The Peace Research Reality
Waskow, Arthur I.
All research is intended to provide new answers to problems that are as yet unanswered. Peace research is no exception. But Mr. Oppenheimer already knows all the answers to the problem of how...
...Let him talk with Marc Raskin and Richard Barnet...
...Controlling the Police in a Disarmed World, which examined the problem of enforcing disarmament and suggested, pending further research, that a small but highly trained and precisely directed police force might well be able to enforce a disarmament agreement even between powers that were toughly pursuing radically conflicting foreign policies...
...Some of them I presently tend to agree with, and some to disagree with...
...Does he want to study the socio-political problems of shifting from an armed to a disarmed economy...
...I see "peace research" as the only way of finding out which of them are true...
...Let him read the work of Anatol Rapoport...
...Such "action experiments" would be too dangerous to try (since they would have major effects on the real world) in the absence of considerable evidence that they would work...
...These do not sound to me like viewing social change "as a series of minor adjustments, and not as a dynamic historical process...
...It is only regrettable that he has not yet used his knowledge to achieve the peace we all seek...
...and he could only have come to such a conclusion by ignoring much of what has been produced by peace researchers...
...Does he wonder whether peace researchers have dug beneath the assumptions of "game theory" and "strategic" thought to lay bare their ideological preconceptions and their failures as modes of political analysis...
...I do not know how he knows these things...
...No one in peace research would argue that model-building and smallgroup research are enough to illuminate the behavior of large institutions...
...and therefore peace research is unnecessary...
...On the other hand, these men do not think that just because they have refused to be whores of the Establishment they must undergo a shotgun wedding with one or another revolutionary party...
...Let him check with Otto Feinstein and Donald Michael...
...If the hypothesis seemed to be supported, the credibility of other portions of Boulding's hypothesis—perhaps those concerned with the shift from "deterrence" to "disarmament"—would be strengthened...
...Thus Kenneth Boulding's hypothesis on the relationship between a steep decline in the cost of delivering violence over a given distance and the shift from a "defense" to a "deterrence" posture could be checked against historical events like the introduction of gunpowder into Japan...
...Even such evidence, of course, would not "prove" the applicability of the hypothesis to our own future...
...Historical research might then support or deny such hypotheses...
...If Oppenheimer believes that "peace research" today is merely the institutionalized opposite of all his opinions, he is wrong...
...What they all have in common is a belief that science is no window dressing for either the ins or the outs, but something truly radical: a way of cutting beneath everyone's accumulated cliches and pieties, and learning how actually to move in a direction one wants to take...
...That is why "inter-nation simulations" have been carried on, placing a number of men in the roles of presidents, foreign secretaries, and defense ministers of conflicting countries and examining how they respond to a political crisis in an armed, disarmed, or disarming world...
...If this summary of Oppenheimer seems unfair, let us make clear what answers he already knows...
...There are many others...
...and The Worried Man's Guide to World Peace, which examined the political and policy problems involved in changing official decisions on peace and war, and proposed a series of guidelines for undertaking and evaluating any sort of social action intended to bring peace...
...That is one possible line of development by which peace research would be made useful...
...that international misperceptions are only symptoms, not causes, of international tension...
...All these men are peace researchers, and none of them takes for granted the philosophical or political assumptions under which any government or Establishment in the world operates...
...For this reason, many peace researchers have turned to model-building and analogical research...
...Does Oppenheimer want to see peace researchers examine the role of private military industry in shaping official military strategy...
...Peace research offers the academic man a chance to reunite the split personae of morally involved citizen and dis passionate scholar...
...Let him talk with Gabriel Kolko...
...that only twin revolutions to oust the present elites on both sides of the Cold War can establish peace...
...The Peace Research Institute, during its 24 months of life, produced three documents under its own imprimatur...
...Oppenheimer already knows all the answers to the problem of how to create and preserve a stable peace...
...He already knows that the only way to eliminate war is to eliminate the roots of conflict between nations and to end human exploitation...
...But one might then with considerably higher confidence attempt to construct "action experiments" in which particular small areas of the world would be disarmed according to the principles suggested by the peace research already done...
...Once it had been made possible through theoretical, experimental, and historical research to try such "action experiments," experience with them would in turn make it politically and intellectually possible to create new world policies...
...That is why historic examples of arms races and trade interruptions have been graphed, and mathematical models of the conflict process developed from the result...
...They demand to find out...
...Quis Custodiet...
...Let me take an example...
...but they may help to generate some hypotheses on the control of conflict and the prevention of violence...
...Most peace researchers are not prepared to mouth anyone's slogans...
...That is why smallgroup experiments in bargaining and negotiation have been used to cast some light on behavior at Summit meetings or in national confrontations...
...What does "finding out" mean in peace research...
...I do know that I do not know any of them...
...The three were The Shelter-Centered Society, which examined the political dynamics that might be set going by a spiralling civil defense program and warned, pending further research, that these might well result in a totalitarian society...
...Does he want to reevaluate the notions of "Western Civilization" and "the Atlantic Community" as the central focus of American policy...
...It is not easy, because the researcher is trying to predict the effects of future large-scale social changes (such as total disarmament or total civil defense) on which he cannot experiment and for which he can find little historical precedent...
Vol. 11 • September 1964 • No. 4
