the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

the internal dynamics of debates in peace research 133insensitive to the suffering that can occur from the violation of ethicalnorms’ (Vasquez, 1976: 710–711). This two cultures problem was– as today (see chapters 8 and 9) – also seen in geographical terms:Western Europe was humanistic and post-Marxist, the United States wasbehavioural and quantitative (Onuf, 1975; Reid and Yanarella, 1976). TheEuropeans had, held Boulding (1978: 347), retreated from reality into‘fantasies of justice’, whereas Americans had succumbed to a ‘niggling scientism,with sophisticated methodologies and not very many new ideas’.Then, as now, researchers in the critical-European tradition were moreconcerned with engaging the US-behavioural mainstream than vice versa(Reid and Yanarella, 1976: 317). But European-Marxist Peace Researcherswere also rebutted for being ‘a closed, complete system of thought’ andfor seeking to explain all conflict of the global South with economic structuresin the North (Onuf, 1975: 72; Reid and Yanarella, 1976: 316). Someindividuals did not, of course, fall into these rigid categories, and themost important European journal, the Journal of Peace Research, continuouslypublished articles from all corners of Peace Research (Gleditsch,1993).Worth noting in this debate is that the criteria for what constitutes ahumanistic epistemology are not at all fixed. Vasquez (1976: 710) definesfor instance the Journal of Peace Research as having shifted to ‘a morehumanist approach by publishing radical and normative work’, whileReid and Yanarella (1976: 322) argue that this approach ‘tacitly share[s]a scientistic foundation with establishment figures’. Certainly, to a contemporaryaudience, the ‘radical’ writings of the 1960s and 1970s wouldin most cases not look particularly radical compared to how the epistemologicalfault-lines became established from the late 1980s onwards.How a field is understood and divided into epistemological perspectives isthus not based on trans-historical objective factors, but is itself somethingthat can change in hindsight as other approaches appear. Epistemologicaldifferences and commonalities are, in short, socially constituted.There are also numerous discussions of the normativity of PeaceResearch, but no consensus on what that means. Sometimes humanismand normative theory are linked and opposed to quantitative studies(Vasquez, 1976: 710; Lopez, 1985: 118) or it is held that the scientismof behavioural approaches depoliticises the normative issues that shouldbe confronted (Reid and Yanarella, 1976). The latter position becameincreasingly common as epistemological debates gained hold of IR andISS in the late 1980s and after the Cold War (see, for instance, Walker,1987; Patomäki, 2001) and we will return to it in coming chapters. But