Landing peace theory on solid ground

Abstract

Peace, being the goal of almost everybody's struggle, becomes everybody's business, including in spheres such as health or education. There may be specialists and savants such as peace researchers or doctors or teachers but the preoccupation with these issues cannot simply be restricted to the experts or their expertise. As Western medical science leaves out spiritual health, and modern education ignores self‐actualization, contemporary peace research deals just with socioeconomic‐political peace and fails to include personal peace, spiritual peace, inter‐species peace, planetary peace, or cosmic peace within its purview. A broad thematic study of war and peace is not always helpful for individuals engaged in a personal quest for peace. As medical science is only a part of broader health science, or schooling but an element of self‐actualization, peace research is only one aspect of a life‐long search for peace and fulfilment. Peace search then becomes a larger life process in which we concern ourselves with both general and universal peace and unique particular peace. Leaving the study of peace just for peace researchers is like letting just the doctors deal with all our health. Peace researchers are a small number of individuals around the world with academic degrees and honors, stable jobs, steady incomes, and all the other securities in life. Put tersely, such peace research smacks of a brahmanical air of exclusivity and sophistication. When not followed by actual application, research becomes an exclusivistic, pedantic, and normative exercise which focuses mainly on the intellect rather than the equally important emotive and cognitive aspects. This is not to mean that peace researchers are unnecessary, just as doctors or teachers do not become non‐essential. Theories of peace cannot afford an unproblematic subject‐object binary opposition and the observer—observed model cannot be a very valid form of peace search. After all, peace researchers are not some kind of holy angels who descend on the earth, discern the human issues, and hand out remedies; on the contrary, they are also part of the problem and hence they try to be part of the solution. If peace search is a constant struggle involving the whole of humanity, peace researchers are moving within it, witnessing the process, analyzing it, and acting about it with the whole of humanity. So we are all searching for peace in our own ways with our own means for slightly varying ends.