Whither Peace Studies? Fragmentation to a New Integration? 【Review】

In spite of the surface appearance of flourishing, peace studies now faces a crisis of dilution and frag-mentation though concerned voices have long warned against it. The root of the crisis is traced back tothe years around 1970, when Johan Galtung proposed the theory of structural violence. At that time,there were heated debates about whether to broaden the research agenda to include poverty and underde-velopment or not. It is shown that, though it was a great contribution to peace studies, the theory ofstructural violence also brought about the excessive expansion of the research agenda of the discipline,because, according to the theory, every important social problem could be a legitimate research subjectof peace studies. More than two decades after the debates, however, there have appeared several symp-toms which show the reorientation of the discipline toward the original narrower focus on war and con-flict. Since a simple return to the past is impossible, it is suggested that, by focusing on the issues of warand conflict, peace studies should try to eliminate one of the major obstacles to the final goal of peace inthe broadest sense of the word. To complicate the matter, however, there have recently been debatesbetween the narrower and wider agendas in security studies. The wider agenda in security studies tendsto broaden peace studies as well because an issue or problem like environmental degradation is claimedto be a peace studies issue on the ground that it is a security issue. Thus, peace studies will have to tack-le with the same problem for some time to come.