The Would-Be Philosophers of Peace

All they are saying is give peace a chance. Good luck with that...

Yeah, that’s a big help…

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Who doesn’t love peace? After all, as Harold Macmillan (not Winston Churchill) remarked: “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.”

Since World War Two, Macmillan’s bon mot has been institutionalized as the social-science field of peace studies, which according to Wikipedia, “identifies and analyzes violent and nonviolent behaviors as well as the structural mechanisms attending conflicts (including social conflicts), with a view towards understanding those processes which lead to a more desirable human condition.”

Such pretentious diction, impressive to the untutored ear, lends an aura of plausibility to an enterprise that is, at bottom, hubristic. Take the phrase “structural mechanisms attending conflicts.” Depending on how one takes it, this could embrace a near-infinity of factors: historical political, social, cultural, economic. Interdisciplinary fields of study are inherently problematic in that they embody multiple subjects, any one of which demands a lifetime of investigation to be clearly understood. In the case of peace studies, these demands reach toward infinity.

A term closely associated with peace studies is conflict resolution and there, at least, some useful work could be done. But it’s nothing new, really: just a fancy academic term for diplomacy, which has been going on since humanity first organized itself into tribes, city-states, empires, etc. Indeed, there is value in examining how this war was avoided or that dispute was resolved—or, in the alternative, how this or that dispute precipitated the contending parties into war. Such things are called the lessons of history, and they repay study—provided that they’re properly contextualized and understood.

But peace studies abjure such modesty; the field’s definition of peace reaches for the stars: “Peace and conflict studies entails understanding the concept of peace which is defined as political condition that ensures justice and social stability through formal and informal institutions, practices, and norms.” This isn’t a definition of peace, it’s the statement of a political program. Indeed, it implies that peace is not merely the absence of war and conflict, but the presence of postmodern progressivism’s Holy Grail: social justice.

Viewed from the peace studies perspective, the Cold War era for instance was not a satisfactory state of peace. True, the rival superpowers never went to war with one another. But that was only because both sides possessed nuclear weapons, which imposed a balance of terror. And of course, the period 1945-90 was punctuated by regional wars, many of which were superpower proxy wars. The missing ingredient was social justice on a global scale; the perfect was made the enemy of the good.

It may be true that the establishment of social justice on a global scale would banish the specter of war, if not every possibility of human conflict—but it’s definitely true that defining a global model of social justice, much less enacting it, is an impossibility A week spent observing the goings-on at the United Nations ought to convince even the most starry-eyed idealist of that.

Perhaps, though, peace studies could serve a more modest purpose, moderating if not abolishing international conflict.

Well yes, it might, if peace studies programs produced dispassionate specialists capable of analyzing a dispute, apportioning the responsibility for it, identifying common ground, formulating solutions, and bringing the contending parties together. Alas, however, human beings are not dispassionate by nature—rather the reverse. Partisanship, ideology, moral judgement, bigotry—beliefs and attitudes both worthy and unworthy—always affect the issue. Peace activists sort themselves into factions, and the very definition of peace becomes a cause of conflict.

Which side in the current conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs advocates peace? Both, one or the other, or neither—your choice. Pro-Hamas activists in the West will claim the mantle of peace advocacy on the strength of their demand for an immediate ceasefire. Supporters of Israel will claim it on the strength of their argument that there can be no peace as long as Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. Indeed, there are a few lonely souls—US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is one of them—who promote that difference-splitting will-o'-the-wisp, the two-state solution. But clearing one’s mind of wishful thinking and ideological prejudice reveals that the rights and wrongs of the crisis have ceased to matter. The outcome of the war now raging depends not on the rights and wrongs, but on power.

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian “philosopher of war,” analyzed it as a positive political and social phenomenon, striving to separate those elements of war that are timeless from those particular to certain times and places. Whether one agrees with his definition of not, it possesses intellectual coherence and serves to this day as a useful analytical tool. But it would be impossible to treat peace in the same manner. Peace is the absence of conflict, implying that there’s nothing worth fighting about just now: That’s about as far as a definition of peace can go. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in peace studies to figure that out.