Do we need peace research when Norway is threatened by war?

War once again threatens Norway’s security. One might ask what we need peace research for at this moment.

Should Norwegian peace research serve as a critical dissenting voice to military thinking about security or as an integral part of Norway’s overall defence strategy?

From idealism to scholarly peace research

After World War II, it became clear that traditional ideas about security had not succeeded in making the world safer. In the interwar years, the field of international relations was dominated by a belief that international law and collective security arrangements could prevent new global conflicts. These ideals turned out to be inadequate in the face of Fascism and great power politics.

Peace research, inspired by pacifism, such as Ghandi’s teachings about non-violent resistance, emerged as an alternative interdisciplinary project. Those involved felt it important for the new field to have scholarly foundations.

By studying conflict dynamics at various levels, both between states and within societies, the hope was to find means of resolving conflicts peacefully. The new field, which was also known as conflict research, aimed at making social change possible without violence.

Gradually the research focus shifted to nuclear weapons, disarmament, and development policy, in contrast to research into military strategy, deterrence, and the balance of power. The field was preoccupied with peace between East and West, and justice between North and South. Consequently, peace research was seen by many as unpatriotic and left-leaning.

Civil wars, liberal optimism and peace-building

The fall of the Soviet Union triggered a dramatic shift in peace and security policy. The focus moved from the threat of nuclear war between superpowers to civil wars with international involvement.

Now peace researchers’ theories about conflict and conflict resolution became highly relevant. For example, The Journal of Peace Research, which is edited at PRIO, evolved from a niche periodical to become an influential publication in international relations in general.

In addition, the boundaries were erased that had previously separated peace research from the study of wars, military interventions, terrorism, migration etc. within fields in the social sciences and humanities, such as political science, sociology, economics, history and anthropology. While this change enriched peace research from a scholarly perspective, it also diluted its pacifist profile.

Simultaneously, the field experienced a theoretical reorientation towards ‘liberal internationalism’: peace was to be secured globally through democracy, human rights, free market economics, supranational institutions, and an expanded agenda for international law.

Lidén points out the irony that this orientation was reminiscent of the ideals of the interwar period, to which peace research had been a corrective.

A new security situation

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States’ and Israel’s war against Iran, doubts about NATO’s defensive alliance, and more acute conflicts between global superpowers have wrought rapid and dramatic changes in Norwegian security policy.

Concepts such as ‘total defence’ and ‘total preparedness’ have grown in political importance, and civil defence is being described as a part of Norway’s defensive systems. Against this background, the place of peace research and the role it should play are open questions.

The expanded field of peace research has much to offer concerning how Norway’s security can be safeguarded. Advanced theories and methods for analysing peace and security around the world are also useful here in Norway.

At the same time, we are in danger of losing an internationally leading tradition of scholarship on global conflicts, peace-building and multilateral institutions if the focus shifts too far from the global conflict picture to domestic Norwegian security policy.

The need for a broad understanding of security

PRIO’s journal Security Dialogue has become an important arena for critical security research on topics ranging from international interventions and ‘the war on terror’ to present-day ideas about national security.

Some people will claim that such critical perspectives are less relevant when war threatens. Lidén claims, however, that it is now essential to further develop such analyses as a corrective, and that doing so complies with peace research’s mandate.

We need empirical research and theoretical developments that can take a step back and view security policy from an overall peace perspective.

Security policy is concerned not only with military threats, but also with pandemics, climate change, natural disasters, energy, infrastructure, ICT vulnerabilities and so on.

Lidén himself is leading a new project on ‘the ethics of preparedness’, which investigates how we justify the prioritization of different threats. How should resources be allocated among the armed forces, preparedness for pandemics, and the climate crisis? The danger of military attacks and wars between superpowers must be treated with the greatest seriousness, but the climate and nature crises pose existential threats in the longer term.

Peace as a prerequisite

Research concerning national security must be capable of seeing these dangers in context. This does not mean that peace research should embrace all kinds of crises, rather it should view them from a conflict perspective.

The field’s unique competence lies, among other things, in seeing how patterns of conflict, both locally and globally, are interrelated, and how they interact with phenomena such as migration, welfare and democracy.

Such competence is crucial not only for understanding specific conflicts, such as that between Russia and Europe, but also for achieving a better understanding of conflicts in a global context. This will be the main challenge for peace research in the coming years, and its most important contribution to national security policy.

• Ingjald Pilskog is an Associate Professor at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.
• This text was published in Norwegian by Forskersonen, and is based on a conversation with Kristoffer Lidén, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). An edited version of the conversation can be heard in Norwegian on the Forum for science and democracy podcast. In the interview, Lidén speaks on his own behalf as a researcher, and not on behalf of PRIO as an institution.