Peace and Conflict Studies - Criticism and Controversy

Criticism and Controversy

A number of criticisms have been aimed at peace and conflict studies, often but not necessarily from outside the realms of university system, including:

• Peace studies do not produce practical prescriptions for managing or resolving global conflicts because "ideology always trumps objectivity and pragmatism";
• are focused on putting a "respectable face on Western self-loathing";
• are hypocritical because they "tacitly or openly support terrorism as a permissible strategy for the 'disempowered' to redress real or perceived grievances against the powerful" (i.e. ideological anti-Western concepts developed by social scientists such as Johan Galtung which arguably add a sense of unjustified acceptability which is used in support of radicalism)
• their curricula are (according to human rights activist Caroline Cox and philosopher Roger Scruton) "intellectually incoherent, riddled with bias and unworthy of academic status...";
• the faculty are not fully competent in the disciplines (such as economics) whose ideas were invoked as solutions to problems of conflict;
• the policies proposed to "eliminate the causes of violence" are uniformly leftist policies, and not necessarily policies which would find broad agreement among social scientists.

Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post, specifically criticized the views of Norwegian professor Johan Galtung, who is considered to be a leader in modern peace research. Kay wrote that Galtung has written on the "structural fascism" of "rich, Western, Christian" democracies, admires Fidel Castro, opposed resistance to the Soviet Invasion of Hungary in 1956, and has described Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov as "persecuted elite personages." Galtung has also praised Mao Zedong for "endlessly liberating" China. Galtung has also stated that the United States is a “killer country” that is guilty of “neo-fascist state terrorism” and has reportedly stated that the destruction of Washington, D. C. could be justified by America's foreign policy. He has also compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany for bombing Kosovo during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

In the Summer 2007 edition of City Journal, Bruce Bawer sharply criticized Peace Studies. He noted that many Peace Studies programs in American Universities are run by Marxist or far-left Professors. More broadly, he argued that Peace Studies are dominated by the belief that "America that is the wellspring of the world’s problems" and that while Professors of Peace Studies argue "that terrorist positions deserve respect at the negotiating table," they "seldom tolerate(s) alternative views" and that "Peace studies, as a rule, rejects questioning of its own guiding ideology."

Regarding his claim that Peace Studies supports violence in the pursuit of leftist ideology, Bawer cited a quote from Peace and Conflict Studies, a widely used 2002 textbook written by Charles P. Webel and David P. Barash which praised Vladimir Lenin because he “maintained that only revolution—not reform—could undo capitalism’s tendency toward imperialism and thence to war."

David Horowitz has argued that Webel and Barash's book implicitly supports violence for socialist causes, noting that the book states "the case of Cuba indicates that violent revolutions can sometimes result in generally improved living conditions for many people." Horowitz also argued that the book "treats the Soviet Union as a sponsor of peace movements, and the United States as the militaristic, imperialist power that peace movements try to keep in check" and that "the authors justify Communist policies and actions while casting those of America and Western democracies in a negative light." Horowitz also claimed that the authors discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis without mentioning its cause (i.e. the placement of the Soviet missiles in Cuba) and blame John F. Kennedy while praising Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for "be willing to back down." Finally, Horowitz criticised the author's use of Marxist writers, such as Andre Gunder Frank and Frances Moore Lappe, as the sole basis on which to study "poverty and hunger as causes of human conflict".

Kay and Bawer also specifically criticized Professor Gordon Fellman, the Chairman of Brandeis University's Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies Program, whom they claimed has justified Palestinian suicide-bombings against Israelis as “ways of inflicting revenge on an enemy that seems unable or unwilling to respond to rational pleas for discussion and justice.”

Katherine Kersten, who is a senior fellow at the Minneapolis-based conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment, believes that Peace Studies programs are "dominated by people of a certain ideological bent, and thus hard to take seriously." Robert Kennedy, a professor of Catholic studies and management at the University of St. Thomas, criticized his university's Peace Studies Program in an interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2002, stating that the program employs several adjunct professors "whose academic qualifications are not as strong as we would ordinarily look for" and that "The combination of the ideological bite and the maybe less-than-full academic credentials of the faculty would probably raise some questions about how scholarly the program is."