Bringing peace back in: Presidential address to the Peace Science Society, 2013

Two recent books. Pinker's the Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Goldstein's Winning the War on War (2011), demonstrate that the long-term trend in human society is toward a dramatic reduction in violence. The reductions that they describe range from state-led violence against subject...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Conflict management and peace science 2014-09, Vol.31 (4), p.345-356
Main Author: Regan, Patrick M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Armed conflict
Citizens
Civil war
Civil wars
Communities
Conflict management
Crime
Incentives
Motivation
Negative peace
Normativity
Peace
Peace treaties
Peacetime
Presidential address
Presidents
Repression (Political)
Social Evolution
Social Scientists
Society
State-society relations
Violence
War
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Summary:Two recent books. Pinker's the Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Goldstein's Winning the War on War (2011), demonstrate that the long-term trend in human society is toward a dramatic reduction in violence. The reductions that they describe range from state-led violence against subjects to crime and to interstate war. This reduction in violence over the long stretch of human history, moreover, is so dramatic that Pinker opines that we should no longer ask the question 'what causes war' but rather we should begin to ask the question 'what causes peace'. This is not a new idea, and in fact recent scholarship is beginning to make inroads (e.g. Goertz et al., 2011; Hoglund and Kovacs, 2010; Wallensteen. 2012), but the idea that social scientists, historically and in general, focus on the wrong question is a key facet of my argument. Peace to us has many faces and it goes well beyond the traditional emphasis on the absence of war, both inter- and intra-state, to incorporate the conditions under which states have little need or incentive to use violence against their citizens, and conversely, citizens have little motivation or incentive to challenge a state by force of arms. In a perfectly peaceful environment our lexicon would only use words like 'political repression', 'genocide' and 'civil war' in the context of historical discussions about social evolution from our violent past to our peaceful contemporary world. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd.]
ISSN:0738-8942
1549-9219
DOI:10.1177/0738894214530852