Welcome to Peace Studies 101

I’m not the teacher, I’m a fellow student. Call me Raphael. I’m taking a university module on the subject of ‘conflict and peace’. The teacher, I call her ‘Irene’.

What am I doing here? 

This is not the module I signed up for. That was cancelled. I’ve been studying International Relations and have been interested in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Kenneth Waltz and Hedley Bull. Each in their own way exploring the origins of the impulse to war. I wanted to study Comparative Government, exploring how different political structures influence the propensity of a society to start wars. It is proposed that war has its origins in the 'minds of men'; in the nature of the state; in the nature of the international system of states. I kind of understand how individual greed and fear contribute, and also how a world of ‘states’ (which are by nature, I’d say, military formations) would tend to war. But I was interested in exploring the area of how competing forces within a state can also lead to an increased danger of war being started. Deepening of knowledge in that area will have to wait: I am to study Conflict and Peace head on.

Session one

We are a group of about twenty (more women than men, a range of nationalities) in an awkwardly shaped and echo-y classroom. City centre, spring, early evening. The lecturer Irene almost immediately crystallises my vague feeling of unease about taking this type of module. She tells how she gave a series of lectures at the neighbouring Strategic Studies college and had an experience of mutual incomprehensibility. You would think it was important for the students of war and the students of peace to at least develop a common language. Apparently they haven’t and, perhaps, don’t really care to. Academic specialisation is one thing, but fracturing human thought to the extent that the study of the problems of war become divorced from the study of the problems of peace can’t be good, surely? Isn’t that what we saw in Iraq? I have grown used to the discourse in the realm of strategy and global politics; I have some misgivings in learning the language of another discourse: a discourse that, apparently, is primarily directed at its own constituency and not understood outside it.