Peace Policy Research Articles

Population Knowledge and the Practice of Guardianship

In the United States of America, as in other regions of the New World, the colonists imagined that the native peoples were “dying out.” Recent critical studies of this popular and robust narrative neglect to account for its demise. This paper describes the emergence, by the 1870s, of a critique of the “Dying Indian” story that rested on a growing store of population knowledge generated by the United States government. This paper narrates the increasing demographic capacity of colonial authority, starting with Jedediah Morse in the 1820s and noting the use of population data by the Cherokee and by Lewis Cass in the debate about Indian removal in the 1830s. This paper then links the work of Henry Schoolcraft in the 1840s and 1850s to the rise of a reservation system and President Grant's “Peace Policy” in the 1860s, arguing that “statistics” enabled humanitarian policy intellectuals to argue “unsentimentally” for a “civilizing” program. The surveillance capacity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) enabled the critique of the “Dying Indian” thesis made by Francis Walker, Selden Clark, and Garrick Mallery in the 1870s which, in turn, contributed to the political success of Senator Dawes's “allotment” policy in the 1880s. This paper concludes by placing the work of these early critics of the “Dying Indian” story in the context of two histories: of U.S. colonial sovereignty and of the discipline of historical demography.

“If a War It May Be Called”: The Peace Policy with American Indians

AbstractIn 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant initiated the “Peace Policy” with American Indians, an approach that privileged humane interactions with native peoples and allowed religious groups to run reservations across the American West. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, administered the largest number of reservations and symbolized the policy's benevolent aims. This essay explores varying Quaker understandings of peaceful relations with Indians as well as the general public's perception of the Friends' nonviolence. The essay focuses on an 1871 Indian attack on an overland wagon train, including Quaker engagements with the army in the attack's aftermath. Despite the Society's part in an emerging culture of threat against Plains Indians, Americans continued to consider both the Society and the policy to be peaceful. As such, this episode proves useful for understanding the intersections of religion and violence in United States history. Close analysis of the internal Quaker debate about military engagement, as well as Americans' ongoing identification of the policy with nonviolence, shows how religious groups and religious language were employed to reclassify episodes of violence as peace.

Emotion Regulation in Intractable Conflicts

It has long been apparent that negative emotions play a central role in intractable conflicts. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to use methods from affective science to test whether emotion regulation strategies can be used to influence conflict-related emotions in a way that would facilitate conflict resolution. To provide the context for this work, we begin by considering the roles emotions play in intractable conflicts. Next, we discuss how emotion regulation might be relevant to intractable conflicts, with a particular focus on cognitive reappraisal. We then review recent studies, conducted mainly in the context of the Middle East conflict, which suggest that cognitive reappraisal may be able to reduce negative emotions and promote public support for peaceful policies. We conclude by describing future challenges and opportunities for research in this area.

Introduction to Special Issue: Bound to be peaceful? The changing approach of Western European small states to peace

AbstractDespite a changed international political context in the post‐Cold War period, Western European small states remain firmly engaged in peace policy. One would be tempted to describe them as “natural born” peacemakers. This article shows a different approach to small states' peace policies. Using a typology from the literature on the role of norms and ideas, it argues that the type of peace engagement followed by small states has changed considerably during recent decades. More precisely, a shift has occurred in their peace policies from normative to cognitive ideas. This may be explained through their closer cooperation with international organisations (such as the EU), loss of significance of traditional role concepts such as neutrality, and the changed content of peace policies. Two consequences result from it: firstly, cognitive ideas are less linked to historically deep‐rooted identities and therefore more prone to change; secondly, there fewer comparative advantages accrue to small states in promoting cognitive ideas. Thus, though small states remain very active peacebuilders, they have become less “natural” peacemakers than they used to be.

Conclusions: Switzerland as a paradigmatic case of small‐state peace policy?

AbstractThis concluding article looks at the findings of the special issue through the lens of the Swiss experience. It traces the development of Swiss peace promotion activities, emphasising the emergence of a fully institutionalized peace policy since the end of the Cold War. Drawing on role theory, it makes sense of this process by referring to changes in the structure of the international system, altered role expectations by external actors, as well as internal processes of role contestation. In comparison to other small states, the article argues that Switzerland can be seen as a paradigmatic case on some levels. Notably, Switzerland extended its peace promotion activities as part of a niche foreign policy, which emerged in response to the post‐Cold War world order as well as a change in dominant foreign policy role conceptions. At the same time, there are a number of idiosyncrasies: Switzerland as a non‐member of EU and NATO enjoys a higher degree of autonomy in crafting its peace policy and its peace promotion activities remain largely focused on civilian instruments.

Values and Identities in Ireland's Peace Policy: Four Centuries of Norm Continuity and Change

AbstractThis article seeks to solve the puzzle of what explains Irish peace policy norm consistency for over three centuries and the recent reversal of these norms. The methodology analyses values and identities in Irish leaders' foreign policy discourses and practices, producing evidence that Irish peace policy norms are consistently: independence and neutrality for Ireland in the cause of peace and security; self‐determination; anti‐imperialism; third world solidarity; and resistance to famine and slavery. In the early 1900s, after Ireland gained statehood, the addition of: institutional cooperation; a constitutional commitment to peaceful resolution of disputes; armed neutrality; UN peacekeeping; and an explicit subordination of material interests for moral, justice‐based norms, made this small postcolonial state an historically‐driven Natural Born Peacemaker. Elite‐led norm reversals consolidated in the 2000s suggests a vital explanatory relationship with elite corruption and associated specific personality characteristics, and the need to revise elite socialisation theory to incorporate these variables.

From Peacemaker to Warmonger? Explaining Denmark's Great Power Politics

AbstractDanish post‐Cold War security policy is typically portrayed as a transformation from an anti‐militaristic and multilateralist member of a Nordic bloc in international relations promoting international solidarity and global peace into an activist proponent of a liberal world order to be defended by military means when necessary. Focusing on Danish peace policy, this article puts forward a contending analysis arguing that what appears as change entails a considerable amount of continuity. Now, as in the past, the Danish contribution to international peace reflects a combination of international demand and the ability and willingness of Danish policy‐makers to meet this demand in accordance with their liberal‐egalitarian values and pragmatic approach to international relations.

Ideas and Norms in Swedish Peace Policy

AbstractChallenging conventional wisdom that powerful states do as they will and small states do as they must, this article advances an analysis of small states and the role they can play as agents of change in the area of peace and security. Insights from constructivist research on foreign policy contribute to explain why some small states adopt norm entrepreneurship as a diplomatic strategy and how such strategy helps small states punch above their weight in international relations. The article is based on an in‐depth case study of Sweden as a norm entrepreneur promoting the norm pertaining to the prevention of violent conflicts in the EU and UN, and it assesses the impact of the following strategies used by such a norm entrepreneur: norm construction, agenda‐shaping, coalition‐building, and support of institutionalisation.

‘Our Entire People are Natural Born Friends of Peace’: The Norwegian Foreign Policy of Peace

AbstractWhat makes a peace nation? In this article it is argued that the Norwegian foreign policy of peace is rooted in an historical self‐understanding of Norway and Norwegians as particularly peaceful, an identity which was first articulated around 1890. Norwegians hold a strong liberal/meliorist belief that the world can become a better place, and that Norway has an important role to play in this process. However, this general belief in peace and a Norwegian peaceful exceptionalism has been expressed in different ways over the last 120 years. Around 1900, the ideal was a passive state and an active people working for peace, while from around 1920 it was accepted that the state needed to take more active part. Where international peace activism was associated in particular with UN peacekeeping during the Cold War, and peace mediation during the 1990's, increasingly a broader panoply of ‘good’ issues have been tied to an ever expanding notion of peace. The last two decades have also seen increased Norwegian participation in offensive military actions, couched at least partly in terms of peace. That the Norwegian attachment to peace remains strong while still allowing for support to military action suggests both that the Norwegian self‐understanding as a peace nation is deeply rooted and that it allows for a self‐righteous understanding of ‘peace through war’.

Still a Physician rather than a Judge? The Post‐Cold War Foreign and Security Policy of Finland

AbstractThis article seeks to explain some of the key changes in Finnish foreign and security policy since the end of the Cold War. Finland's peace policy during the Cold War built on a self‐image of a neutral bridge‐builder between East and West, that is a ‘peacekeeping superpower’ and a ‘physician not judge’ in world politics. Since that Finland's neutrality has been replaced with a peculiar combination of military non‐alignment and commitment to the European Union's common security and defence policy. A change has taken place from traditional peacekeeping to military crisis management led by the EU and NATO. Lately, Finland has started to build a profile in the field of peace mediation. This article argues that these changes have been enabled by a recalibrated understanding of small stateness, as Finnish identity has been adjusted from small‐state neutrality towards ‘member‐state alignment’ and ‘small‐EU‐member‐stateness’. Consequently, the Finnish physician approach has been reconstructed for the post‐Cold War world.

Peace education: an impact assessment of a case study of UNESCO-APCEIU and the university for peace

Each year the Asia-Pacific centre of education for international understanding (APCEIU), operating under the auspices of UNESCO, hosts a peace education training-of-trainer’s program for teacher-educators from Asia-Pacific member states. In this paper, I examine through a qualitative case study approach the programmatic design and evaluation of the APCEIU training program, seeking to monitor its medium-term impact on educators in order to understand the broader implications of peace education training. Research findings are based on consultation records, documentary analysis, observations, and questionnaire responses from participants of the 2009 peace education training program. In the medium-term impact assessment report, 14 educators offered data pertaining to their post-program implementation of peace education concepts and practices into their work. Data was also collected from several participants two years later to continue monitoring progress. These results are further compared to impact data gathered from eight graduates of the University for Peace. Findings indicate that among the 23 educators who participated in the study all have gone on to develop peace education programs or policies in their home countries.

Sustainable Urbanization Plan for the City of Bacolod

Sustainable Urbanization Plan for the City of Bacolod

Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association

Divinely Guided provides a useful overview of the Women's National Indian Association (wnia), an evangelical Christian organization founded in 1879 that sought assimilation of Native Americans to prevent their “extinction.” Valerie Sherer Mathes's goal is to bring the scholarly discourse on female reformers among the Indians, well known to ethnohistorians, into dialogue with a women's history that has neglected women's efforts in Indian work. Divinely Guided successfully locates women such as the wnia cofounder Amelia Stone Quinton and Annie Ellicott Kennedy Bidwell, vice president of the wnia in the West, in the historiography of women activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using personal papers, government documents, and wnia literature, Mathes reconstructs wnia assimilation efforts in northern and southern California. On reservations (Round Valley and Hoopa) and in missions these women were purveyors of a federal maternalism in which white women, acting in their roles as wife and mother, “uplifted” Indian women according to middle-class norms of civilization. As was true for the efforts of many other women reformers, these labors imparted organizing and lobbying skills, and brought these women into the political sphere, where they became influential in Indian policy. Mathes demonstrates that the wnia was as large and influential as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and deserves a monograph-length study. She contextualizes the wnia in the evangelical influences informing President Ulysses S. Grant's so-called peace policy, which allowed churches to administer Indian reservations beginning in 1872. As women were powerful in evangelical causes, this step opened the door for their Indian advocacy.

Safety and peaceful coexistence policies in Latin American schools: human rights perspective

The paper presents the theoretical framework, methodology and results of the X Inter-American Report on Human Rights Education, produced in 2011 by the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights (Costa Rica) under the coordination of the author. The research examines the increasing problem of securing peaceful coexistence,safety and prevention of school violence in 17 Latin American countries from South, Central and North America, and the educational policies they have developed or are currently developing to face it, analyzed from a human rights perspective.

War Signals: A Theory of Trade, Trust, and Conflict

We construct a theory of persistent civil conflicts, where persistence is driven by the endogenous dynamics of inter-ethnic trust and trade. In times of peace, agents belonging to two groups are randomly matched to trade bilaterally. Trade hinges on trust and cooperation. The onset of conflict signals that the aggressor has a low propensity to cooperate, harming future trust and trade. Agents observe the history of conflicts and update their beliefs over time. The theory predicts that civil wars are persistent. Moreover, even accidental conflicts that do not reflect economic fundamentals erode trust, and can plunge a society into a vicious cycle of recurrent conflicts (a war trap). The incidence of conflict can be reduced by policies abating cultural barriers, fostering inter-ethnic trade and human capital, and shifting beliefs. Coercive peace policies, such as peacekeeping forces or externally imposed regime changes, have no enduring effects.

The Peace Prefix: Ambiguities of the Word ‘Peace’

The Western security community has increasingly militarized its politics of peace, through peacekeeping, peace-making and other policies to which the ‘peace’ prefix has been attributed. Peace has become a virtual concept, which at times disguises rather violent management techniques of ‘global governance’. Peace, within this framework, is a practice and a policy, mantled by a narrative of a liberal, and teleological, desire for non-violence. Non-violence towards the governing institutions became viewed as peace, advancing the notion of ‘peace-as-order’. A teleology of liberal development helped to securitize the ‘not-yet-liberalized Other’, excluding non-liberal concepts from the idea of peace. Like the baby thrown out with the bathwater, peace lost its emancipatory content. A particular peace is the result, which includes transitional justice or reconciliation as rhetorical devices for its legitimization. However, the practice of ‘peace’ leaves these processes to the ‘losers’; lasting peace between equals remains elusive and the politics of peace an exercise in managing security.

The Peaceful Conspiracy: Bond Markets and International Relations During the Pax Britannica

AbstractThis article provides foundations to Polanyi's famed argument that monopoly power in the global capital market served as an instrument of peace during the Pax Britannica (1815–1914). Our perspective is novel—we focus on the role of intermediaries and certification. We show that when information and enforcement are imperfect, there is scope for the endogenous emergence of “prestigious” intermediaries who enjoy a monopoly position and as a result, control government actions. They can implement conditional lending: they subject the distribution of credit to the adoption of peaceful policies. Prestigious intermediaries act that way because of their concern with maintaining an unblemished track record when wars increased risks of default. Our analysis, which brings together insights from different disciplines, provides a significant extension to, and departure from, recent research on how countries accumulate reputational capital.

JOHN KENNEDY, RELIGION, AND FOREIGN POLICY

John F. Kennedy is the only member of a non-Protestant religious tradition in the United States to become president. Kennedy, raised a Catholic, has received praise from some Catholics for making Catholicism more acceptable, though recently has drawn criticism for legitimating the idea of radically privatizing religious faith. Kennedy identified closely with his faith early on, but when he began his run for president, shifted away from heavy identification with his faith. In his formation of the Peace Corps and policy toward Vietnam, Kennedy's main drives were political rather than religious. However, Kennedy's engagement with the Vatican after 1963 was influenced by his faith.

War Signals: A Theory of Trade, Trust and Conflict

We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other group. Since conflict disrupts trade, the onset of a conflict signals that the aggressor has a low propensity to trade. Agents observe the history of conflicts and update their beliefs over time, transmitting them to the next generation. The theory bears a set of testable predictions. First, war is a stochastic process whose frequency depends on the state of endogenous beliefs. Second, the probability of future conflicts increases after each conflict episode. Third, accidental conflicts that do not reflect economic fundamentals can lead to a permanent breakdown of trust, plunging a society into a vicious cycle of recurrent conflicts (a war trap). The incidence of conflict can be reduced by policies abating cultural barriers, fostering inter-ethnic trade and human capital, and shifting beliefs. Coercive peace policies such as peacekeeping forces or externally imposed regime changes have instead no persistent effects.

The Germination of South Korea's ‘Nordpolitik’: Various Aspects of Park's ‘Special Statement on the Foreign Policy for Peace and Unification’

The Germination of South Korea's ‘Nordpolitik’: Various Aspects of Park's ‘Special Statement on the Foreign Policy for Peace and Unification’