Symbiosis between Peace Research and Peace Action

Abstract

There exist some empirically established bases for a symbiosis between peace research and peace action. For example, both researchers and peace activists are intellectually oriented rather than profit motivated (Parkin, 1968: Lipset, 1970). There is obviously not much money to be made in either of these activities. Activists need and want research done on the effects of their actions. This need was explicated by activists at the 1970 Grindstone Summer School in Peace Research and at the 1970 Haverford Workshop for Training in Non-violent Social Change. In addition to peace activists and peace researchers, there are also peace educators and peace politicians to be considered in this symbiosis. However, all four of these groups tend to isolate themselves from each other, apparently from fear of contaminating the purity of their particular approaches. In so doing they reduce the effectiveness that might result from having their efforts better coordinated. Much peace research can show that all these groups have much more in common than they sometimes seem to realize. A recent study of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and World Federalists, for example, shows both groups to be high in internationalism, low in militarism, high in intelligence and education (including liking school), low in misanthropy and family discord, low in faulty childhood disciplines, and radical in political and religious preferences (Eckhardt, 1970a). Such similarities in both ideology and personality provide an empirical foundation for a common bloc, and this evidence can be extended to many more radical groups in our culture today. Peace research has fairly well established that one principal obstacle to world peace today is the military-industrial complex at the socio-economic-political level (Mills, 1957; Melman, 1961; Cook, 1962; Barnet, 1969; Knoll & McFadden, 1969), and the military-industrial personality at the psychological level (Hampden-Turner, 1970; Eckhardt, 1970b). Now activists have been saying this for many years, on the basis of their impressions and intuitions, long before the evidence was as fully available as it is now. Since their own research has confirmed the activists' impressions on this basic point, researchers should be more ready to accept the impressions of activists as hypotheses worthy of immediate research, so that they may be confirmed or denied as soon as feasible, for greater effiency in the peace movement as a whole. Another very important contribution activists make to research lies in the fact that activist tactics often expose the power structure of any society, which would otherwise remain invisible. thus making 'facts' available for scientific research which would otherwise be unavailable. For example, Eckhardt (1969) has shown that the social forces opposed to peace and freedom in an American community in the 1960's included high school principals, school board members, athletic coaches, fundamentalist church boards, war veterans, and a federal district court judge. Many other examples may be found in the civil rights demonstrations in the United States during the 1960's, which have exposed the breadth and the depth of racial prejudice there. Similarly, reactions to anti-war demonstrations during the 1960's have revealed the extent of militarism in our culture today. In this respect, the peace activist serves in relation to peace research a function similar to that served by the psychoanalyst in relation to mental health research. Like the analyst, who makes the personal unconscious conscious, the activist makes the social unconscious conscious. This is a vital function for research in both cases, because we cannot research something of which we have no knowledge. Now that this part of the problem has been