I. William Zartman and The Peace Intellectual Tradition

Bill Zartman, one of the towering scholars of peacemaking, has just passed at 93.

Many scholars and public intellectuals have had peace as an aim of their life’s work, but only a few—chiefly Kenneth Boulding, Randi Forsberg, Gene Sharp, Robert Johansen, Teresia Teaiwa, Marcus Raskin, Charles Osgood, and Johan Galtung—have given us the analytical building blocks for thinking our way to peace while also working in the real world to make peace a kind of praxis.

Zartman’s contributions place him in the esteemed coterie mentioned above. A true peace intellectual.

Zartman’s biggest contributions have been the concepts of “preventive diplomacy” and “ripeness,” that latter of which I have repeatedly used both to make sense of the world and to advise what is to be done to make the world suck less (e.g., here, here, here, and here).

I always ran up against the brute reality that the necessary policies of peace, restraint, and cooperation seemed to require contexts other than the ones we faced in order to be feasible. Ripeness as an idea made me realize that context is not just some fixed thing you inherit; it can be shaped. So if you want to make impossible policies possible, you have to aim your actions at ripening the situation accordingly. We shouldn’t just advocate for nuclear arms control, for example; we should direct statecraft toward making nuclear arms control politically viable.

My extension of Zartman’s version of ripeness stretches how he wrote about the concept, but I think it’s faithful to his ambitions as a man who wished for peace. Those of us who write and think for a public audience ought to be building on the best legacies of those who came before us. Part of the intellectual’s task is figuring out what from the past is worth discarding, saving, and adapting. And I’ve found much to propel my imagination in Zartman’s work.

I worry about how the peace intellectuals had real influence in the Cold War but basically lost the post-Cold War to all manner of chauvinists and jingoes. To the extent peace intellectuals exist, they’re Jedi dispersed across the Galaxy; far from policy and the halls of power. At the same time, I’ve become a much more radical thinker than I once was, and I find a lot of peace work to be dodging central issues relating to power and oppression.

Accordingly, if there are two criticisms of the older generation of peace intellectuals that stick, it’s that they had a class blind spot, and that they were too aloof of military strategy and the bellicose imagination of the national security state.

The former—the class blind spot—likely owes to the red-scare anti-Communism that pervaded their generation’s culture and politics. The academic research on peacebuilding, conflict management, and peace science that emerged since the Cold War has always suffered from not taking Marxist insights (or materialist analysis in general) seriously enough. The field of international relations suffers the same blind spot.

The second criticism that’s hard to deny is that peace studies became a siloed tradition of research alien to foreign policy practice, which gravitated more to strategic studies. Peace studies and strategic studies don’t dialogue with each other and have become profoundly antagonistic ways of understanding the world.

Power, it seems, has chosen strategic studies. The policymaker, whose hands pull the levers of state power, always encounters insights from strategic studies in their training but rarely gets so much as a whiff of what there is to learn from the peace tradition.

This is why I’ve been working to forge a more critical strategic studies (or a more strategic peace studies), re-synthesizing these now-distinct worlds of peace and power politics.

The thing I’ve always admired about the peace intellectuals—especially Zartman—is that they never lost the plot. The point of international relations, international security, strategic studies, and the rest ought to be peace (and of course, no justice, no peace). If we can’t make that normative commitment central to our efforts to build knowledge, then what the hell are we doing? I never met Zartman, but I’ve read him enough to know that he’d agree.

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Zartman’s son eulogized his father on Facebook, reminding us of the full humanity of a person who lived for not only peace but also, apparently, for music. That reminds of my favorite Shakespeare quote (maybe the only one I really know):

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.