The Inner Battles of Peace Studies

The Limits and Possibilities

Ashis Nandy

The black holes of astrophysicists are sometimes matched by the 'black holes' of political science and international relations (IR). Through these disappear an entire range of 'researchables' — from invisible genocides and designer famines to contraband memories of erased pogroms and cultures casually pushed towards extinction. They do sometimes invite curiosity of the students of peace studies but are often found extremely difficult to accommodate within the major theoretical frames of the mother disciplines of political science and IR.

This I suspect is part of a larger problem. For, as time passes, through these black holes also disappear details of everyday life, emotions, values and tacit theories of social transformation and visions of desirable society of myriad little cultures, along with their experiences of suffering. These subjectivities are seen as so much of noise or as stuff fit for dustbins of history and shelves of museums. They do not match the official expectations from a proper sub-discipline spawned by political science and IR.

However, while these experiences are exiled from the world of academic social knowledge, they survive in the netherworld of individual and collective memories and wait for an opportune moment to come back to mock our disciplinary cultures and academic canons. This brief chapter is an attempt to acknowledge that underside of peace studies — the disposable subjectivities and noncultures ignored, exiled or museumized as irrelevant, which then sometimes reemerge in public discourse like skeletons tumbling out of a cupboard. They then — and only then — threaten to discredit many respectable intellectual initiatives and to demuseumize otherwise undervalued, marginalized, mnemonic or memory-dependent traditions. I have come to suspect that this politics of knowledge constitutes the unacknowledged underworld of the disciplines of political science and IR and limits the possibilities of both.

To give two random examples, the desperate attempts by successive Turkish regimes have not erased the memories of the Armenian genocide despite the passage of time. They have only managed to stoke the interest of scattered activist-scholars all over the world in the subject and kept the issue alive. If the Turkish officialdom were less enthusiastic about dissuading scholars from foraging the memories of that half-forgotten massacre, perhaps Turkey might have been less haunted by the Armenian question (as has indeed happened in the case with the genocide of the Hereros and Namaquas during the German colonial rule in Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century after the German government publicly apologized for the killings). Likewise, as the respected anthropologist of Indonesia Clifford Geertz might have found towards fag end of his life, what he had casually dismissed in his writings as some unimportant 'skirmishes' was nothing less than a full-fledged, organized genocide stoked and supported by the American establishment — thanks not so much to scholarly work, such as those of Robert Cribb, as to Joshua Oppenheimer's disturbing documentary An Act of Killing. So much for the famed 'thick description' of Geertz.

In both cases, an invisible genocide suddenly became visible: in one case to return to invisibility, in the other to acquire temporary visibility that may or may not become permanent.

Are there inner dissonances in the cultural and psychological baggage that peace studies carry to be a viable subdiscipline in political science and IR? Does the Enlightenment vision, which frames the culture of knowledge into which many of the social sciences were born, have a place for only negotiated and enforced peace and not for the idea of nonviolence? When later on, armed with the mythos of the French Revolution as the basic design of all radical social interventions, did the Enlightenment values open up some possibilities while closing others? Do we have to go back as far as St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and the Christianity of the first four centuries to reach Europe's disowned traditions of nonviolence? Once again, just because I am raising these questions does not mean that I have the answers.

However, even a preliminary response to these questions has to admit that one part of the story was beautifully captured by Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) when the French Revolution was dutifully consuming its children as a regular public spectacle. Without terror, Robespierre claimed, virtue was helpless — a claim that is now only an inescapable part of the mythos of all subsequent revolutions but also of almost all attempts to radically reorder human society, attempts to correct the faulty international order, perhaps also all millennial movements trying to actualize their utopias or visions here and now.

Experience may have shown repeatedly that this piece of inherited wisdom can leave entire sphere of polities caught in a cycle of just wars and attempts to correct historical wrongs on behalf of one's ancestors or of that mythic entity called one's nation. In many instances in many societies, terror becomes an end in itself and might even come close to being institutionalized as almost a way of life, Cambodia being a good example, with Syria giving it tough competition at the moment. Sometimes, even when the system collapses, the brutalization of the society shows, and the idea of terror remains a tacit option in everyday life and even in family relations.

Sometimes those who try to radically alter a way of life through massive violence end up no better after their efforts and leave their children and grandchildren haunted by the question whether all the bloodshed, mass deportations, man-made famines, institutionalized cruelties and attacks on the moral universe of society have left them culturally poorer, ethically impoverished and politically self-destructive. Many actualized utopias, the twentieth century has shown us, have been fraudulent exercises trying to pass themselves off as a new civilization through surveillance, censorship and thought policing.

Russia, the land of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, should have been one of the first countries in our times to try to answer these questions but has not as yet shown any sign of doing so. If it does, the answers will probably come not from Russia's political class but from its intellectuals — writers, painters, film directors and thinkers. Understandably. An ideological state built around the idea of the infallibility of its ideology, even after its death, leaves behind a state apparatus that is organized around the fear of anarchy and dissolution. It has to fall back upon its coercive might to paper over its democratic failures. Even if the successor state is a nonideological one, it cannot dump its statism and its fear of decentralization, anarchy and free media. Putin's Russia today is blessed with a more primitive and less humane version capitalism than Victorian England.

Robespierre's formulation acquired a sharper edge in the twentieth century when the imperial power structure set up by colonialism began to dissolve. The idea of just war was always there as part of the repertoire of states; it began to get secularized and scientized towards the middle of the nineteenth century. The religious passions that underlay the idea earlier were displaced onto new ideological frames, and progress itself became a rallying call and a self-justification. This allowed more latitude to nation-states and in the hands of unscrupulous regimes became almost infinitely flexible. George W. Bush was only a more clumsy retailer of phoney just wars.

Second, sensing the growing antiwar sentiments in less manageable sections of the people — such as the youth (particularly students), women and parts of the religious establishment — there has been systematic efforts to delimit the scope and the possibilities of 'militant nonviolence'. It can succeed, it is said, only under a benign, liberal regime, not under fascists and despots. In some texts, Gandhi's successes — or, for that matter, those of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama — are traced not to politics, worldview or ethics but to the political sagacity and liberal ethics of the colonial powers and other despotic regimes. Even though Gandhian nonviolence was born under a ruthlessly authoritarian, openly racist, colonial regime in South Africa and tasted its early successes there, it was tried against the Nazi regime only once. And that effort, too, had succeeded (Stoltzfus 1996).

Such attempts to 'normalize' the radical messages of peace activists have begun to pay some political dividends, too. In Gandhi's India — more so in his birthplace, Gujarat — Gandhi is increasingly a nonperson and a ritual presence in the ruling culture of politics. Nonetheless, despite the attempts to marginalize peace research by the mainstream cultures of political science and IR, peace research has now an expanding, visible culture that is in alliance with dissenting voices within political science and IR. In the case of IR, peace studies have also benefitted from the tensions between, on the one hand, the conventional political wisdom vended by strategic and defence studies and, on the other, the personal ethics and emotional ties that shape everyday life and perhaps even what one might identify as our basic humanity acquired through our developmental experience and socialization.

The issue is also complicated by the diversity in the culture of everyday life that is being brought into peace research by its practitioners. This has, however, not been an unmixed blessing. The way peace research is presently conceptualized, the diverse cultural backgrounds peace researchers bring to their discipline do not seem to bring their scholarly vision and the theoretical grids into a common, more daring, cross-cultural theoretical pool. The diversity seems to mainly help multiply conventional area studies or satisfies the conventional demand for geographical coverage masquerading as cross-cultural depth.

Third, the practice of IR, the conventions of diplomacy and warfare have behind them the sanctions of international institutions, in turn backed by a 'consensus' that is seen as global and relatively independent of cultural differences and disparities in military and economic might. The deviations from this consensus are seen as unfortunate by-products of the birth pangs of a new, more humane international order. There is little awareness that this world image clashes directly with the experiences, memories, fears and desperation in many parts of the world that see the present order as a planned edifice perched upon the hidden demands of a terribly unequal, quasi-colonial international order and upon the cultivated forgetfulness associated with the self-abnegation and ethnocide in the Southern Hemisphere.

Fourth, while both are equally important, but the former is better known than the latter, perhaps because many Southern scholars are reluctant to take a position on Afro-Asian or Latin American despotism when it comes packaged in, what Herb Feith used to call, developmental authoritarianism. Earlier, the handy excuse was nation building and state formation; now it usually is progress or development. Peace researchers, too, have sometimes chosen to be diffident, silent spectators of such self-destruction in the name of protecting the sovereignty of regimes exuding the right kind of radical chic and mouthing politically correct slogans.

Fifth, peace studies have consistently focused on nation-states as the major actors in the global scene and mostly ignored the way nonstate actors have gate-crashed into the global arena to embrace and pursue new causes and sometimes adopt new forms of resistance, using new technologies of violence and nonviolence. The thrust of twentieth-century violence was to make wars more technocratic, 'cleaner' and psychologically distant from us. Such sanitized wars have made wars more palatable not merely to some sections of the citizens but also to the soldiers mobilized to fight the war. Even in India, hardened by its own versions of violence and cruelty, when seeing television coverage of bombing raids during the Gulf War, many complained that it looked too much like a video game and a grand spectacle. (Such sanitization of violence is, of course, part of a larger problem that has to do with the new role of mass media, the changing nature of electoral politics and the scope and limits of individualism in a democracy in the age of virtual reality.) Not merely hard-eyed politicians and other policymakers but also ordinary citizens, even children, are getting brutalized and learning to live with massive, pointless cruelty around them.

Finally, while intellectual work in which disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and biographical studies intersecting political science and IR have declined in salience, one of the few formulations on which a consensus has survived is that, when for some reasons political institutions are wobbly and the nature of politics is fluid, the role of individuals as leaders, ideologues or even assassins matter more, and in-depth studies of such individuals become crucial. This is by now a part of global common sense. Without Gorbachev, it is doubtful if the Soviet Union would have wound up shop so gracefully and peaceably. Without Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping, it is doubtful if the post-Vietnam detente between the United States and China would have become such a consequential event.

In some democracies, this salience of individual actors has now been potentiated by the growing power and salience of media. The change is most visible in countries that use the Westminster model of competitive democracy, but the electoral process and campaigning style has become decisively presidential. People's representatives in a newly elected legislature do not choose a prime minister; the electorate are encouraged by the contestants, the media and pundits to choose amongst prime minister–designates. After elections, the winning party might formally elect the prime minister, but that is increasingly a ritual. Examples are countries like Australia, Germany, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the country that hosts the mother of all parliaments, Britain.