Part two of this thesis relates domination to peace research.

Chapter one relates peace research to domination. The coverage of peace research here is by no means exhaustive, and focuses on key sections of the work of Johan Galtung to show how this major peace research theorist has effectively neglected explaining domination. Chapter two examines nonviolence as a central concern for peace research and offers both a more rounded and a more restricted approach to nonviolence. Chapter three applies the revised framework for interpreting domination to nonviolence.

Chapter four draws out some possible policy implications for peace research of the evaluation of nonviolence in the light of the application of the revised framework for interpreting domination.

Nonviolence as a substantive concern for peace research has been chosen for detailed analysis because it raises many issues central to applying and evaluating the efficacy of the revised framework for interpreting domination discussed in chapter five of this thesis. However, the exact connection between domination and peace research is difficult to make because peace research’s approach to this issue is deficient. More specifically, the connection between nonviolence and domination needs to be specified.

Peace research is an interdisciplinary field of scholarly research into problems of and possible solutions to violent human conflict, especially at the international level, and also at the level of human interaction within societies. Because this chapter is concerned with peace research theory, the many applied concerns of peace research, such as disarmament, maldevelopment, militarism, arms races, and the like, will be largely omitted. As with this thesis as a whole, peace research influenced by feminist theory and practice will be omitted (cf. Murray & Mack, 1985; Brock–Utne, 1990).

The linkages between domination and peace research are obvious at a basic level. Many, if not all, of the problems addressed by peace research in one way or another involve the negative effects on the human predicament of what amounts to domination and its manifestations. Arms races, violations of human rights, violent armed conflict of varying intensities, maldevelopment, institutionalised militarism, the role of the mass media in legitimating or facilitating the creation or extension of militarism, racism, gender–based or legitimated oppression, all the foregoing concerns of peace research can be reconceptualised as being negative aspects of the manifestations of domination. Conversely, the positive aspects of peace research’s concerns, such as peace, disarmament, conflict resolution, negotiation, peace education, and nonviolence can all be generally reconceptualised as falling within earlier examinations of positive aspects of the critique of domination. Peace research has difficulty coming to terms with domination, and yet domination is central to it because it is one of the major causes of the passivity of historical agents and helps explain the failure to respond to ethical calls for action against violence or even sometimes to perceive such ethical challenges or appeals.

If one came to peace research literature for the first time, one might expect a coherent definition of peace, a rounded account of nonviolence, and clear links between peace, nonviolence, and domination. But in the literature on peace research, these specifications are very hard to find or are even missing.

The first issue to be considered is a more adequate definition of peace research. This chapter discusses a body of literature by scholars who publish in journals which are described as ‘peace research journals’, who describe what they do, in whole or in part, as ‘peace research’, or who have institutional affiliations with peace research or peace studies departments or specialist research institutions. This approach, by way of scholarly self–definition through personal or professional identification with ‘peace research’, or through publication in certain journals defined as ‘peace research journals’, may be minimally adequate. But debates within peace research literature about what peace research should be reveals a continuing problematic, even a certain insecurity within the field over what it is, or ought to be, not the least because the attacks mounted against peace research from many scholarly and political quarters require peace researchers to offer defences of their work. The controversy over peace research, or, as is more often the case, peace studies and peace education, particularly in schools, which has erupted in some countries, including Australia, will not be examined here (e.g., Cox & Scruton, 1984; Mack, 1985: 75 – 82; Aspin, 1985 & 1987; Maley, 1986).

A leading participant in the continuing definitional debates, William Eckhardt, wrote that: "If ‘peace’ can be defined as the positive abolition of war, then peace research would be any systematic study concerned with the abolition of war..." (Eckhardt, 1988: 181). This seems hardly adequate if a more precise definition is required in order to differentiate peace research from other disciplines or fields with which peace research shares many concerns involving the problem of either actual or potential war, such as international relations or strategic studies. Caroline Stephenson wrote of peace research that "There seems to be agreement that the field is interdisciplinary at its best, or at least multidisciplinary, that it is international (and/or more often transnational), that it is policy–oriented – meaning directed to the real–life political environment of both policy–makers and peace movements – and that it is value–explicit" (Stephenson, 1989: 20). When attempting to differentiate peace research from international relations or strategic studies, Andrew Mack wrote that "... even the most hawkish strategists or cynical disciples of Realpolitik [would not argue] that their task was to contribute to the maintenance of war and the prevention of peace" (Mack, 1985: 18). Mack proposed an ingenious, if interim, solution to the definitional problem, typifying peace research as a ‘syndrome’, or a collection of attributes which tend to cluster together.

Like others who have attempted to define peace research, Mack left off his discussion at this point, and went on to examine what a wide range of peace researchers do throughout the world (Mack, 1985; Dedring, 1976). He demonstrated the high degree of theoretical, methodological, ideological, and practical plurality within the field which itself mitigates against any comprehensive definition, beyond a minimal one embracing directed research on ways to abolish war. Even this definition would be criticised by some peace researchers. Indeed, many peace researchers would argue that war is just one, albeit important, issue addressed by peace researchers, and that, all too often, peace researchers tend to focus on ‘negative peace’ or the obstacles to the outbreak of peace, rather than ‘positive peace’ or the opportunities available to enhance the sustained outbreak of peace.

What tends to be distinctive about peace research is the explicitness with which peace researchers often assert their fundamental normative orientation in favour of peace, even understood only as the absence of war, rather than claiming astringent scholarly objectivity or maintaining a stance of purely dispassionate inquiry. Claiming to be a peace researcher while claiming to be dispassionately investigating problems of war and peace without a personal commitment to assisting peace to break out seems to be a profound, if not unsustainable, contradiction. Some scholars nevertheless argue that adherence to scholarly objectivity would enhance their overall goal more than explicitly normatively oriented research. It is also indicative of a dualism in modern social science against which many writers have argued (e.g., Knights & Willmott, 1983).

Another related problem is how to differentiate between peace research properly so called, peace studies, peace education, and the more research and education oriented activities of peace movement groups. Even the term ‘peace movement’ is problematic because some writers would argue that there is no such thing as ‘the’ or ‘a’ peace movement. The implication of using a definite or indefinite article is that there is an ideologically unified or monolithic movement instead of a multitude of social groups or organisations clustering around issues bound up with concern about and engaging in action for peace. These difficulties in delineating what is ‘a’ or ‘the’ peace movement have been indicated by many writers (e.g., Saunders & Summy, 1986; Carter, 1990).

Any sharp differentiation between peace research, peace education, and peace action could also be artificial. Other peace researchers probably would prefer that here were negligible links between peace research and peace activism. Eckhardt, stressing the centrality of the abolition of war to peace research, education, and action, argued that peace education is any teaching aimed at abolishing war, and peace action is any action, both parliamentary and extra–parliamentary, designed to abolish war (Eckhardt, 1988: 181). Stephenson suggested that peace research finds itself largely within the social sciences and evolving from a positivistic and behavioural/quantitative/data–based approach into a much broader methodological approach. Peace studies is, according to Stephenson, even more multi– and trans–disciplinary, ranging across physics, biology, religion, art, language, linguistics, and other fields (Stephenson, 1989: 20).

Another problem lies in defining ‘peace’ itself. Peace, as understood by peace researchers, has evolved from a basic understanding of peace as simply the absence of war involving states or nations in large–scale, armed conflict, to giving attention to questions of direct and structural violence, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ peace, absence of institutionalised discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, religion, or adult sexual preference, as well as considerations of humanity’s relations with nature in terms of protecting the environment from damage caused by war and war preparations such as nuclear testing. Religious expressions of ‘peace’, such as spiritual equilibrium, social justice legitimated by reference to standards of justice set out in religious texts, and peace between votaries of different religious faiths have also been examined by peace researchers.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this thesis peace research can be broadly defined as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarly research on problems of organised violence generally, and possible solutions, informed by an often explicit normative orientation which holds that peace is a positive value.

Nevertheless, even a cursory examination of the literature of peace research is reveals how little direct account is taken of the theoretical traditions examined earlier in this thesis, each of which, in its own way, and with its own weaknesses, makes an issue of the phenomenon of domination (c.f., Reid & Yanarella, 1976). The existing literature on peace research struggles to define peace research in terms of violence without adequately theorising domination.

I now exelimpfy this with regard to some of the work of the leading peace researcher, Johan Galtung.

Johan Galtung is often described as one of the founders of modern peace research and remains one of its major, and most influential, theorists (Kemp, 1985). From the outset, Galtung editorialised in the Journal of Peace Research, first published in 1964, that the JPR was a journal of critical theory – broadly defined – which facilitated interdisciplinary debate and encouraged research for action to facilitate peace. Galtung posited a dialectic between ‘general and complete war (GCW)’ and ‘general and complete peace (GCP)’. "One may look upon peace research as research into the conditions for moving closer to the state we have called GCP, or at least not drifting closer to GCW" (Galtung, 1964: 1). Peace research was therefore concerned with simultaneously examining aspects of positive and negative peace, positive peace being concerned with the integration of human society and negative peace being concerned with the absence of war and violence. Circumstances involving negative peace could coincide with definitions of peace coming from official state sources, to do with pacification or conflict control. Galtung’s conception of negative peace embraced research into all aspects of war and organised violence. Positive peace research would involve research into the conditions which would facilitate the outbreak of general and complete peace. Recognising that there are any number of schemes and proposals for work towards this end, Galtung tautologically noted, "... for all it is not only a question of knowing under what conditions peace may be achieved and maintained, but of knowing under what conditions" (Galtung, 1964: 2). Peace research also had to have a future orientation: "Peace research should also be peace search, an audacious application of science in order to generate visions of new worlds .... and to suggest policies" (Galtung, 1964: 4). Rather than being empirically validated, Galtung maintained that peace research ought to be theoretically consistent and this consistency had to apply to reformulations of peace research itself. The discipline had to be internationally oriented and maintain its transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary character.

Given the obvious shortcomings of Galtung’s initial statement of what peace research ought to be about, coupled with the growing dissatisfactions of academics with what their work was achieving, five years later, Galtung published a now classic article in the JPR, ‘‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’ in 1969, partly in response to an attack by Herman Schmid who castigated peace research for its diffidence towards political concerns to do with the struggles of oppressed peoples for their liberation from oppression (Schmid, 1968). Schmid criticised peace research for tending to neglect the proposition that a state can hardly be considered to be at peace when its government virtually institutionalised torture as an instrument to control the civilian population, and information on effective social control techniques was supplied to that state so–called developed nations governments.

Radical peace researchers such as Schmid argued that peace research was "... concentrated on the concepts of control of the international system to prevent major breakdowns, and integration of the international system to make it more stable" (Schmid, 1969: 29). In effect, he continued, peace research had capitulated with the powerful to realise the goals of peace, neglecting more explicitly radical research oriented towards positive peace.

It should be noted that Galtung’s article also represents one of the relatively few extended theoretical discussions in peace research literature. Comparatively little of equal theoretical significance or impact has subsequently appeared in peace research literature, and in many respects, peace research has been trading on Galtung’s discussion in this article ever since.

The significance of this article for this thesis lies in the way Galtung attempted to establish a disaggregation of violence into ‘actual’ violence (in which an actor capable of or actually doing violence could be readily identified), and situations in which violence was latent or being done without a readily identified or identifiable actor or cause. His disaggregation of violence offers a superficially useful heuristic, but one lacking analytical purchase. Although he did not address domination directly, Galtung arguably conflates violence with domination, violence being more a means used to establish, maintain, and extend relations of domination than a substantive phenomenon amenable for systematic theorising. This is by no means to suggest that violence itself cannot be a subject for theoretical investigation. It is to suggest that without considerable precision, violence can become reified rather than recognised as a means or technique used by actors to achieve identifiable ends in situations in which obvious damage is being done to people in that an identifiable actor or cause doing the damage, Galtung’s heuristic disaggregation of violence into ‘actual’ and ‘structural’ is even weaker.

Galtung began with an almost impossibly broad definition of violence:

He further defined violence as "... the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is ... when the potential is higher than the actual is by definition avoidable and when it is avoidable, then violence is present" (Galtung, 1969: 162; cf. Marcuse, 1972: 43 – 87).

This weakness could be remedied by a more precise disaggregation of potentially many kinds of violence, the uses to which violence can be put, and domination. A number of methodological tools could be deployed to investigate different kinds of violence, the goals sought by actors using those different kinds, and theoretical and empirical connections between violence as a means, the goals being sought using different forms of violence, and domination, in its more precisely disaggregated forms.

Overt violence is usually quite readily discernible because harm is being done to identifiable actors by other actors. Galtung’s most influential, and problematic, contribution was the notion of ‘structural violence’. "There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances" (Galtung, 1969: 162 – 163). One of the key issues in deciding if a situation is structurally violent is determining whether or not there is an identifiable agent at work doing violence to other actors. States going to war against other states would offer examples of direct and obvious violence. But a state in a commanding position in world trade may exercise its power to artificially deflate the price of a commodity upon which another state depends for needed foreign exchange, the former state’s policies it seeks to influence. The effects of the former state’s deflation of world commodity prices may include mass starvation if the latter state’s population were unable to afford food as their income fell. This situation is structurally violent, according to Galtung, because it lacks actors actively doing violence to other actors. Another example would be withholding needed and otherwise available medicines for readily treatable diseases because the needy country could not afford the drugs. Yet another example would be starvation occurring in one country while other countries stockpile food because the relevant international commodity prices made selling the food uneconomic and releasing the food on the international market would deflate prices below levels acceptable to politically influential producer lobbies in the stockpiling countries.

Galtung’s scheme seems decidedly weak when the sophistication of contemporary global commodity and general economic monitoring technologies is considered. His general definition of ‘structural violence’ depends on an actor being utterly unaware of the likely or actual consequences of their structurally implemented activities. Modern government and commercial surveillance and analysis capabilities make it almost inconceivable that the consequences of policies or actions Galtung might label as ‘structurally violent’ would remain unknown to those agencies implementing them (e.g., Camilleri & Falk, 1992: 69 – 103). In the light of this, more adequately defining what might constitute ‘structural violence’ becomes very difficult.

The violence done by a commodity rich state to the starving population of another country may be quite unintentional because no identifiable actors have decided to starve another country’s people. Those actors may be utterly unaware of the consequences of their actions, though this seems exceptionally unlikely. Direct violence occurs when a government analyses Landsat pictures which show a serious staple crop failure in another state whose policies it regards as hostile, and imposes a trade blockade against the distressed state to coerce its government to change its policies, or even resign in favour of other local forces aligned with the blockading government’s interests. Structural violence, according to Galtung’s scheme, would occur if, congruent with some economic ideology, the commodity rich government withheld its surplus from the distressed government because deaths in the distressed country would be an unintended consequence of the rich government’s policies. This seems illogical because people starve when they cannot get sufficient food, and, while attempting to explain their action by reference to economic ‘necessity’ or ‘responsible management’, the rich government would hardly be expected to be ignorant of the effects of its actions. It seems a neat rationalisation to bracket responsibility out of the situation, especially when the significant internationalisation of the global economy is added to the picture.

Source: Galtung J., ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’ Journal of Peace Research Vol. 6 No. 2, 1969, P. 173.

Structures may have violence latent or manifest in them. Galtung would hold that a government able to declare a state of emergency, impose martial law, with the concomitant suspension of many ordinarily accepted civil liberties, was latently violent. All states are latently violent.

The failure of vocative appeals to rich governments to, for example, release significant food surpluses when famine, caused by civil war, drought, falling commodity prices, or a combination of these and other factors, ravages various countries adds a further component to the analysis of what constitutes ‘actual’ and ‘structural’ violence (e.g., Hayes, 1987). Was the refusal of the EEC to release significant parts of its food surplus and transport that surplus to Ethiopia in late 1984 and into 1985, an example of ‘actual’ or ‘structural’ violence? Would Galtung’s scheme assist in evaluating this situation? Examining the responses of various European governments to the appeals of established non–governmental aid agencies, and the direct appeals by significant actors in this particular situation, such as Bob Geldoff, might assist in partially differentiating whether or not ‘actual’ or ‘structural’ violence was present.

This adds the requirement that actual situations be examined over time, because actual violence could conceivably give way to structural violence, and vice versa, and the impact of vocative appeals, such as ‘Live Aid’ or ‘USA for Africa’ may indicate how vocative appeals to governments may ameliorate whatever form of violence in Galtung’s scheme is decisively operative. It may also further indicate an implicit rigidity in Galtung’s scheme, in that it neglects the possibility of situations changing, or being changed, as a result of the intervention of a wide range of possible actions, actors, and other factors. The famine may have gone largely unnoticed had not a British television crew filed graphic stories about it, had not Bob Geldoff seen them, was sufficiently moved to try to do something about the situation, and had the combination of drive and contacts to facilitate ‘Live Aid’ and subsequent events. The point is that Galtung’s scheme seems to lack a subtle yet essential analytic purchase which would assist in more closely differentiating between different forms of violence in particular situations manifesting over time, with the possibility of intervention by different kinds of actors who may use violence of varying forms or degrees, or, for that matter, nonviolent means of intervention, and whose motivations may be equally complex, and significantly explicative of the dynamics or eventual outcomes of each specific situation.

Galtung was reluctant to describe structural violence in terms of social injustice, largely because of the many interpretations which can be applied to the latter term. He wanted structural violence to be interpreted rigorously. But he cannot have it both ways because his conception of structural violence is open to normative and qualitative interpretation associated with conceptions of notions of justice and injustice. Necessarily, Galtung’s conception of structural violence takes peace research well beyond simple conceptions of war and warlessness into terrains associated with social justice, injustice, and potentials for the realisation of what it might mean to be more human and organise a more humane society and world. As with critical theory’s loose formulation of domination, Galtung’s formulation of structural violence could be interpreted by some peace researchers as being virtually anything they found morally objectionable. Unless peace research influenced by Galtung’s conception of structural violence were rooted in a rigorous theoretical tradition which maintained that humans in society were engaged in projects to actualise their potentials for emancipation from domination, it could sublate into idealism and loose analysis, or be co–opted and operationalised by empiricists seeking to establish measurement standards for degrees of structural violence.

Galtung reformulated his position:

Source: Galtung J., ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’ Journal of Peace Research Vol. 6 No. 2, 1969, P. 183.

Peace, understood as social justice within a context where personal violence was absent (bottom left), could nevertheless be a ‘negative’ peace in that, as Galtung warns, "... a research emphasis on the reduction of personal violence at the expense of tacit or open neglect of research on structural violence leads, very easily, to acceptance of ‘law and order’ societies" (Galtung, 1969: 184).

Given that this article was published, at least in part, as a response to radical criticisms of peace research, Galtung concluded by arguing against what amounts to a radical form of totalising in that he interpreted at least some of his critics as arguing for the realisation of absence of both personal and structural violence, while neglecting the values which he felt ought to inform peace research, and make it distinctive. Pragmatically, he initially responded, even reducing levels of either structural violence or personal violence alone is no mean achievement, and such reductions ought to be praised even if they are still neglectful of the need to reduce the other type of violence. More importantly, "... the view that one cannot meaningfully work for both absence of personal violence and for social justice can also be seen as essentially pessimistic, as some sort of intellectual and moral capitulationism" (Galtung, 1969: 186). In essence, Galtung argued for sensitivity on the part of peace researchers to the plurality of emphases which can find a place within the overall, and general, value orientation of peace research.

Galtung’s theoretical conceptions of actual and structural violence have been the subject of further critique in peace research literature, with various scholars attempting to operationalise or refine the theoretical vocabulary (e.g., Derriennic, 1972). Dedring, for example, praised Galtung’s bold expansion of the notion of peace into areas more traditionally associated with social justice, but was concerned about the policy and scholarly implications of a thorough–going development of Galtung’s scheme which might lead scholars into becoming activists for social justice to the detriment of their potential influence as allegedly dispassionate scholars (Dedring, 1976: 21). Mack was less conciliatory.

Peter Lawler, in criticising Galtung’s ‘value–plural’ and non–hegemonic approach to world order, argued that Galtung’s argument failed because his treatment of values was undefended. As Lawler wrote, Galtung’s "...consistent refusal to adopt any specific philosophical framework, or adequately explicate his adopted mix, robs Galtung of any means for defending his vision except for a continuing reliance on the supposedly ‘trans–ideological’ category of human needs" (Lawler, 1989: 51). Feminists such as Birgit Brock–Utne have drawn attention to how women are especially damaged by structural violence, and included in the concept of positive peace a distinction between "... indirect violence leading to a shortened life span and indirect violence which reduces the quality of life. Both positive and negative peace is viewed at the micro–level where the violence is of a mere unorganised kind and at the macro–level what I term organised violence" (Brock–Utne, 1989: 148). As examples of micro–level negative peace Brock–Utne cites wife batterings, rapes, child abuse, and street killings, topics usually well removed from peace research’s general coverage of negative and positive peace.

The continuing debates in peace research literature ranging across almost the whole range of the field’s broad compass reflect both a continuing uncertainty, even insecurity, among peace researchers about what they believe they should be doing, how they should be doing it, and for whom they should be doing it. It would be almost accurate to assert that there might be as many conceptions of peace and peace research as there are peace researchers. In a reflection on ‘Twenty–Five Years of Peace Research’, Johan Galtung attempted to summarise some of the evolving approaches to peace research a quarter of a century after he helped establish the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). In essence, he argued for a radical acceptance of the high degree of theoretical and methodological plurality within peace research, a reinforcement of the general values of peace research as discussed earlier, including acute sensitivity to the risks of co–optation, and argued that peace research should escalate its trans–cultural, trans–national, and trans–disciplinary approach. Methodologically, Galtung argued for peace research to embrace empirical research in order to accurately gather data about its research projects, but to recognise the limitations of data for the development of theory. As he put it, one cannot build a theory of disarmament on the basis of the example of Costa Rica, though the Costa Rican example undoubtedly has heuristic value. Similarly, critical peace research brings values to bear upon what the data gathered by empirical research does, could, or ought to mean, evaluating current policies and practices in the light of peace research’s explicit normative orientation to peace as a positive value and goal. He also argued for a constructivist approach to peace research, in which empirical and critical research approaches would be drawn upon to propose possible peace strategies, looking to the future from a sound foundation in the past, from whence is drawn much empirical data, and the present, often critically analysed on the basis of empirical data and from which trends or possible directions can be discerned.

He drew attention to the wide range of conceptions of peace, from a Roman conception of peace under the rule of law which nevertheless allowed for considerable structural violence, Greek and Hebrew conceptions of peace which embraced more concern for justice and thence a sensitivity to ameliorating structural violence as well as actual violence, through to Eastern conceptions of peace, such as Hindu Shanti, Buddhist ahimsa, and the different but related Chinese and Japanese conceptions of peace which embrace connotations of social harmony, peacefulness, and adjustment, and yet can probably accommodate both structural and actual violence, as both Chinese and Japanese history amply demonstrate. Galtung’s major point was that just as there are many conceptions of peace within peace research, there are many civilisations on this planet which have different, and yet related, conceptions of peace (Galtung, 1985). This has implications for the development of an attempted universalistic theory of peace useful for peace research which satisfies philosophical standards of general applicability for all humanity. Peace research tends to reject the high abstraction of Grand Theory, yet its theoretical development almost demands this level of abstraction if general applicability is to be sought. It appeared that peace research was encountering the limits of theory, and, as Galtung pointed out, peace research represents only one tiny part of the effort to make the world a more peaceful place.

In conclusion, Galtung wrote:

Galtung was hinting at work done elsewhere on human needs theory, and developments upon it, in an attempt to construct as universalistic and uncontroversial as possible a basis for peace as a fundamental human need, a tack also generally taken by at points by Habermas, among others (e.g., Galtung, 1980; Lawler, 1989; Habermas, 1979; 1990). But, as Lawler argued, Galtung’s consistent resistance to take up a specific philosophical framework in order to defend his position, and his consistently descriptive approach to peace research analysis left his work open to the claim that his vision of a possible future world is unrealisable and presupposes its normative defensibility, the latter point itself challenged by Galtung’s acknowledgment of the globally fractured nature of humanity’s understanding of peace (Lawler, 1989: 51).

It is implicit in Galtung’s approach to peace research that attention must be focused on theoretical and praxeological analysis of examples of positive peace and instances of where attempts are made at reducing actual and structural violence. Given the general vagueness of his conception of structural violence, and his proto–theoretic approaches to the issues he addresses, it is clear that peace research stands in need of more rigorous theory construction and application of theory to its substantive concerns to more effectively explicate the dynamics of and possible solutions to the problems it addresses. At a heuristic level, it may be that applying a revised framework of a phenomenon such as domination may offer peace research greater specific purchase for analysing its weaknesses in theory and theory application.

It is beyond the ambit of this thesis to examine the literature of peace research, but, given Galtung’s influence in the field (e.g., Kemp, 1985), and the weaknesses indicated here of what arguably constitutes one of his most important contributions to peace research theory, it is proposed that at least some of the deficiencies of peace research theory, as indicated by Galtung’s contribution, could be remedied by greater systematic attention to the phenomenon of domination along lines suggested in chapter five, and pointed to earlier in this chapter. In addition, given peace research’s general bias towards so–called ‘negative’ peace concerns, violence, arms races, militarism, maldevelopment, etc., focusing attention on an issue such as nonviolence would help redress this bias because nonviolence falls more into the ambit of ‘positive’ peace. This is not to say that peace research does not address nonviolence. It is one of the central concerns of peace research literature which emphasises the potentials for peace, or at least a reduction of violence, as well as is of direct concern for analysts of peace movements of many kinds. At a policy level, some peace researchers have researched and advocated nonviolence as an adjunct to or even a replacement for conventional means of national defence, often attempting this task with all the rigour and ‘realism’ of their scholarly associates in strategic and military studies (e.g., Sharp, 1990; c.f. Martin, 1993). Evaluating these applications of nonviolence are also beyond the ambit of this thesis.

It has already been suggested that focusing on violence needs more critical attenuation because violence can be seen as an admittedly complex means deployed to achieve a wide range of ends, rather than an end in and of itself. This thesis is far more concerned with what can be construed as a major end of the deployment of violence, the establishment, maintenance, and extension of relations of domination, however domination may be disaggregated into particular forms, be they actor–oriented, structural, or otherwise thematised. Further, focusing on the logical opposite of violence, nonviolence, often deployed by actors seeking to challenge relations of domination, could indicate further avenues for productive theorising and research with implications for, particularly, peace research aiming at disclosing greater opportunities for assisting sustainable peace to break out.

I have now shown that Galtung is unable to describe the nature of peace research without a clear concept of domination. I have also shown that his account of violence is defective. If, however, the focus fell instead on to a clearer conception of domination and this was applied to nonviolence, then some modest progress could perhaps be made.

The following two chapters focus on nonviolence and then the application of the revised framework for interpreting domination to the case of nonviolence to indicate whether or not the revised framework aids in theorising about and analysing nonviolence. The concluding chapter of this section of the thesis proposes some policy implications for peace research in the light of the evaluation of the revised framework with respect to nonviolence.