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PEACE BY PEACEFUL MEANS: PEACE AND CONFLICT, DEVELOPMENT AND CIVILIZATION
Johan Galtung
California: Sage Publications, 1996 pp. 280, paper, $26.95
THE WAGES OF PEACE: DISARMAMENT IN A SMALL INDUSTRIALIZED ECONOMY
Nils Petter Gleditsch, Adne Cappelen, and Olav Bjerkholt
California: Sage Publications, 1994 Cloth $75.00
Two publications by the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization and The Wages of Peace: Disarmament in a Small Industrialized Economy, represent contrasting approaches to peace studies. The former work, by PRIO founder and renowned peace scholar Johan Galtung, is an ambitious, thought-provoking argument for promoting less violent methods of peace action and broadening the agenda for peace studies. The authors of the latter study focus more narrowly and pursue more modest objectives. Nils Petter Gleditsch, Adne Cappelen, and Olav Bjerkholt use macroeconomic models to assess the economic consequences of reduced military spending in Norway
Galtung's stated purpose was "to promote peace, not only peace studies." His intended audience apparently included peace activists as well as peace scholars. Yet the book is apt to appeal most to scholars. A reconceptualization of positivist disciplines clearly necessitates new terms and classificatory systems, but Galtung's esoteric language and excessive typologies are likely to limit the book's appeal. The book will be less than inviting to nonacademics.
Although a study which seeks to promote peace and influence peace activists ought to be more accessible, Galtung's prescriptions for peace by peaceful means are provocative nonetheless. Activists as well as scholars should contemplate his prescriptions for eliminating direct, structural, and cultural violence. For if he is correct in asserting that nonviolence is the key to promoting peace, strategies of action, as well as theories of peace, should be reconceptualized.
Peace by Peaceful Means is organized into four parts, each corresponding to a major research program in...