On the Concept of Peace

Journal of Peace Research (1964) ‘An Editorial’, 1 (1): 1–4.

This is a classical text that made the dichotomy of negative and positive peace well known to the research community. Although not signed it is commonly agreed that it was written by the editor of the journal, Johan Galtung, its founder and first editor.

Galtung, J. (1969) Violence, peace and peace research, Journal of Peace Research, 6 (3): 167–91.

In this article Galtung elaborates on the meaning of positive peace by intro­ducing a new concept, ‘structural violence’, largely in response to a critique of peace research as being too focused on ‘direct violence’, i.e. wars, conflicts and violence. The concept of structural violence has since then been used not only in peace research but also in other disciplines.

Höglund, K. and Söderberg Kovacs, M. (2010) Beyond the absence of war: the diversity of peace in post-settlement societies, Review of International Studies, 36 (2): 367–90.

These two authors return to the issue of positive peace by elaborating on a set of other possible notions of peace. It was part of a new discussion on ‘peace’, in particular in relation to the conditions after a protracted war. What kind of peace is to be built?

Regan, P.M. (2014) Bringing peace back in: presidential address to the Peace Science Society, 2013, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 31 (4): 345–56.

In the continued discussion on positive peace, Regan, as president of the Peace Science Society, poses the challenge to the research community to put ‘peace’ in the forefront of research, thus making scholarly sense of ‘positive peace’. He also demonstrates that the dichotomy of negative and positive peace was used already in the 1950s, thus giving it a history.

This has been pursued in the development of the concept of quality peace, largely done at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The first volume is Wallensteen, P. (2015) Quality Peace: Peacebuilding, Victory and World Order. It is a first systematic attempt at comparing two different endings of war: victory and negotiated settlement.

Peace and Peace Research

Wallensteen, P. (2011a) ‘The Origins of Contemporary Peace Research’, in K. Höglund and M. Öberg (eds), Understanding Peace Research. London: Routledge, pp. 14–32.

Wallensteen, P. (2011b) Peace Research: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, pp. 4–20.

These two publications elaborate on the effect the choice of peace concept has on the forming of a research agenda. The first one shows how ‘traumas’ and ‘hopes’ have formed the present agenda. The second one shows that ‘peace’ is researchable, gives the arguments for its pursuit within universities as an autonomous activity, and discusses the ethical aspects of research results.

The Philosophical Underpinnings of Peace Research

Organized peace research is, of course, not the originator of a discussion on ‘peace’. Through time, this has been an important concern for many writers. Three key texts are the following:

Kant, I. (1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.

The renowned philosopher outlines his approach to a lasting international peace arrangement emphasizing matters such as republican rule, interna­tional federations and arms control. These visionary ideas were widely read during the 1800s. They influenced the formation of international organiza­tions in the 1900s and sparked a modern research approach, referred to as the Kantian Peace.

Machiavelli, N. (1532) The Prince.

This text from the sixteenth century was published after the death of Machiavelli. It gives advice to the political leader who wants to retain power in turbulent times. It is a classical reading for a ‘realist’ approach emphasizing the importance of power. It has also sparked an ongoing discussion on moral­ity and power.

More, T. (1516) Utopia.

The work on Utopia is contemporary with Machiavelli’s and can be seen as a critique of the power struggles that went on in Europe at the time. It does so by outlining a vision of a different society, ‘Utopia’. The concept is firmly entrenched in European thinking, and has also led to new derivations, such as ‘dystopia’ as a negative vision of a future society.

For philosophical discussions on these and other writers of relevance for peace, security, justice and development, go to the soundcloud website of the Regina Theatre, Uppsala, Sweden: https://soundcloud.com/reginateatern-reginateatern, where thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Ibn Khaldun, Dag Hammarskjöld, Baruch Spinoza, Hanna Arendt and Voltaire are covered, as well as lesser known but equally impressive personalities such as Bertha von Suttner, Karin Boye, William Wilberforce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Conflict Data Projects

The text mentions several projects that deal with the collection of systematic data and that have been influential for the presently important projects. They are valuable to study, to see the development of definition, methods of data collection and ways of presenting information. The work presented in Understanding Conflict Resolution departs largely from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. It can be reached at www.ucdp.uu.se. For the history of this project see Wallensteen, P. (2011) Peace Research: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, pp. 105–24.

AKUF, Working Group on the Causes of War, University of Hamburg, www. wiso.uni-hamburg.de/en/fachbereiche/sozialwissenschaften/forschung/ akuf/akuf/

This is a project that originated in Budapest, Hungary, and now continues from the University of Hamburg, Germany, mostly publishing in the German language for a German public.

The Correlates of War homepage: www.correlatesofwar.org/

This is the site of the seminal project that also stimulated quantitative studies in international relations research globally. It was initially led by J. David Singer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

Singer, J.D. (1972) The correlates of war project, World Politics, 24: 243–70. Introduces the early phases of this project, and presents the underlying ideas as well as the hopes for the project.

Wright, Q. (1942) A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Many of these projects explicitly refer to the work of Quincy Wright, and the original study with its many observations and data collections still remains interesting to read. There is also a later, abbreviated version of this work.

Comparing Conflict Data Collections

Dixon, J. (2009) What causes civil wars? Integrating quantitative research find­ings, International Studies Review, 11 (4): 707–35.

This work compares the sources used by different researchers for the study of civil wars and also assesses agreed findings.

Eck, K. (2005) A Beginner’s Guide to Conflict Data: Finding the Right Dataset, Uppsala University, Sweden, UCDP Papers No 1. Available at www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/publications/ucdp_papers/

Eck’s overview provides a quick introduction to all the data collections that were known at the time. It still remains a useful guide.

Forsberg, E., Duursma, A. and Grant, L. (2012). Theoretical and Empirical Considerations in the Study of Ethnicity and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, UCDP Paper No 8. Available at www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/66/66310_1paper8.pdf

This work is based on a conference drawing together a number of the leading data collection projects focusing specifically on ethnic conflict.

Trends in Armed Conflict

The issue of whether wars and violence are in decline has given rise to a num­ber of discussions. It was, in particular, stimulated by the best-selling work of Steven Pinker:

Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Viking.

Gleditsch, N.P., Pinker, S., Thayer, B.A., Levy, J.S. and Thompson, W.R. (2013) The Forum: the decline of war, International Studies Review, 15: 396–419.

In a forum for discussion, the issues of a trend towards a reduction in num­bers and fatalities of conflicts were debated at the annual convention of the International Studies Association 2012. Some of the interventions were brought together in this volume, which thus gives an update on the discus­sions as they stood in the early 2010s.

The issue of trends has also been discussed by authorities affiliated with the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. An important contribution is the one by Joakim Kreutz in 2010. The annual update of the armed conflict record is published in the Journal of Peace Research, giving observers a basis for making their own conclusions:

Kreutz, J. (2010) How and when armed conflicts end: introducing the UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset, Journal of Peace Research, 47 (2): 243–50.

As the UCDP also collects data on other forms of violence than armed conflict that constitute the focus in this book, its annual articles in JPR now deal with ‘organized violence’. This includes the category of one-sided violence that we will return to in Chapter 12 in this volume.

Allansson, M., Melander, E. and Themnér, L. (2017) Organized violence 1946–2016, Journal of Peace Research, 54 (4): 574–87.

In the World Bank and UN publication Pathways to Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict, UCDP data are used extensively. The report argues that the increase in armed conflicts in the past two decades spurs the need for preventive strategies. Only a conference version is available, but a full-length book will be published in 2018.

Peace Agreement Data

An important novel development is the emergence of a dataset entirely devoted to peace agreements. The projects mentioned here all focus on the post-Cold War period. The UCDP has such information, as mentioned in this chapter, and used throughout this volume. In addition, there is now PAM and the Peace Accords Matrix of the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame is one, developed both from practical considerations and as a deepening of information, such as that provided by the UCDP. This project focuses on the implementation of ‘comprehensive peace agreements’ during their first ten years. The Barometer project involved in the monitor­ing of the 2016 Colombia peace agreement is developed from PAM (see Chapter 6 in this book)

Joshi, M. and Darby, J. (2013) Introducing the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM): a database of comprehensive peace agreements and their implementation, 1989–2007, Peacebuilding, 1 (2): 256–74.

A different peace agreement data project is PA-X, based at University of Edinburgh, including more than 1500 agreements in around 150 peace pro­cesses (as of March 25, 2018) concluded by actors in conflicts with armed violence causing more than 25 conflict-related deaths in one year. It has a particular focus on gender, something that is particularly useful for Chapter 13 of this volume.

Bell, C., Badanjak, S., Forster, R., Jamar, A., Pospisil, J. and Wise, L. (2017) PA-X Codebook, Version 1. Political Settlements Research Programme, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. Available at www.peaceagreements.org or www.kaggle.com/university-of-edinburgh/peace-agreements-dataset

Interpretations of Conflict Information

Of course, data are still open to interpretation. The facts provided by the data project create a framework for understanding but may also lead to a quest for different ways of collecting information. Two significant contributions are provided by Ann Tickner and John A. Vasquez:

Tickner, A. (1997) ‘You just don’t understand’: troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists, International Studies Quarterly, 41 (4): 611–32.

Vasquez, J.A. (ed.) (2012) What Do We Know about War? (2nd edn). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Conflict Dynamics

It is not easy to categorize literature, as many authors use all the approaches mentioned. However, there may be more elements of a certain approach in some:

Bercovitch, J. (ed.) (1996) Resolving International Conflicts: The Theory and Practice of Mediation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

In this work, Jacob Bercovitch brings together a number of contributions on mediation, illustrating the many ways in which third parties can act in differ­ent types of conflicts. The focus is on international conflicts.

Staub, E. (1989) The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ervin Staub is an insightful analyst of genocide. In this work he describes the origins of such one-sided violence in four cases demonstrating both the dynamics between perpetrators and victims and the role of the bystanders.

Basic Needs

Azar, E. and Burton, J. (1986) International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Burton, J. (1990) Conflict: Resolution and Provention. London: Macmillan.

These two books outline the framework of basic needs and how it relates to conflict resolution as well as conflict prevention. Burton argues for early action, and promoting the term ‘provention’.

Berdal, M. and Malone, D.M. (2000) Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Collier, P., Elliott, V.L., Hegre, H., Hoeffler, A., Reynal-Querol, M. and Sambanis, N. (2003) Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

In a series of case studies and with the help of statistical analysis these two books specify the economic factors that may lead to civil war. The ‘greed’ of actors was seen to be more important than ‘grievances’ felt by marginalized groups. The debate has continued and is summarized in the following works:

Ballentine, K. and Sherman, J. (2003) The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, New York: International Peace Academy.

Wallensteen, P. (2014) ‘Theoretical Developments in Understanding the Origins of Civil War’, in E. Newman and K. DeRouen, Jr. (eds), Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars. Abingdon: Routledge, Chapter 2, pp. 13–27.

Rational Calculations

Zartman, I.W. (ed.) (1995a) Elusive Peace: Negotiating an End to Civil Wars. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

Here I. William Zartman brings together a number of contributions demon­strating the possibilities of ending civil wars at particular moments in time.

Peace Agreements: General Understanding

There is considerable work on peace agreement with respect to individual conflicts. General treatments are rarer. However, the Peace Accord Matrix at the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame, is a particular resource for the implementation of such agreements. It can be reached on https://peaceac cords.nd.edu

For an overview as well as definitions of peace agreements, see Harbom, L., Högbladh, S. and Wallensteen, P. (2006) Armed conflict and peace agree­ments, Journal of Peace Research, 43 (5): 617–31.

Bell, C. (2008) On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and Lex Pacificatoria. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

In this work Bell presents the legal aspects of peace agreements, which are often absent in the more political treatments of such arrangements. There is now also a database on peace agreements, called PA-X and available on www.kaggle.com/university-of-edinburgh/peace-agreements-dataset

Stedman, S.J., Rothchild, D. and Cousens, E.M. (eds) (2002) Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Here a number of researchers study peace agreements in political terms and in particular conflicts.

Inter-state War

Buzan, B. (1991) People, States and Fear (2nd edn). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Buzan’s classic work constitutes an eloquent theoretical explanation for the dynamics in inter-state relations.

Geller, D.S. and Singer, J.D. 1(998) Nations at War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this work, the two authors associated with the Correlates of War project recount empirical findings for how the international system actually operates.

This theme is further elaborated in Vasquez, J.A. (ed.) (2012) What Do We Know About War? (2nd edn). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

This volume brings together a number of authors working in the Correlates of War tradition on inter-state relations.

In contrast to the concern with security matters, state revenue is given a heavy role in this seminal contribution on the emergence of states in Western Europe: Tilly, C. (1990) Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990–1990. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Inter-state Peace

Holsti, Kalevi J. (1991) Peace and War: Armed Conflict and International Order, 1648–1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In a very long historical perspective Holsti highlights the variations in how inter-state relations are organized and the importance of this for war and peace. For a shorter period than Holsti applies, and with a different systematic, this short article also discusses the importance of international orders and relations between major powers for war as well as peace:

Wallensteen, P. (1984) Universalism vs. particularism: on the limits of major power order, Journal of Peace Research, 21 (3): 243–57. (Also reproduced in Wallensteen, P. (2011) Peace Research: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge – where the notions of Geopolitik, Realpolitik, Idealpolitik and Kapitalpolitik are analysed at some length.)

In an important work two authors explain not only how democracy is import­ant for peaceful inter-state relations, but also integration and international organizations, in what they call Kantian Peace, drawing on a classical text by the philosopher Immanuel Kant:

Russett, B.M. and Oneal, J.R. (2001) Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations. New York: Norton.

Recurrence of Civil War

There is an increasingly complex literature on the issue of recurrence of civil war. A good overview of the literature and the discussions is provided in:

Newman, E. and DeRouen, Jr., K. (eds) (2014) The Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

For an interesting way to investigate the dynamics of recurrence consult Walter, B.F. (2004) Does conflict beget conflict? Explaining recurring civil war, Journal of Peace Research, 41 (3): 371–88.

Peace after Civil War

The literature on the possibilities of peace after civil wars is more limited. Insightful ideas can be learned from particular cases, whether failed or successful.

For a number of case studies as well as thematic analysis on peacebuilding after civil war see Joshi, M. and Wallensteen, P. (eds) (2018) Understanding Quality Peace: Peacebuilding after Civil War. London: Routledge.

For more general understandings of peace agreements and their implementa­tion, the presentation of the Peace Accords Matrix is a valuable tool. It is introduced in Joshi, M. and Darby, J. (2013) Introducing the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM): a database of comprehensive peace agreements and their imple­mentation, 1989–2007, Peacebuilding, 1 (2): 256–74.

General Dynamics of State Formation Conflicts

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Kaldor, M. (2006) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (2nd edn). Cambridge: Polity Press.

These two books have both contributed to the discussion on the special char­acter of identity-based conflicts. Anderson builds, for instance, on examples from Southeast Asia, and also focuses on the identity-shaping effects of lan­guages. Kaldor discusses ‘new’ conflicts as those building on ethnic and other identities, often using the experiences of the Balkan wars, to support her the­ses. This has also given rise to a debate on what is ‘new’:

Melander, E., Oberg, M. et al. (2009) Are ‘new wars’ more atrocious? Battle intensity, civilians killed and forced migration before and after the end of the Cold War, European Journal of International Relations, 15 (3): 505–36.

Solutions for State Formation Conflicts

Cornell, S.E. (2002) Autonomy as a source of conflict: Caucasian conflicts in theoretical perspective, World Politics, 54 (2): 245–76.

Cornell makes a critical evaluation of the autonomy arrangements worked out during Soviet and post-Soviet times in the Caucasus.

Gurr, T.R. (2000) Ethnic warfare on the wane, Foreign Affairs, 79 (3): 52–64.

In this article Gurr argues that the international community has actually developed ways of dealing with ethnic conflicts, ranging from the support of minority rights to self-governance. He also sees a largely successful use of such solutions.

Regan, P. and Wallensteen, P. (2013) Federal institutions, declarations of inde­pendence and civil war, Civil Wars, 15 (3): 261–80.

In this work the authors see federalism as a solution to intra-state conflicts about territory, but also point to the dangers of armed conflicts becoming more vicious if such arrangements break apart. In particular, they study the organization of military forces and its centralization as a key factor.

Bosnia and Palestine

Daalder, I.H. and Froman, M.B.G. (1999) Dayton’s incomplete peace, Foreign Affairs, 78 (6): 106–13.

The Dayton agreement on the Bosnian crisis was concluded in 1995, and this treaty still stands. However, there were quickly critical comments on what was lacking in this agreement. Daalder and Froman’s work is an early contribution, and others have followed.

A different approach is Kostic, R. (2008) Nationbuilding as an instrument of peace?, Civil Wars, 10 (4): 384–412, using national polling data in the search for changing attitudes among the ethnic communities.

LeVine, M. and Mossberg, M. (eds) (2014) One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States. Oakland: University of California Press.

This is a collection of essays exploring ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking for a solution to the protracted Palestinian conflict. In particular it elaborates on the possi­bility of two parallel states in one territory.

Deutsch, K.W. et al. (1957) Political Community and the North Atlantic Area. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Karl W. Deutsch created the concept of a security community and built it on a series of comparable cases during a long historical period. The term has entered political use. This work explains the original intentions and the dis­tinctions that were made between different types of such communities.

Wallensteen, P. and Sollenberg, M. (1998) Armed conflict and regional conflict complexes, 1989–1997, Journal of Peace Research, 35: 593–606.

Building on early results from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) the two authors observed the connections between different conflicts, particularly with respect to regional settings. Thus, they coined the term ‘regional conflict complexes’. Here also ‘global conflict complexes’ have been added.

Buzan, B. and Waever, O. (2003) Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this comprehensive volume the two authors point to the importance of regions for understanding the operations of the international society. Security concerns create connections between societies, and hence they are interested in such ‘regional security complexes’. It complements the previously men­tioned UCDP-based article, but also contrasts it, in terms of methodology and emphasis.

On the United Nations

There is a considerable literature on the UN, but rarely is it as analytical as one would like. However, there are two books that are in a category of their own:

Weiss, T.G., Forsythe, D.P., Coate, R.A. and Pease, K.K. (2014) The United Nations and Changing World Politics, Boulder, CO: Westview.

Now in its 7th edition this work is an indispensible and comprehensive intro­duction to the work of the UN with regard to security, human rights and development.

Axworthy, L. (2001) Human security and global governance: putting people first, Global Governance, 7 (1): 19–23.

In this article the former Canadian Minister for Foreign Affairs outlines the concept of human security. This was guiding Canadian approaches to the UN during the Liberal government and had an impact on UN affairs.

High Level Panel (2004) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, United Nations.

The high level panel, appointed by Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General, pro­duced one of the most ambitious public reports to reform the UN system since the end of the Cold War. Its recommendations span many aspects of what is treated in Chapters 9–11 in Understanding Conflict Resolution, including Security Council reform.

On the Security Council

Einsiedel, S., Malone, D.M. and Stagno, U.B. (2015) The Security Council during the 21st Century. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

This is a sequel to a previous volume edited by David M. Malone in 2004, thus updating and further deepening the analysis of the work of the UN Security Council, as the most powerful of the UN organs engaged in peace and security matters.

Wallensteen, P. (1994) Representing the world: a security council for the 21st century, Security Dialogue, 25: 63–75.

There has been a constant quest for reform of the Security Council. Very little has happened, but there are ideas. This article outlines logical possi­bilities for making the Council more representative, without losing its efficiency.

Weiss, T.G. and Young, K.E. (2005) Compromise and credibility: security coun­cil reform?, Security Dialogue, 36 (2): 131–54.

In this article, the prolific UN observer Thomas G. Weiss and a colleague out­line the possibilities and impossibilities of UN Security Council reform.

The UN Secretary-General

There are many good accounts of personal experiences in the UN. A valuable book giving the perspective from the top organ is the following:

Annan, K. and Mousavizadeh, N. (2012) Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. London: Penguin.

In this work the former Secretary-General Kofi Annan (at the helm of the UN 1997–2006) gives an account of his early days in Ghana, as well as his many years in various positions in the United Nations. It provides an eye-opening perspective on the organization from the inside.

On Regional Organizations

Compared to the extensive work on the UN there is less comparing regional organizations, their strengths and weaknesses with respect to peace and secu­rity. Most recent has been a collection of chapters dealing in particular with the EU, OSCE, AU, ECOWAS and the League of Arab States:

Wallensteen, P. and Bjurner, A. (eds) (2015) Regional Organizations and Peacemaking: Challengers to the UN? London: Routledge.

This book outlines the role regional organizations can play in peacemaking. Thus, its contributions are relevant also for the aspects developed in Chapters 9, 10 and 11.

Sanctions

The use of economic and targeted sanctions has given rise to considerable debate and reforms within international organizations. Mostly this has dealt with the UN and the EU:

Targeted Sanctions: The Impact and Effectiveness of UN Action is edited by Thomas J. Biersteker, Sue E. Eckert and Marcos Tourinho (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and presents analyses of sanctions episodes, i.e. evaluates the impact of each separate decision by the UN.

Eriksson, M. (2010) Targeting Peace, Understanding UN and EU Targeted Sanctions. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

Eriksson deals both with UN and EU targeted sanctions, the type of sanctions that have entirely replaced the earlier comprehensive approaches.

Wallensteen, P. and Grusell, H. (2012) Targeting the right targets? The UN use of individual sanctions, Global Governance, 18 (2): 207–30.

In this work, the UN application of sanctions on individuals is analysed. It uncovers in some detail the various ways in which targeted individuals react to this type of pressure.

Peacekeeping

Melander, E. (2009) Selected to go where murderers lurk? The preventive effect of peacekeeping on mass killings of civilians, Conflict Management and Peace Sciences, 26 (4): 389–406.

As is the case with sanctions, peacekeeping has also been much debated with respect to its actual impact in local situations. Melander studies its impact on the security of civilians, taking into account that peacekeepers are often sent to the most difficult cases.

Prevention

Conflict Prevention has been on the agenda of the international discussions since the early 1990s:

Carnegie Commission (1997) Preventing Deadly Conflict: Final Report. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Washington, DC.

This was a remarkable project initiated by a private foundation to raise the issue of early action for conflict prevention. It had a strong impact on the debate and on actual behaviour, particularly in the United Nations.

Lund, M.S. (1996) Preventing Violent Conflicts: A Strategy for Preventive Diplomacy. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press.

Michael Lund’s book reflected the international reactions to the crises in Bosnia and Rwanda in the first half of the 1990s. Many of the ‘tools’ described have remained on the agenda of international actors.

Öberg, M., Möller, F. and Wallensteen, P. (2009) Early conflict prevention in ethnic crises, 1990–98: a new dataset, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 26 (1): 67–91.

This is one of the few, systematic studies trying to ascertain whether early action actually works in preventing conflicts from escalating. It has generated unexpected results.

Mediation

Svensson, I. (2009) Who brings which peace? Neutral versus biased mediation and institutional arrangements in civil wars, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53 (3): 446–69.

A central tenet in mediation is the importance of being unbiased and impar­tial. Svensson’s study questions this. This article has drawn considerable atten­tion in the literature on mediation research.

Svensson, I. and Wallensteen, P. (2010) The Go-Between: Jan Eliasson and the Styles of Mediation. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press.

This work attempts a different approach. It ‘follows’ one mediator, Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson, in six different mediation situations taking place within three decades. It opens up for a close look at mediation in practice, but also how mediation has evolved from inter-state relations to complex regional and multidimensional concerns.

Peacebuilding

After the Cold War the issues of peacebuilding became a major concern. Whether it really worked or not draws a considerable discussion. A central work in this was:

Paris, R. (2004) At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The discussion was far-reaching however, and has still not ended. It has distin­guished liberal peacebuilding from other approaches, even including ‘strate­gic’ peacebuilding. See, for instance:

Philpot, D. and Powers, G.F. (eds) (2010) Strategies of Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A further contribution, based on empirical work on post-war conditions within as well as between states, is this work, arguing in favour of the notion of ‘quality peace’ replacing ‘positive’ peace as well as peacebuilding:

Wallensteen, P. (2015) Toward Quality Peace: Peacebuilding, Victory and World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The work on peacebuilding is also relevant for thinking about the options in a peace process. In this work, the authors suggests a new type of state struc­ture as a solution for the Palestinian issue:

LeVine, M. and Mossberg, M. (eds) (2014) One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States. Oakland: University of California Press.

In the comprehensive report of the International Panel on Social Progress, drawing together the thinking of nigh on 270 scholars, Chapter 10 deals with conflicts of all the manifestations that have been discussed in this book: Rethinking Society for the 21st Century. Report of the International Panel on Social Progress, 2018. New York: Cambridge University Press; see www.ipsp.org

Bjarnegård, E., Melander, E., Bardal, G., Brounéus, K., Forsberg, E., Johansson, K., Muvumba Sellström, A. and Olsson, L. (2015) ‘Gender, Peace and Armed Conflict’, SIPRI Yearbook 2015. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Ch. 4.I.

Caprioli, M. (2000) Gendered conflict, Journal of Peace Research, 37 (1): 53–68.

Cohen, D.K. and Nordås, R. (2014) Sexual violence in armed conflict: introducing the SVAC Dataset, 1989–2009, Journal of Peace Research, 51 (3): 418–28.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Philosophy Tea 2017, Regina Theatre, Uppsala, Sweden. Podcast. https://soundcloud.com/reginateatern-reginateatern/ philosophy-tea-171017-charlotte-perkins-gilman

Gilman, C. Perkins (1979 [1915]) Herland. New York: Pantheon.

Melander, E. (2005a) Political gender equality and state human rights abuse, Journal of Peace Research, 42(2): 149–66.

Tickner, A.J. (1992) Gender in International Relations: A feminist Perspective on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is an unusual read and helped to identify many of the issues that have formed the concern about global environment.

So did the report of the Brundtland Commission in 1986 in Our Common Future, which also brought in the issue of conflict to the environmental issues.

David Guggenheim’s film about Al Gore’s campaign, An Inconvenient Truth from 2006, is still relevant for the environmental issues.

For updates on nuclear weapons development, consult the SIPRI Yearbooks.

For tracking the Sustainable Development Goals there is a valuable tool, the Goal Tracker, see www.goaltracker.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Folder_ goaltracker2.pdf

The notion of quality peace is also developed in the edited volume by Joshi, M. and Wallensteen, P. (eds) (2018) Understanding Quality Peace: Peacebuilding after Civil War. London: Routledge, where Chapters 1 and 17 provide directions for further study.

Not many researchers attempt to do predictions for the future, with respect to the field of peace and security. A remarkable attempt, however, is one that projects the amount of civil armed conflicts for the coming forty years. It thus constitutes an interesting point of departure for an empirically based discussion:

Hegre, H., Karlsen, J., Nygard, H.M., Strand, H. and Urdal, H. (2013) Predicting armed conflict, 2011–2050, International Studies Quarterly, 57 (2): 250–70.

It contrasts more traditional Realpolitik thinking about the future, as evidenced in a recent bestseller:

Kissinger, H. (2014) World Order. London: Penguin.

New conceptual contributions are rare, particularly from political actors. Thus, a small article by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan deserves attention: Annan, K.A. (1999) ‘Two Concepts of Sovereignty’, The Economist, September 18, pp. 49–50, which led to the notion of Responsibility to Protect (R2P).