This paper presents the behaviourist "non-normative" Peace Research (PR) tradition with two objectives. One objective is to locate this field in relation to closely related fields of research. PR specificity is: the dependent variable of peace and conflict when compared with Political Science and International Relations; the normative concern with the causes of war when compared with Strategic Studies; and the rejection of the "practicality" of research and a restraint on normativity when compared with Peace Studies (defined as peace research, peace teaching and peace action) and Conflict Resolution. Also, PR is considered here as one of the sub-fields of International Security Studies. The second objective of the paper is to present the history of PR. Since its creation in the 1950s, with a focus on inter-state conflict as an alternative to Strategic Studies, PR had two defining periods: one in the late 1960s labelled as the "socialist revolution", with the conceptualisation of peace as more than the absence of war (positive peace) and a challenge for normativity in research; and a second period in the 1980s that brought the broadening of the referent object to intra-state conflict and liberal peace, and the emergence of other social sciences dedicated to the study of issues in, or close to, PR, broadly defined as security with some of them adopting a normative stance in research. The epistemological community of PR kept its behaviourist approach in spite of these two normative challenges, and its distinctiveness and unity is much due to its method.
Keywords
Normativity; Peace Studies; Peace and Conflict StudiesHow to cite this article Sousa, Ricardo Real P. (2017). "Genealogy of behaviourist peace research". This paper presents more than 60 years of Peace Research (PR) evolution and has two main objectives. The first objective is to identify major changes to what PR studies and how it is studied. This is done with reference to the behaviourist PR approach, which is considered as the backbone of this paper. 3 We share King et al.'s (1994) perspective that the characteristics of good research include: making descriptive or explanatory inferences on the basis of empirical information; research that uses explicit, codified and public methods to generate and analyse data whose reliability can be assessed; qualitative and quantitative methods that are necessarily imperfect and, therefore, the conclusions are uncertain; and the "unity of all sciences consists alone in its method, not in its material" (Pearson, 1892, p. 16). These characteristics minimise the normative bias or influences of the researcher on knowledge.There are three defining periods in PR. 4 PR starts in the late 1950s in the aftermath of the behaviourist revolution that is characterised by a focus on the causes of inter-state violent conflict (deadly conflict normally associated with war) researched through behaviourist approaches, with the predominance of Political Science.In the late 1960s peace is conceptualised as more than just the a...
