North America: Peace Studies versus the Hegemony of Realist and Liberal Methods

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.