Suchergebnisse

Peace research is a continuous range of activities from purely scientific concerns such as international systems research & conflict research to the promotion of ideologies by various activist groups. The personnel & problems of this field are interdisciplinary, but it is difficult to form a synthesis of the methods of the various sciences involved in it. This division of social science into subfields has allowed each subfield to remain disciplined by having clear rewards for successful criticism, but has also resulted in many issues not being investigated at all, & in lack of communication between disciplines. General systems theory represents the best attempt at synthesis, but has not yet developed any substantial body of internal criticism. The problems of this field are particularly intractable because they are neither many-body problems, like those of the economics of the market, nor one- or two-body problems capable of explicit solution, but few-body problems creating very large difficulties of analysis. A model is beginning to emerge, comparable to a billiard table on which billiard balls, representing states, roll among cobwebs, representing interactions among a wide variety of organizations. A key to the study of the behavior of any such system is the process of decision making. Two major types of solution exist: the dissociative one of dividing up resources stably among various actors, & the associative one of uniting actors in common activities. The field as a whole is one part of the scientific study of human betterment. W. H. Stoddard.

THIS ARTICAL PROVIDES A CRITIQUE OF A RECENT ARTICLE BY ASBJORN EIDE. EIDE'S WORK REPRESENTS THE CURRENT STATE OF EUROPEAN PEACE RESEARCH AND IT OFFERS A NEW FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SYSTEM AND ITS DYNAMICS.