Heg

Orientalist representations don’t cause violence – doesn’t assume a causal relationship

Rotter 2k – Professor of History at Colgate University (Andrew J., “Saidism Without Said: Orientialism and U.S. Diplomatic History”, The American Historical Review, 105(4), p. 1208-1210)

A third and yet more troubling problem for historians reading Orientalism is Said’s dubious epistemological relationship to matters of cause and effect. Discourse theory and postmodernism generally have shaken old certainties about history as a kind of science, a divining rod, which, properly wielded, will indicate the truth. In the postmodern universe, there is no truth, just self-serving “realities” promoted by regimes of power. “Reality is the creature of language,” and “Western Man a modern-day Gulliver, tied down with ideological ropes and incapable of transcendence because he can never get beyond the veil of language to the reality ‘out there,’” as three historians have summarized it. Following Nietzsche and Heidegger, postmodernists like Michel Foucault deny the linearity of the historical process; thus “causation should be pitched out.” For better or worse, most historians still believe that they are engaged in a search for reasons why things happened as they did. An event occurs, like the American Revolution. It is not, they say, a construct or a representation but a revolution, properly named. There are reasons why the revolution occurred. and even though historians might assign different weights to these reasons or argue over whether some of them mattered at all, they still believe that the causes of the revolution are knowable, that they preceded the act of revolution itself, and that they are important to understand. One of the contributions of discourse theory has been to complicate—a virtue, in its own terms—comfortable assumptions about historical causation. But do the difficulties of ascribing cause make the effort itself a fool’s errand? Said seems unsure. At times, James Clifford has pointed out, Said “suggests that authenticity,’ ‘experience,’ ‘reality,’ ‘presence,’ are mere rhetorical contrivances.” Elsewhere in Orientalism, he posits “an old-fashioned existential realism.” Sometimes, Orientalism “distorts, dominates, or ignores some real or authentic feature of the Orient”: sometimes, Said “denies the existence of any ‘real’ Orient.” There is, he asserts, a relationship between the discourse of Orientalism and the exercise of power by the West over the Mideast. The discourse, Said wrote, “is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in uneven exchange with various kinds of power,” including political, intellectual, cultural, and moral. Making allowances for lifting this quotation out of a longer passage, it is nevertheless reasonable to wonder about the agency of that word “produced.” Does Said mean to say, as his grammar suggests, that the discourse is “produced . . . with various kinds of power” rather than by power, or that the discourse has an independent source? Is discourse a dependent variable where power is concerned, providing a reservoir of culturally shaped images from which the powerful can draw to justify decisions made for reasons of perceived strategic or economic interest?7 Said’s efforts to illuminate these connections arc not always successful. Responding to Bernard Lewis’s attack on Orientalism, Said insisted that “there is a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) coincidence between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France.” “Coincidence” is far from cause and effect. In Culture and Imperialism, where the relationship between discourse and power is the heart of the matter, Said admitted: “It is difficult to connect these different realms, to show the involvements of culture with expanding empires, to make observations about art that preserve its unique endowments and at the same time map its affiliations.” Saids subsequent use of language indicates the difficulty. His definition of imperialism includes not just the “practice” and “theory” of domination but also the “attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory”—a statement that calls to mind Mark Lilla’s comment that “postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument. ” Said struggles to decide whether culture and politics are separate spheres in some ways connected or finally the same thing. Novels never “‘caused’” imperialism, but reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “was part of the European effort to hold on to, think about, plan for Africa”; and, while no one would construe Moby Dick as “a mere literary decoration of events in the real world. . the fact is that during the nineteenth century the United States did expand territorially, most often at the expense of native peoples, and in time came to gain hegemony over the North American continent and the territories and seas adjacent to it.” That is a fact; what it has to do with Moby Dick is less clear.8 I am picking here at the most provocative and vulnerable part of Said’s argument. Said’s notion of power is more refined than the foregoing decontextualized summary admits. He defines Orientalism as “a style of thought,” a way of thinking about the East in such a way as to dominate it. Orientalism gave the West “the power to say what was significant about (the Other], classify him among others of his breed, put him in his place,” as Michael Dalby has summarized it. For Said, as for Foucault, knowledge is power. This equation, however arresting. may not say enough to historians of the state. It certainly does not say enough to historians of U.S. foreign relations, on which more shortly.

Threats

Turn—rejecting strategic predictions of threats makes them inevitable—decision makers will rely on preconceived conceptions of threat rather than the more qualified predictions of analysts

Fitzsimmons, 2007 [Michael, Washington DC defense analyst, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning”, Survival, Winter 06-07, online]

But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challeng- ing. If not sufficiently bounded, a high degree of variability in planning factors can exact a significant price on planning. The complexity presented by great variability strains the cognitive abilities of even the most sophisticated decision- makers.15 And even a robust decision-making process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as variability and complexity grows. It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk, variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic sur- prise, in ‘an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconceptions.’16 The decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environ- ment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.

No internal link from our reps to war

Kaufman, Prof Poli Sci and IR – U Delaware, ‘9

(Stuart J, “Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case,” Security Studies 18:3, 400 – 434)

Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly present, war occurs only if these factors are harnessed. Ethnic narratives and fears must combine to create significant ethnic hostility among mass publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to manipulate that hostility, evoking hostile narratives and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of chauvinist mobilization. Such mobilization is often spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes of violence) that increase feelings of hostility and make chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side's felt security needs threaten the security of the other side, the result is a security dilemma spiral of rising fear, hostility, and mutual threat that results in violence. A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist logic explains why ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war. Even if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity exist, severe violence usually can still be avoided if ethnic elites skillfully define group needs in moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is consociationalism.17 War is likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist mobilization, and a security dilemma.

There is no root cause of conflict --- strategies that assume as much cause more conflict

Moore 04 [John Norton, Professor of Law at the University of Virginia He formerly served as the first Chairman of the Board of the United States Institute of Peace and as the Counselor on International Law to the Department of State, Winter, “Beyond the Democratic Peace: Solving the War Puzzle”, 44 Va. J. Int'l L. 341, Lexis Law]

If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an absence of effective deterrence, what is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war? Past, and many contemporary, theories of war have focused on the role of specific disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty and social injustice, competition for resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, perceptions of "honor," and many other factors. Such factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or generating fear and manipulating public opinion. The reality, however, is that while some of these factors may have more potential to contribute to war than others, there may well be an infinite set of motivating factors, or human wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent existence of such motivating factors for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high-risk decisions leading to war that is the key to more effectively controlling armed conflict. And the same may also be true of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic conflict," as though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan Tutsis as well as its Hutu opponents. n158 Certainly if we were able to press a button and end poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice, and endless disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic governments must remain committed to policies that will produce a better world by all measures of human progress. The broader achievement of democracy and the rule of law will itself assist in this progress. No one, however, has yet been able to demonstrate the kind of robust correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of war that is reflected in the "democratic peace." Further, given the difficulties in overcoming many of these social problems, an approach to war exclusively dependent on their solution may doom us to war for generations to come.

Realism’s inevitable – interdisciplinary research proves

William Wohlforth (professor of government at Dartmouth College) 2009 “ Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War”Project Muse

Mainstream theories generally posit that states come to blows over an international status quo only when it has implications for their security or material well-being. The guiding assumption is that a state’s satisfaction [End Page 34] with its place in the existing order is a function of the material costs and benefits implied by that status.24 By that assumption, once a state’s status in an international order ceases to affect its material wellbeing, its relative standing will have no bearing on decisions for war or peace. But the assumption is undermined by cumulative research in disciplines ranging from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology that human beings are powerfully motivated by the desire for favorable social status comparisons. This research suggests that the preference for status is a basic disposition rather than merely a strategy for attaining other goals.25 People often seek tangibles not so much because of the welfare or security they bring but because of the social status they confer. Under certain conditions, the search for status will cause people to behave in ways that directly contradict their material interest in security and/or prosperity. s

Rejecting securitization destabilizes identity—causes more violence.

Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Jewish Studies, UCLA, 2004, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, “Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf

If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition, the world we find ourselves in today is one from which the political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange new shape. A world not anchored by the “us” and “them” binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically, as Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of Friendship: The effects of this destruction would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation states; it would sustain at any price so-called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which … it would lose its political being … without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? (PF 77) If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the political, the disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship between Us and Them provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective identifications and repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props up the psychotic with a sort of pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is surrounded by enemies; as Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for “an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented – therefore monstrous –forms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable” (PF 83).

Security creates value to life.

Booth 5 [Ken, visiting researcher - US Naval War College, Critical Security Studies and World Politics, p. 22]

The best starting point for conceptualizing security lies in the real conditions of insecurity suffered by people and collectivities. Look around. What is immediately striking is that some degree of insecurity, as a life-determining condition, is universal. To the extent an individual or group is insecure, to the extent their life choices and changes are taken away; this is because of the resources and energy they need to invest in seeking safety from domineering threats – whether these are the lack of food for one’s children, or organizing to resist a foreign aggressor. The corollary of the relationship between insecurity and a determined life is that a degree of security creates life possibilities. Security might therefore be conceived as synonymous with opening up space in people’s lives. This allows for individual and collective human becoming – the capacity to have some choice about living differently – consistent with the same but different search by others. Two interrelated conclusion follow from this. First, security can be understood as an instrumental value; it frees its possessors to a greater or lesser extent from life-determining constraints and so allows different life possibilities to be explored. Second, security is not synonymous simply with survival. One can survive without being secure (the experience of refugees in long-term camps in war-torn parts of the world, for example). Security is therefore more than mere animal survival (basic animal existence). It is survival-plus, the plus being the possibility to explore human becoming. As an instrumental value, security is sought because it free people(s) to some degree to do other than deal with threats to their human being. The achievement of a level of security–and security is always relative –gives to individuals and groups some time, energy, and scope to choose to be or become, other than merely surviving as human biological organisms. Security is an important dimension of the process by which the human species can reinvent itself beyond the merely biological.

Death

Life has intrinsic and objective value achieved through subjective pleasures---its preservation should be an a priori goal

Amien Kacou 8 WHY EVEN MIND? On The A Priori Value Of “Life”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 4, No 1-2 (2008) cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/92/184

Furthermore, that manner of finding things good that is in pleasure can certainly not exist in any world without consciousness (i.e., without “life,” as we now understand the word)—slight analogies put aside. In fact, we can begin to develop a more sophisticated definition of the concept of “pleasure,” in the broadest possible sense of the word, as follows: it is the common psychological element in all psychological experience of goodness (be it in joy, admiration, or whatever else). In this sense, pleasure can always be pictured to “mediate” all awareness or perception or judgment of goodness: there is pleasure in all consciousness of things good; pleasure is the common element of all conscious satisfaction. In short, it is simply the very experience of liking things, or the liking of experience, in general. In this sense, pleasure is, not only uniquely characteristic of life but also, the core expression of goodness in life—the most general sign or phenomenon for favorable conscious valuation, in other words. This does not mean that “good” is absolutely synonymous with “pleasant”—what we value may well go beyond pleasure. (The fact that we value things needs not be reduced to the experience of liking things.) However, what we value beyond pleasure remains a matter of speculation or theory. Moreover, we note that a variety of things that may seem otherwise unrelated are correlated with pleasure—some more strongly than others. In other words, there are many things the experience of which we like. For example: the admiration of others; sex; or rock-paper-scissors. But, again, what they are is irrelevant in an inquiry on a priori value—what gives us pleasure is a matter for empirical investigation.

Thus, we can see now that, in general, something primitively valuable is attainable in living—that is, pleasure itself. And it seems equally clear that we have a priori logical reason to pay attention to the world in any world where pleasure exists. Moreover, we can now also articulate a foundation for a security interest in our life: since the good of pleasure can be found in living (to the extent pleasure remains attainable),[17] and only in living, therefore, a priori, life ought to be continuously (and indefinitely) pursued at least for the sake of preserving the possibility of finding that good.

However, this platitude about the value that can be found in life turns out to be, at this point, insufficient for our purposes. It seems to amount to very little more than recognizing that our subjective desire for life in and of itself shows that life has some objective value. For what difference is there between saying, “living is unique in benefiting something I value (namely, my pleasure); therefore, I should desire to go on living,” and saying, “I have a unique desire to go on living; therefore I should have a desire to go on living,” whereas the latter proposition immediately seems senseless? In other words, “life gives me pleasure,” says little more than, “I like life.” Thus, we seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the fact that we already have some (subjective) desire for life shows life to have some (objective) value. But, if that is the most we can say, then it seems our enterprise of justification was quite superficial, and the subjective/objective distinction was useless—for all we have really done is highlight the correspondence between value and desire. Perhaps, our inquiry should be a bit more complex.

Death reps cause an empathic shift---this is especially crucial in the context of policy debates and advocacy simulations

Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City. University of New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER" gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pdf

Perhaps, then, what distant consumers express when they sit glued to the television watching a disaster replayed over and over, when they buy t-shirts or snow globes, when they mail teddy bears to a memorial, or when they tour a disaster site, is a deep, maybe subconscious, longing for those age-old forms of community and real human compassion that emerge in a place when disaster has struck. It is a longing in some ways so alien to the world we currently live in that it requires catastrophe to call it forth, even in our imaginations. Nevertheless, the actions of unadulterated goodwill that become commonplace in harrowing conditions represent the truly authentic form of humanity that all of us, to one degree or another, chase after in contemporary consumer culture every day. And while it is certainly a bit foolhardy to seek authentic humanity through disaster-related media and culture, the sheer strength of that desire has been evident in the public’s response to all the disasters, crises and catastrophes to hit the United States in the past decade. The millions of television viewers who cried on September 11, or during Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings, and the thousands upon thousands who volunteered their time, labor, money, and even their blood, as well as the countless others who created art, contributed to memorials, or adorned their cars or bodies with disaster-related paraphernalia— despite the fact that many knew no one who had been personally affected by any of these disasters—all attest to a desire for real human community and compassion that is woefully unfulfilled by American life under normal conditions today. ¶ In the end, the consumption of disaster doesn’t make us unable or unwilling to engage with disasters on a communal level, or towards progressive political ends—it makes us feel as if we already have, simply by consuming. It is ultimately less a form of political anesthesia than a simulation of politics, a Potemkin village of communal sentiment, that fills our longing for a more just and humane world with disparate acts of cathartic consumption. Still, the positive political potential underlying such consumption—the desire for real forms of connection and community—remains the most redeeming feature of disaster consumerism. Though that desire is frequently warped when various media lenses refract it, diffuse it, or reframe it to fit a political agenda, its overwhelming strength should nonetheless serve notice that people want a different world than the one in which we currently live, with a different way of understanding and responding to disasters. They want a world where risk is not leveraged for profit or political gain, but sensibly planned for with the needs of all socio-economic groups in mind. They want a world where preemptive strategies are used to anticipate the real threats posed by global climate change and global inequality, rather than to invent fears of ethnic others and justify unnecessary wars. They want a world where people can come together not simply as a market, but as a public, to exert real agency over the policies made in the name of their safety and security. And, when disaster does strike, they want a world where the goodwill and compassion shown by their neighbors, by strangers in their communities, and even by distant spectators and consumers, will be matched by their own government. Though this vision of the world is utopian, it is not unreasonable, and if contemporary American culture is ever to give us more than just an illusion of safety, or empathy, or authenticity, then it is this vision that we must advocate on a daily basis, not only when disaster strikes.

Ecology

Disenchantment is never total – a rational approach is crucial to confront the logic of technological destruction and recover possibilities for connection with the world within technology.

Feenberg 7

(Andrew, Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Volume 42, “Between Reason and Experience,” p. 19-21, http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/books/Between_Reason_and_Experience_DYP42.pdf)

What has proven fatal to Marcuse’s reputation is his hopeful argument for radical social and technical transformation. Yet this aspect of his work is relevant in a new period of crisis and protest largely focused around technical issues such as environmental pollution, energy politics, and the globalization of industrialization and disease. In this and the concluding parts, therefore, I will consider some starting points for continuing the general line of argument Marcuse developed under the contradictory influences of Heidegger, Marxism and the New Left. Heidegger and Marcuse argued that the understanding of beings in general, what we would normally call “culture,” is rooted in the form of the instrumental relation to reality. That form evolves historically and in its latest incarnation takes on a particularly destructive aspect. The danger is not merely physical but concerns the substitution of technological rationality for every other type of thought. The subject in a “one-dimensional society” neither understands its own essential involvement in its world nor the potentialities with which that world is fraught. Understanding this “second” dimension requires a thought freed from narrow instrumental purposes and capable of addressing lived experience in all its complexity. These thinkers appear to postulate the existence of a culture – modern technological culture – that evacuates the second dimension. In this technological culture, abstract aspects of social processes are isolated and privileged as the ends of action. The pursuit of ends with means, preferably technically efficient means, replaces an understanding of the structure of meaning in which experienced worlds consist. The focus on the means leads to a forgetfulness of meaning and eventually to the lopping off of whole dimensions of the original experience that appear functionally irrelevant. From within technological culture it seems that all that has been lost in the disenchantment of the world is arbitrary prejudices and myths. According to this view modern scientific-technical rationality supplies all the truth human beings can possibly require. The lifeworld is a poor source of knowledge until its givens have been refined to remove illusory subjective elements. Everything, including human beings, belongs to the technical system. Both Heidegger and Marcuse were tempted at least rhetorically to accept such a reductionist vision as accomplished fact while giving it a dystopian twist: the triumph of Brave New World. Yet ultimately neither believed the experiential realm could be wholly eliminated. Heidegger claimed that behind the functional appearances of modern technology there lies a mysterious revealing of new meanings which are still hidden to us but which may someday be revealed. Marcuse concluded that the very meaninglessness of modern technology situates it within the project of a ruling class. The destruction of all traditional meaning, which is the condition of capitalist technical and economic advance, is simply the other side of the coin of the reinterpretation of meaning in the degraded form of consumer goods. In his later work, Marcuse, as we have seen, argued for transforming technology itself. He did not share Heidegger’s belief that the relationship to technology could be independent of its design. The particular examples Marcuse cites are the assembly line and advanced weaponry. If these technologies remain at the core of modern life, no change in our relation to them can save us. The movement would thus have to overcome not just the cultural, economic and political orders but the underlying technology of destruction, indifferent to nature, human life and the development of human capacities. But Marcuse could only hint very generally at how this would come about and what the new technology might entail. Because both thinkers faced a world in which no alternative appeared at the technical level proper, they sought sources of resistance in other domains such as Nazi politics or New Left protest. But this is a departure from the ontologically fundamental role technical practice holds in their own philosophies which they did not adequately explain or justify. These thinkers ended up with such unsatisfactory conclusions because they could find no way to return to the realm of everyday technical experience to discover there the enactment of new meanings that cannot be treated as merely arbitrary, that appeal precisely to a modern ground while pointing beyond the current limitations of modern societies. If we can find a closer connection between politics and technology, a more convincing alternative may appear.

Bomb

Nuke war threat is real and o/w racism and invisible violence---their expansion of structural violence to an all-pervasive omnipresence makes preventing war impossible – also answers their value to life claim

Boulding 78 - Ken is professor of economics and director, Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, University of Michigan, “Future Directions in Conflict and Peace Studies,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 342-354

Galtung is very legitimately interested in problems of world poverty and the failure of development of the really poor. He tried to amalga- mate this interest with the peace research interest in the more narrow sense. Unfortunately, he did this by downgrading the study of inter- national peace, labeling it "negative peace" (it should really have been labeled "negative war") and then developing the concept of "structural violence," which initially meant all those social structures and histories which produced an expectation of life less than that of the richest and longest-lived societies. He argued by analogy that if people died before the age, say, of 70 from avoidable causes, that this was a death in "war"' which could only be remedied by something called "positive peace." Unfortunately, the concept of structural violence was broadened, in the word of one slightly unfriendly critic, to include anything that Galtung did not like. Another factor in this situation was the feeling, certainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, that nuclear deterrence was actually succeeding as deterrence and that the problem of nuclear war had receded into the background. This it seems to me is a most danger- ous illusion and diverted conflict and peace research for ten years or more away from problems of disarmament and stable peace toward a grand, vague study of world developments, for which most of the peace researchers are not particularly well qualified. To my mind, at least, the quality of the research has suffered severely as a result.' The complex nature of the split within the peace research community is reflected in two international peace research organizations. The official one, the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), tends to be dominated by Europeans somewhat to the political left, is rather, hostile to the United States and to the multinational cor- porations, sympathetic to the New International Economic Order and thinks of itself as being interested in justice rather than in peace. The Peace Science Society (International), which used to be called the Peace Research Society (International), is mainly the creation of Walter Isard of the University of Pennsylvania. It conducts meetings all around the world and represents a more peace-oriented, quantitative, science- based enterprise, without much interest in ideology. COPRED, while officially the North American representative of IPRA, has very little active connection with it and contains within itself the same ideological split which, divides the peace research community in general. It has, however, been able to hold together and at least promote a certain amount of interaction between the two points of view. Again representing the "scientific" rather than the "ideological" point of view, we have SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, very generously (by the usual peace research stand- ards) financed by the Swedish government, which has performed an enormously useful service in the collection and publishing of data on such things as the war industry, technological developments, arma- ments, and the arms trade. The Institute is very largely the creation of Alva Myrdal. In spite of the remarkable work which it has done, how- ever, her last book on disarmament (1976) is almost a cry of despair over the folly and hypocrisy of international policies, the overwhelming power of the military, and the inability of mere information, however good, go change the course of events as we head toward ultimate ca- tastrophe. I do not wholly share her pessimism, but it is hard not to be a little disappointed with the results of this first generation of the peace research movement. Myrdal called attention very dramatically to the appalling danger in which Europe stands, as the major battleground between Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union if war ever should break out. It may perhaps be a subconscious recognition-and psychological denial-of the sword of Damocles hanging over Europe that has made the European peace research movement retreat from the realities of the international system into what I must unkindly describe as fantasies of justice. But the American peace research community, likewise, has retreated into a somewhat niggling scientism, with sophisticated meth- odologies and not very many new ideas. I must confess that when I first became involved with the peace research enterprise 25 years ago I had hopes that it might produce some- thing like the Keynesian revolution in economics, which was the result of some rather simple ideas that had never really been thought out clearly before (though they had been anticipated by Malthus and others), coupled with a substantial improvement in the information system with the development of national income statistics which rein- forced this new theoretical framework. As a result, we have had in a single generation a very massive change in what might be called the "conventional wisdom" of economic policy, and even though this conventional wisdom is not wholly wise, there is a world of difference between Herbert Hoover and his total failure to deal with the Great Depression, simply because of everybody's ignorance, and the moder- ately skillful handling of the depression which followed the change in oil prices in 1-974, which, compared with the period 1929 to 1932, was little more than a bad cold compared with a galloping pneumonia. In the international system, however, there has been only glacial change in the conventional wisdom. There has been some improvement. Kissinger was an improvement on John Foster Dulles. We have had the beginnings of detente, and at least the possibility on the horizon of stable peace between the United States and the Soviet Union, indeed in the whole temperate zone-even though the tropics still remain uneasy and beset with arms races, wars, and revolutions which we cannot really afford. Nor can we pretend that peace around the temper- ate zone is stable enough so that we do not have to worry about it. The qualitative arms race goes on and could easily take us over the cliff. The record of peace research in the last generation, therefore, is one of very partial success. It has created a discipline and that is something of long-run consequence, most certainly for the good. It has made very little dent on the conventional wisdom of the policy makers anywhere in the world. It has not been able to prevent an arms race, any more, I suppose we might say, than the Keynesian economics has been able to prevent inflation. But whereas inflation is an inconvenience, the arms race may well be another catastrophe. Where, then, do we go from here? Can we see new horizons for peace and conflict research to get it out of the doldrums in which it has been now for almost ten years? The challenge is surely great enough. It still remains true that war, the breakdown of Galtung's "negative peace," remains the greatest clear and present danger to the human race, a danger to human survival far greater than poverty, or injustice, or oppression, desirable and necessary as it is to eliminate these things. Up to the present generation, war has been a cost and an inconven- ience to the human race, but it has rarely been fatal to the process of evolutionary development as a whole. It has probably not absorbed more than 5% of human time, effort, and resources. Even in the twenti- eth century, with its two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, it has probably not acounted for more than 5% of deaths, though of course a larger proportion of premature deaths. Now, however, ad- vancing technology is creating a situation where in the first place we are developing a single world system that does not have the redundancy of the many isolated systems of the past and in which therefore if any- thing goes wrong everything goes wrong. The Mayan civilization could collapse in 900 A.D., and collapse almost irretrievably without Europe or China even being aware of the fact. When we had a number of iso- lated systems, the catastrophe in one was ultimately recoverable by migration from the surviving systems. The one-world system, therefore, which science, transportation, and communication are rapidly giving us, is inherently more precarious than the many-world system of the past. It is all the more important, therefore, to make it internally robust and capable only of recoverable catastrophes. The necessity for stable peace, therefore, increases with every improvement in technology, either of war or of peacex