1972/12/01 by Elise Boulding
Social Sciences · #Peacebuilding and International Security
paper · doi:10.1177/002200277201600402
When scholars committed to peace and conflict research first began consciously separating themselves from the older discipline of international relations, particularly during the period of explosive development of new institutions and working groups in the late fifties and early sixties, much time was spent trying to figure out the logical basis for an essentially intuitive revolt against the IR Establishment. Intuitions of a new way of thinking have a way of leaping out of the existing fields of one's conceptual structures, leaving the mind with the task of reorganizing cognitive maps. In the course of cognitive reorganization that followed on the initial intuitive leap, peace researchers elaborated so many different ways of mapping the peace research field that they acquired a somewhat illusory sense of working in an intellectual movement of enormous diversity in terms of conceptualizations and substantive interests. At the time of the 1969 UNESCO advisory meeting of experts on peace research, Kenneth Boulding and I took the occasion to examine this assumed diversity, in an analysis of the areas covered by peace research journals and international relations journals in the previous ten years, based on an admittedly cursory survey of titles of articles published. At that time we wrote: