutions, and performances within modern techno-managerial governance,
Critical scholars have recently articulated a new field of research called Science,
Technology, and Society studies (STS),21 a field that can be easily applied to issues in peace
and conflict such as the rise of scientific terrorism expertise22 or the international
peacebuilding complex.23

While Critical approaches to peace and conflict have had much to say about the conflict,
there has been little engagement with the peace in the same way that debates about the
nature and possibility of peace have defined Peace Studies. When one considers the
intellectual heritage, theoretical-methodological preoccupations, and ethical commitments

19 See Vitalis, White World Order.
20 Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts, eds., Violent Environments (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 2001)
21 STS is often grounded in the work of sociologist Bruno Latour. See, e.g., Bruno Latour, Science in

Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, M.A..: Harvard
University Press, 1987).
22 Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism" (New York, N.Y.:

Cambridge University Press, 2013).

23 Sverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International

Intervention (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

of Critical approaches, it is not surprising that accounting for war, violence, and conflict has
consumed more interest than theorizing or building peace. For example, the Marxist
tradition is a notorious case in point: issues of war and peace do not figure prominently
among the primary concerns of Marx, Engels, or their progeny.24 The primary concern of
Marxism was and continues to be the Capitalist system, its effects, and the struggles to
confront and overturn it. When Trotsky was appointed Foreign Minister of the Soviet
Union, he famously quipped that his job would simply entail the announcement of the
Russian revolution to the world. International relations was otherwise a practice of
Bourgeois states. Over the course of the twentieth century, Marxists came to recognize the
importance of war as one of the processes through which the Capitalist system expanded
itself, resolved its contradictions, and expended its surpluses.25 Marxist skepticism towards
the concept of peace, in the Bourgeois sense, was similar to critiques of minimalist
definitions of peace. In the Marxist sense, minimalist peace was a either a temporary
understanding between capitalist states (e.g., the Treaty of Versailles) or temporary period
of capital retrenchment in the face of opposition to its ruthless expansion (e.g., the UN
prohibition of wars of aggression and colonial imperialism). While Communism promised
to end the violence associated with Capitalism, particularly inter-Bourgeoisie wars and
imperialism, Communism never promised to end all social conflict, merely to place new
parameters upon it so that social conflict would be far less destructive and immiserating.26

The extent to which Critical scholars have been interested in peace is largely indirect.
Starting with the research and theorizations of Michel Foucault (if not Max Weber27 and

24 Bernard Semmel, Marxism and the Science of War (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,

1981).
25 e.g., Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986).
26 Terry Eagleton, Terry, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press, 2011),

chapter four.
27 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York, N.Y.:

Penguin, 2002).

Norbert Elias28 before him), Critical attention has often focused on the emergence of
Liberal states in the North Atlantic world in the modern period, and so the processes of
ordering and disciplining those states into well regulated polities, polities that are
ostensibly free of the kinds of violence that marked earlier forms of the state. Building upon
Foucaults work on penal systems, governmentality, and then biopower and the
biopolitical,29 Critical scholars have taken an interest in the extent to which the modern
Liberal state, if not todays global Neoliberal reality, must be understood in relation to its
life promoting rather than life denying functions. In opposition to the Marxist
obsession with the ills and violence of modernity, poststructuralists have recently attended
to the productivity of modern forms of power rather than its obvious restrictions and
violent excesses. At the same time, this turn towards the productivity of modern Liberal
states has evoked a strong rebuke from postcolonial scholars. Some have argued that
Foucaults elision over the violence of modernity results from a failure to appreciate the
extent to which the primary laboratory of modern forms of power were the plantation, the
colony, and the empire spaces of extreme forms of violence.30

The disinterest in issue of peace among Critical approaches also stems from their shared
preoccupation with the dominant framing of the worlds problems. Peace, after all, has
never been understood as a major problem facing the world. And while Critical approaches
are typically motivated by the desire to build more humane, egalitarian, and sustainable
futures, their central preoccupations tend to be the perceived impediments to those
futures. To be critical is first and foremost to be critical of the regimes of knowledge and
power that perpetuate inequality and violence. The dominant frameworks through which

28 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Malden, M.A.:

Blackwell, 2000).
29 See Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan

(New York: Vintage, 1995); Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, I.L.: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michel
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge De France, 1975-76, translated by David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

30 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15(1), 2003: 11-40.

issues of peace and conflict are understood and managed in todays world militarism,
homeland security, and counterterrorism have been the central preoccupation of Critical
approaches. Thus one will find journals and textbooks devoted to Critical Security Studies
(journal launched in 2013), Critical Terrorism Studies (journal launched in 2008), and even
Critical Military Studies (journal launched in 2015), where as no such journal or textbook
exists for Critical Peace Studies.31

The failure of Critical approaches to problematize peace explicitly is not only a significant
intellectual blindspot, it often leads to inaccurate descriptions of recent trends in war and
peace. Scholars writing from critical perspectives often insist that the world has entered a
permanent state of war in which things are worse now than ever before.32 Yet those in the
Peace Studies community who keep abreast of the latest statistics on armed conflict33 and
debates about our age of unprecedented peace,34 know that things are not always as bad
as the mass media make it out to be. This paper will later return to this lacuna in Critical
approaches to thinking about peace and conflict.

Given this lacuna, assessing the contribution of Critical approaches to the traditional
concerns of Peace Studies has to be conducted indirectly. The most visible contribution of

31 Critical Security Studies has at least one textbook, Columba Peoples and Nick Vaughan-

Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies An Introduction, second edition (New York, N.Y.: Routledge,
2015); one book series published by Routeldge; and three books on research methods: Mark B
Salter and Can E Mutlu, eds., Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (New
York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2012); Laura J Shepherd, ed., Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction
to Theories and Methods (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013); Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew
Neal and Nadine Voelkner, eds., Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis (New York,
N.Y.: Routeledge, 2015).
32 Hardt and Negri, Multitude.
33 Therse Pettersson and Peter Wallensteen, Armed Conflicts, 1946-2014, Journal of Peace

Research 52(4), 2015: 536-550.

34 See, e.g., Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York:

Viking, 2011).

Critical approaches to our understanding is the multidimensionality or intersectionality of

the main drivers of conflict. It could be argued that the growth of the Human Security
paradigm owes much to Critical approaches.35 Human Security is now widely practiced as a
serious approach to peacebuilding and conflict prevention by international, governmental,
military, and private agencies around the world. That said, it should come with little
surprise that Critical scholars have also developed penetrating critiques of the Human
Security paradigm, particularly its insturmentalization by authoritarian states and neoimperial agendas.36 Along the same lines, there have also been penetrating critiques of
diplomatic peacemaking,37 transitional justice and national reconciliation,38 peacekeeping
and humanitarian interventions,39 as well as postconflict peacebuilding, nationbuilding,
and statebuilding.40 These citations represent a mere fraction of Critical engagements with
issues in Peace Studies but they are nonetheless representative of the kinds of analytical
techniques that Critical approaches use.41

35 For an original statement of Human Security, see Buzan, Barry, Ole Wver, and Jaap de Wilde,

Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

36 e.g., Paul Amar, ed., New Racial Missions of Policing International Perspectives on Evolving Law-

Enforcement Politics (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013).

37 Iver B. Neumann Diplomatic Sites: A Critical Enquiry (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,

2013).
38 Alexander Keller Hirsch, Theorizing Post-conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution and Repair

(New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2012).

39 Bachmann, Jan, Colleen Bell, and Caroline Holmqvist, eds., War, Police and Assemblages of

Intervention (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2015).

40 Daniel Bertrand Monk and Jacob Andrew Mundy, The Post-conflict Environment: Investigation and

Critique (Ann Arbor, M.I.: University of Michigan Press, 2014).

41 Any effort to map the entire universe of Critical contributions to thinking about peace and conflict

would begin with the two key book series devoted to these and related issues, the Borderlines
series with University of Minnesota Press (1995-2007) and its successor, the Interventions series
with Routledge (2009 to present).

Common to almost all Critical approaches is an effort to problematize or denaturalize the

basic concepts that make up our world. These are especially and idea that is able to pass
without theorization or historicization. These are what Pierre Bourdieu called doxa, things
that go without saying because they come without saying.42 Building upon such conceptual
critiques, Critical approaches then attempt to account for the way things actually work
given the insufficiency of existing accounts. Critical approaches are also very much
interested in the mapping and measuring the effects of existing systems of power while, at
the same time, reconstructing the imaginative worldviews that is, the ideologies and
discourses that allow such productive mythologies to take hold in societies that they
become natural if not invisible. Tracing the processes through which ideas become
practices and then material realities (reification) is a core methodology, as is the reverse
tracing the production of regimes of knowledge that legitimate regimes of power. One of
the most vivid examples of this is the concept and now lived reality of terrorism, an
idea that had little currency half a century ago has, since the 1970s, come to be one of the
organizing principles of military and security affairs in the world today. Although the
terrorism has many contested definitions, it has nonetheless become, through its
appropriation by governmental, academic, and private institutions, the primary lens
through which armed conflict is understood in todays world. But what is curious about
terrorism, for Critical scholars, is the extent to which terrorism is not a natural feature of
world but is in fact a feature of the world produced by counter-terrorism discourse and
practice.43 Indeed, this observation that terrorism and counterterrorism produce and
reproduce each other is one of the reasons that there is an inherent tension between
traditional Peace Studies and Critical scholars. Where Peace Studies is often a solutionoriented enterprise, Critical scholars are often as skeptical of putative solutions as they are
of the ostensible problems. As much as defining a problem is a practice of knowledge
imbricated in operations of power, so are the acts of prescribing solutions to that problem.

42 See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1972]).

43 Joseba Zulaika, Terrorism: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy (Chicago, I.L.: University of Chicago Press,

2009).


As another an example of this approach, Dan Monk and I assembled a collection of studies
in a book called The Postconflict Environment through the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson
Center. Our first goal was to problematize the major domains of post-Cold War
peacebuilding in the age of Neoliberalism, domains such as state- and nationbuilding,
transitional justice and national reconciliation, refugee management, reconstruction, and
economic reform. What each study in the collection attempted to do was, first of all, the
ways in which postconflict environments had to be manufactured and maintained by the
stakeholders with the most invested in the very idea the postconflict environment. We
found that the dominant stakeholders in these domains were not the polities being
subjected to these new regimes of peacebuilding but rather the techno-scientific
community of self-appointed postconflict managers. Our collective conclusion was that one
of the major pitfalls of externally promoted peacebuilding was the extent to which those
peacebuilders seemed to be more committed to the reproduction of particular frameworks
of knowledge and practice than to the actual environments in which they worked.


A Conclusion of Sorts

The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations claims that Peace Studies commitment to
the possibility of peace, whether in terms of its negative or positive conceptualizations,
means that Peace Studies is not an objective or empirical enterprise, but one guided by
normative assumptions and a preference for social engineering over social science.44
Anyone who has kept abreast of developments in peace research over the previous decade
will find this definition woefully inadequate, if not antiquated. In recent years, for example,
it is difficult to say whether or not Peace Studies, as evidenced in the Journal of Peace
Research and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, can be understood anymore as radically
opposed to how mainstream Political Science, International Relations, Economics, and

44 Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newnham, The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations (New

York, N.Y.: Penguin, 1998), 424-425.

Sociology conduct research on issues of war, conflict, security, and strategy. Indeed, Peace
Studies has recently gone mainstream in a big way. Its journals are some of the best in the
social sciences, and recent mass-market books by public intellectuals have generated much
popular interest in theories of positive peace.45 The once marginalized and highly
normative study of strategic nonviolent movements has become an object of serious and
award-winning social scientific inquiry.46

If ever there were a historical moment that called for a critical evaluation of our
contemporary practices and sciences of peace, now would be the time.

45 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking,

2011); Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates
to Robots (New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Other mass market books include ,
Joshua S Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York:
Dutton, 2011) and John Horgan, The End of War (San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2013).
46 For example, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic

Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2012) won the 2012
Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award from the American Political Science Association and the 2013
University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. See also the special
issue of the Journal of Peace Research, Understanding Nonviolent Resistance (volume 50[3], May
2013) edited by Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham.