The Inner Battles of Peace Studies

The Limits and Possibilities

Ashis Nandy

The black holes of astrophysicists are sometimes matched by the 'black holes' of political science and international relations (IR). Through these disappear an entire range of 'researchables' — from invisible genocides and designer famines to contraband memories of erased pogroms and cultures casually pushed towards extinction. They do sometimes invite curiosity of the students of peace studies but are often found extremely difficult to accommodate within the major theoretical frames of the mother disciplines of political science and IR.

This I suspect is part of a larger problem. For, as time passes, through these black holes also disappear details of everyday life, emotions, values and tacit theories of social transformation and visions of desirable society of myriad little cultures, along with their experiences of suffering. These subjectivities are seen as so much of noise or as stuff fit for dustbins of history and shelves of museums. They do not match the official expectations from a proper sub-discipline spawned by political science and IR.

However, while these experiences are exiled from the world of academic social knowledge, they survive in the netherworld of individual and collective memories and wait for an opportune moment to come back to mock our disciplinary cultures and academic canons. This brief chapter is an attempt to acknowledge that underside of peace studies — the disposable subjectivities and noncultures ignored, exiled or museumized as irrelevant, which then sometimes reemerge in public discourse like skeletons tumbling out of a cupboard. They then — and only then — threaten to discredit many respectable intellectual initiatives and to demuseumize otherwise undervalued, marginalized, mnemonic or memory-dependent traditions. I have come to suspect that this politics of knowledge constitutes the unacknowledged underworld of the disciplines of political science and IR and limits the possibilities of both.

To give two random examples, the desperate attempts by successive Turkish regimes have not erased the memories of the Armenian genocide despite the passage of time. They have only managed to stoke the interest of scattered activist-scholars all over the world in the subject and kept the issue alive. If the Turkish officialdom were less enthusiastic about dissuading scholars from foraging the memories of that half-forgotten massacre, perhaps Turkey might have been less haunted by the Armenian question (as has indeed happened in the case with the genocide of the Hereros and Namaquas during the German colonial rule in Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century after the German government publicly apologized for the killings). Likewise, as the respected anthropologist of Indonesia Clifford Geertz might have found towards fag end of his life, what he had casually dismissed in his writings as some unimportant 'skirmishes' was nothing less than a full-fledged, organized genocide stoked and supported by the American establishment — thanks not so much to scholarly work, such as those of Robert Cribb, as to Joshua Oppenheimer's disturbing documentary An Act of Killing. So much for the famed 'thick description' of Geertz.

In both cases, an invisible genocide suddenly became visible: in one case to return to invisibility, in the other to acquire temporary visibility that may or may not become permanent.

Are there inner dissonances in the cultural and psychological baggage that peace studies carry to be a viable subdiscipline in political science and IR? Does the Enlightenment vision, which frames the culture of knowledge into which many of the social sciences were born, have a place for only negotiated and enforced peace and not for the idea of nonviolence? When later on, armed with the mythos of the French Revolution as the basic design of all radical social interventions, did the Enlightenment values open up some possibilities while closing others? Do we have to go back as far as St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and the Christianity of the first four centuries to reach Europe's disowned traditions of nonviolence? Once again, just because I am raising these questions does not mean that I have the...