Peace Research and the Industrial Revolution

Abstract

Having quantitatively grown so fast, peace research urgently needs to clarify its research object and to dissociate itself from other approaches. A discussion of theory is not luxury. The international system, with its threat of total or partial destruction which provides the general framework of peace research, must be recognized as a phenomenon of recent history. It is the pro duct of the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist mode of production. Retracing this system to its historic genesis enables us to expose the roots from which the decisive conflict potential of modern times - the modern state, the arms race, the discrepancy between rich and poor countries, non-capitalist countries as components of the capitalist world system - have developed. Unless we reduce historically conflicts of the moment to their recent contemporary structure rooted in the capitalist revolution, peace research will only be able to cure symptoms. Today we are historically still in the epoch of the capitalist revolution of the (European) 17th and 18th centuries. It must be transcended, overcome, if we are to create conditions for the possibilities of circumstances in which conflicts are no longer warlike, i.e. mediated by states but rather articula ted and carried out as social conflicts by the agents directly concerned.

Conflict Transformation: A Multi-Dimensional Task

“…The idea of conflict formation was already present in the work of the European structural theorists who analysed conflict formations (e.g. Senghaas 1973;Krippendorf 1973). Perhaps the most influential work to date has been that of Galtung (brought together in Galtung 1996, 70-126), which offers a rich brew of core concepts.…”