Studying peace

An interdisciplinary field of study both more specialized and broader than that of international relations. It is more specialized in the sense that it focuses on the nature of conflict and its resolution, but it is broader in that it draws on all scientific disciplines, in particular the social sciences, including history.

Individual peace researchers define their task as one of accommodating social change in a non-violent way and to this end they seek to improve the present system or appropriately to transform it. The peace researcher is concerned with all forms of violence: open, behavioural violence and hidden, structural violence. The structural forms of violence are those institutionalized inequalities within and among nations which inhibit social justice, and are therefore conducive to behavioural violence. As these structural forms of social injustice exist both at the international and at the national level, so the peace researcher is led to examine social injustice wherever this is relevant to problems of international peace.