Scholarly Contributions

PEACE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION

The pursuit of local and global peace and justice were central concerns throughout Professor Said’s career. Witnessing a world of collapsing borders and new forms of economic, political, and social connection among diverse communities, he saw the potential for a new global civilization through new approaches to peace. As a key theme found within his earliest writings, Said continued to develop his ideas and vision through the development of courses at American University (AU), where he eventually led efforts to establish one of the first graduate programs in international peace and conflict resolution in the country. As one of the leading scholars of peace and a trailblazer in the field of international relations (IR), Said’s contributions helped to expand and strengthen peace and conflict resolution studies (PCR) as a departure from the traditional, realpolitik approaches to security. For Said, peace is not an end destination but “a dynamic process of doing and being,”¹ which was evident not just in his scholarship but in how he lived his life.

Said recognized that the challenges facing the contemporary world – from the threat of nuclear weapons, ecological devastation, and increasing identity-based conflict – demanded a new approach to peace and conflict resolution. As he wrote in a 2004 paper commemorating the United Nations Day of Peace, despite “50 years of IR theory we are no closer to understanding what confronts the US in Iraq than we were in understanding the challenges faced by Westmoreland in Vietnam or the reality of the Persian empire discovered by Alexander the Great.”² While predominantly Western approaches within IR treat conflict resolution as “mechanical processes or tools,” Said asserted the field needs “human spirit and values.”³ In his view, peace and conflict resolution are not issues confined to a separate subfield, but should be seen as a new way of doing international relations.⁴

Said was critical of the traditional paradigms of global politics that historically defined peace in terms of the security and interests of those holding power (see International Relations Theory). He argued that such an approach “has resulted in a systemic thought pattern that focuses less on maximizing the potential of peace than on maximizing its use as another tool in the national toolbox to further short-term self-interest.”⁵ This “narrow and disorienting perspective” is now commonly recognized within peace studies as “negative” peace, as it settles for “an absence of war” and understands justice in limited terms as “a legalized injunction against gross, physical torture.”⁶ To maintain peace from this perspective, one must rely on coercive power and institutionalized cooperation among great powers.⁷ Largely Western and state-centered, such a perspective is monolithic, excluding non-Western and Global South perspectives from the conversation.⁸ For Said it reflects a “cultural triumphalism,” the attitude that Western approaches to international issues are “the same for everyone else, past, present, and future.”⁹ By avoiding “the why of conflict”¹⁰ or the root causes, Said asserts that ultimately the dominant IR approaches are ill equipped to understand let alone resolve the increasing number of non-material, identity-based conflicts in the new era, which require “an understanding of the beliefs, values, and behavior of conflicting parties.”¹¹

Writing in the 1990s as a new century approached, Said observed an emerging, pluralistic global civilization, the impact of which the IR field had underestimated.¹² For Said this new era required an alternative paradigm of peace that promotes global solidarity and cooperation. In particular, peace must be reconnected with the aspirations of justice “as a first step toward building foundations for a more stable, equitable, and life-affirming world order.”¹³ In his 1995 textbook on international politics, he writes that peace and conflict resolution studies accelerated after the Cold War, moving beyond traditional security studies by recognizing that “hunger, poverty, and exploitation are also breeding grounds for violence and therefore pose a significant challenge to national as well as global security.”¹⁴ PCR focuses on “positive” peace by bringing a holistic perspective to security of an interdependent global system, covering “the full continuum of violent versus peaceful activity … rather than on relations between specific states.”¹⁵ Said’s own PCR theory and practice expands on and contributes to our understanding of positive peace. For Said, peace is “the nexus of human will and human diversity that creates the social force necessary to transform the horror of war to the stability of peace.”¹⁶ It is “both task and experience. The task of peace is dealing with structural and cultural violence, as well as direct violence. The experience is self-knowledge.”¹⁷

Said’s understanding of peace as a dynamic process of doing and being was reflected in how he conducted his own life, from participating in the March on Washington in 1963, to actively supporting student activism within anti-war and feminist movements, to affirming that such activities were valuable and experiential components of peace education.¹⁸ (See A Meaningful Life.) While he had been teaching on peace issues since the 1960s, his thinking on the topic expanded in the 1970s as he met with such peace pioneers as Quaker scholars Kenneth and Elise Boulding, in the 1980s as he became involved with the establishment of the United Institute of Peace (USIP), and throughout his years of public diplomacy and conflict resolution efforts around the world.¹⁹ Said began offering his first courses in peace studies in the early 1980s, paving the way for the eventual establishment of the program dedicated to the topic at AU.²⁰ His popular course on “Peace Paradigms,” for instance, began with a critique of the traditional, realist approaches within international relations before moving on to other alternative paradigms, including global governance through the role of international institutions and law, the power of nonviolent movements for social and political change, conflict resolution through the power of communication, and the paradigm of “transformation” that considers the roles of ethics and spirituality for a more sustainably peaceful and humane world.

The PCR courses became increasingly popular among students, some of whom worked with Said to encourage faculty to approve a graduate program dedicated to the topic. Said’s collaborative leadership approach eventually led to the establishment of a Master’s Degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) in 1996. Yet the process was not an easy task. AU Professor Mohammed Abu-Nimer (and Sr. Adrienne Kaufmann) who worked alongside Dr. Said to help build the program, notes that it “required being able to fight and stand your ground against many forces that negate the very foundational values of peace and conflict resolution studies. In particular, it means confronting both the offensive and the just war theorists, researchers, and policymakers who perpetuate the culture of violence discourse.”²¹

Despite the critique and skepticism he faced, Said persisted. “The message was more important than me,” he explained. “I don’t mind being on the periphery.”²² He led the IPCR program for over 10 years, which grew to become one of the flagship programs within AU’s School for International Service, one of the largest schools of international relations in the US.²³ Under his leadership, the program took a multicultural approach to the study of both peace and conflict from a bottom-up instead of a top-down perspective. With the aim to train students as global citizens, Said and his colleagues “sought to cultivate the passion of student activists and scholars into making concrete policy driven assessments of the world’s many conflicts in a multidisciplinary framework that embraces the richness of all cultural and religious traditions as they inform peacemaking in a global context.”²⁴ Said also launched the Center for Global Peace (CGP) at AU in 1996, which aimed to analyze and advance different approaches to peace and conflict resolution. In 2014, just a year before his retirement, he was honored with a Distinguished Scholar Award in Peace Studies from the International Studies Association for his many contributions as a peace scholar and advocate (See Service and Recognition). Professor Said brought both a visionary and applied approach, developing robust theory and practice in the field with significant contributions in the areas of peace education and religion and conflict resolution. For him, peace was never just “a goal to be pursued. It is always in the making. It is a journey towards a place where there is trust, mercy, and justice. We may not get there, but the journey is important and is never ending.”²⁵

Notes