Description
As a field of scholarship and practice peace and conflict studies is facing difficult times. This paper will present findings from an 8-year study including over 150 interviews with actors in what I will broadly call ‘peace work’ that illustrate the problems the field faces as the compounding pressures of the 21st Century continue to drive increasing disruption, competition, and violence. The overall impression from the data is of a deepening crisis, and of traditional peace work actors, and the kinds of norms they have long advocated, being increasingly underfunded and marginalized from debates. It is important, of course, that peace work actors keep working through this period. That scholars keep theorizing, research, teaching, and publishing, and that practitioners keep advocating for and implementing peace work as the ‘polycrisis’ we face drives new violent conflict. But this paper takes also a longer view of the field and what we must do to avoid being so easily marginalized in the future. Building on insights from the interviews, the paper takes a broader institutional view of the field and asks, what kind of structures and relationships do we need to establish today to ensure we cannot be so easily marginalized in the future? It calls for a renewed focus on the field as a field in development, and provides a framework to guide that development into the future.
