In April 2024, mandelbaum published a more than 500 pages volume on critical peace research, edited by our Research Affiliate Josef Mühlbauer and Maximilian Lakitsch from the Institute of the Foundations of Law at the Department of Global Governance, University of Graz. The book is a compilation of concepts, analyses and diagnoses. It comprises 22 contributions of which 2 are in English. Read the contents here.

It is the right time for this book with the right topic: A “Zeitenwende” – a turning point in history – is needed for sciences that question government policies that use that term. It is the intention of well-known Austrian peace researcher Werner Wintersteiner’s essay to reclaim the term “Zeitenwende” for a critical reflection of peace research.

Let me elaborate on this idea: Why is it now the right time for critical peace research? Because the issue of war and peace is on the table again after it seemed to have been forgotten for decades. Humanity is facing a poly-crisis in which the global challenges – though known since the end of World War II – have in the meantime reinforced each other to form a Gordian knot that demands urgent resolution, if human life is to deserve continuation. Otherwise, injust relations between groops of people lead to more and deeper violent conflicts; the global warming, the extinction of species and environmental pollution exacerbate these conflicts; and the use of weapons of mass destruction could escalate these conflicts to the point of no return. The military conflicts around Ukraine, in the so-called Middle East and the preparations for such conflicts around China have the potential to lead to nuclear war. As I wrote some time ago, the term “responsibility to protect” (R2P), introduced – like “Zeitenwende” – with a misguiding meaning, namely to camouflage military interventions as humanitarian missions, has one correct application: the responsibility to protect all of humanity from annihilism. Annihilism is the explicit justification or trivialisation of brinkmanship that risks annihilation, its preparation or execution, or the implicit sleepwalking into annihilation. So, “Zeitenwende” for peace research could instigate to connect to ideas of some 40 years ago and flesh out the issue of the responsibility to protect all of humanity from annihilism. This would be an important issue of critical peace research.

Wintersteiner’s detailed ideas are a blueprint for the overhauling of the research. And the volume brings together many more issues. Let me mention just a few.

It tackles military logic that is based on bipolar thinking of We and Them (“we are the good”) to justify arms deliveries to Ukraine, as Dieter Segert, elected Member of the Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, puts it. The German party Die Linke finally collapsed over the discourse for and against military support of Ukraine, which is described in detail by Ingar Solty from the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. Michael Berndt, member of Arbeitskreis Herrschaftskritische Friedensforschung of Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (AFK), asks whether, for example, military interventions in the Sahel can be seen as part of the solution to the problem or rather as part of the problem itself. Ronald Tuschl who teaches at the Institut für Bildungsforschung und PädagogInnenbildung at University of Graz finds even in the Star Wars film series educational peace policy connections.

The next 100 pages are dedicated to reflections of conflict transformations supported by peace-workers on the ground.

Another 100 pages deal with transnational structural violence. A long essay (in English) by US political scientist Roy Casagranda from the Community College in Austin, Texas, starts the history of US Imperialism with John Locke and the domestic Manifest Destiny and zeroes in on the Middle East during the last 4 decades. According to Casagranda, “the world is in the worst shape it’s been in since the end of WWII. Refugees, genocide, fascism, and global warming are the only prospects in 2022 and in large part it’s all because of foolish US policies” (page 302). After the current change of US presidency the prospects might even become worse. This part is rounded off with an interview of Mühlbauer with retired professor at the Department of Social Sciences, Universität Osnabrück, Mohssen Massarrat on US hegemony, geopolitics and Iran.

In the last 100 pages, Head of Division, Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education, Department of Educational Science, University of Klagenfurt, Claudia Brunner cogitates about the contradiction inherent to the system of producing revolutionary ideas within an institution that is by trend reactionary and concludes with propagating the decolonisation of university. In their articles, Lakitsch as well as Juliana Krohn – she works at the Institut für Philosophie at Universität Innsbruck – strive to incorporate ecology into peace research, Lakitsch through the proclamation of an “affirmative turn”, Krohn through decolonisation. When Mühlbauer, in the end, presents a selection of actors in the field with whom he has come into contact, he recalls the famous quote of Marx: “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.”

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