The name ‘Peace Studies’ was quite deliberate – it was a Quaker initiative.
They wanted to see a department in a British university
along the lines of what was happening in Scandinavia –
the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, Peace Research Institute, Oslo, and the rest
and they wanted one done in Britain.
So, although it was looking obviously at conflicts,
the emphasis was on how to prevent conflicts,
how to resolve them, and how to build peace afterwards.
Our postgraduate students come here from all over the world
and currently we have 80 from 25 countries.
Many of them know huge amount about conflict – they have experienced it,
they’ve worked in peace-building – and it’s a very lively atmosphere
A tough group to teach! But quite exhilarating as well.
If you look back over the last 40 years, we must have close to 2,000 graduates
who have gone to work in all kinds of places:
for the UN; for Oxfam; for governments;
in mediation services in local councils;
in post-conflict building, peace building, in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere
and then, that way, they have made a very big contribution, the students themselves.
One always remembers that they really are at the heart of it.
As far as the staff are concerned,
we’ve done large amounts of very applied research;
we feed into the general public, we aid activism in some ways.
But we will also put in briefings for Government.
We had a contract recently to work for the Norwegian Military of Foreign Affairs.
A number of us will be called on to give briefings in Ministries in Britain.
We keep our own independence.
we are about critical analysis of the causes of war and that can be controversial.
But at the same time, because I think we really work
very hard at it to do high-quality work,
we are still listened to, even by people who might take a different view.
In fact what is the world’s standard book
on the theory and practice of conflict resolution
was written by two of my colleagues and another academic –
Tom Woodhouse, Oliver Ramsbotham and Hugh Miall.
That’s just going into its fourth edition.
It’s been published in Japanese, I think there’s an Arabic edition.
It’s a world-wide resource for people who want to deal with conflict resolution.
It’s been a very busy period over the last 15 years or so,
with a lot of calls, usually to analyse what is happening,
and try to give something of an independent view,
and that can involve over 100 or 200 radio and television interviews a year;
mostly radio and mostly to international networks;
some to local and regional networks in Britain, but mostly international.
And there it is people just looking to understand what is happening
from the point of view of someone who tries to stand
independent and looks at it from both sides.
That can be difficult. I mean if you are trying to explain
why Islamic State is behaving as it does
then people can say ‘oh, you’re sympathetic to it’.
You’re not – what you’re trying to do is put yourself
in their way of thinking, understand what they’re doing and why.
And by that means try to advocate ways
in which that situation could be handled.
[Radio interview: “Beheadings of the hostages
are designed to be an absolute provocation;
they are designed to incite a Western reaction.]
The Greenham Common Fence – well, essentially
when the Greenham Common base was demolished, back in the late 1980s,
some local Quakers were able to get, quite legitimately,
about a 30 metre stretch of the fence,
and that has been used in museums and elsewhere,
but the amount was far too surplus to requirements,
and Bradford’s Museums Department got fed up of storing it,
so they looked for someone to take it and so it’s on my small holding!
Well, one of the things is that we often have
a lot of tensions within Peace Studies.
Students saying we’re not being radical enough.
There was one occasion, about 30 years ago,
when they got incensed by particular things
when we were trying to make it properly academic,
and a small group of students actually occupied the Department.
Now this was back in the days, 30 years ago,
when you still got that – we had a two-week occupation!
It ended amicably and it ended with a staff-student party
which is maybe the way to resolve conflicts!