"The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." --Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Graduate Programs in Peace Studies
Peace Studies Links: US Academic Instutitions
Centre for Peace Studies McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
About Peace Studies
Peace Studies is a discipline that seeks to understand war and peace, violence and non-violence, conflict and conflict transformation, and that looks for ways to promote human well-being through this understanding. Peace Studies is distinguished from other disciplines by its focus, its integration of approaches from varied disciplines, its explicit values and its engaged scholarship.
Focus: While many academic disciplines regard war and peace, violence and non-violence, conflict and conflict transformation as important aspects of human social life, Peace Studies is the only one that puts them at the centre of its study.
Integration: While Peace Studies is committed to drawing on the contributions of existing disciplines and disciplinary approaches, it insists on integrating these within its distinctive values and approaches.
Values: Peace Studies is one of a number of emerging disciplines that explicitly regards certain conditions as problematic and commits itself both to understanding and to changing these conditions. Just as Women's Studies regards male domination as problematic, and Environmental Studies regards some kinds of environmental destruction as problematic, Peace Studies regards war and certain kinds of violence as problematic. This does not mean one must be a pacifist to enter this discipline and it does not mean one must condemn all violence or every call to arms; but it does mean that Peace Studies as a discipline seeks the diminishment of war and large-scale violence and does not pretend to be neutral on the issue of whether these will dominate the human future.
Engagement: Peace Studies is an engaged discipline. This means that the student of Peace Studies will be encouraged to become engaged in practical action in society and to relate this action to what is learned in the classroom. Practical action is crucial to the student's learning (theory and practice are intricately related) and to the empowerment of the student as an agent of change.
Georgetown University Justice and Peace Studies
Justice and Peace
Mission Statement
The emerging interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies--known variously as "peace and conflict studies," "conflict analysis and resolution," or "peace and justice studies"--is concerned with practical, normative questions of how to realize peace and justice in the everyday world. The ultimate goal of Peace Studies in the university context, however phrased, is to produce practically useful scholarship on how to create a more just and peaceful world. Such scholarship requires empirical accounts of the causes of war, violence, and injustice; practical understandings of how to prevent and ameliorate harmful social conditions; and theoretical reflections on the definition of justice. Each of these investigations can take place at all levels of social organization, from the individual to the family, from the small group to the nation, or at the level of the international community.
Our subject matter asks many basic questions. What is peace? What is conflict? How can one be encouraged and the other avoided? Students are exposed to a rich and contentious literature on the nature of peace and justice, a literature which has been a part of the Western debate as far back as Socrates, and which informs discussions in many other traditions as well.
Questions of central interest to the field concern the material and psychological determinants of aggression, the role of families and other institutions in producing aggressive or peaceful societies, the origins of social inequality, techniques of representing others, and the role of such representations in the building of communities. We also ask questions about the role of religious identity in forming the social conscience, when wars are just or unjust, the causes of war, the legitimacy or efficacy of international norms of conduct, and the effectiveness of various techniques of resolving conflict in different settings.
Obviously such questions draw on a wide range of existing disciplines including Psychology, Philosophy, Theology, History, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Literature, and Linguistics. Equally essential is that the field requires an active collaboration and dialogue between all these elements. The goal is not just to combine existing scholarship, but to form a useful synthesis of such material with an eye to improving the world around us.
There are at least six scholarly journals devoted specifically to the field of Peace Studies, and several publishers produce on-going book series. Much relevant publication also goes on within traditional disciplines.
Peace Studies at Georgetown
The Georgetown University Program on Justice and Peace (PJP) is an interdisciplinary unit dedicated to teaching and research in the emerging area of Peace Studies. At present PJP offers students a program of study toward an undergraduate minor in the Georgetown College of Arts and Sciences and a certificate in the School of Foreign Service.
Although most of the university programs to which PJP compares itself are referred to as "peace studies," or "peace and conflict resolution," early on it was thought important to emphasize the relation between justice and peace in our program. There are a number of reasons for this emphasis. From an empirical point of view, we feel that one cannot study either of these phenomena in isolation. Structures of social oppression, actual or perceived, are argued by many to be among the causes of war and other violent conflict. Such conflict also has obvious effects on social structure and on the possibility of attaining justice.
Conversely, one cannot attempt to evaluate the ethical implications of violence, whether it be war, revolution, or individual conflict, without considering the consequences it has for social and political structure. Any adequate understanding of the virtues of justice must at least outline the conditions under which people ought to be free from violence and war.
Within the Christian
tradition we find these two issues deeply entwined. From the Catholic Just War
debate to the Quaker peace communities, issues of justice and peace are integral
to the Christian world view. Our Program is especially well suited for research
and teaching about the many ways in which different social and religious arrangements
conceptualize and practice peace. We take inspiration from the teachings of
Gandhi and Ambedkar, Martin Luther King and Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchu and
Emma Goldman. In its teaching, research and service at Georgetown, the Program
is dedicated to providing ecumenical, international perspectives on peace, and
to developing practical solutions to problems of social inequality and injustice
at all levels of society. The attainment of justice and peace forms a conceptual,
moral, and practical unity that must be pursued across the diversity of human
experience.