About Peace Studies

The Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster grew from the shared concern of scholars and physicians at McMaster about the dangers of the Cold War. This collaboration initially led to the introduction of an undergraduate course in Peace Studies, and ultimately to the Combined Honours B.A. program and Minor in Peace Studies which are offered by the Faculty of Humanities. It also gave rise to public education initiatives, which have grown into two important annual lecture series, the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures and the Mahatma Gandhi Lectures on Nonviolence, and other lectures and conferences on areas such as peace education and peace through health. The Centre for Peace Studies was formally established in 1989.

The Centre for Peace Studies continues to be distinguished by its strong connection to the health sciences and has developed expertise in researching and applying ways to build peace through health initiatives. In addition to collaboration with the Population Health Research Institute (formerly the Centre for International Health), peace scholars at McMaster work with the Bertrand Russell Archives, the Institute for Globalization and the Human Condition, and the Women’s Studies Program.

Peace Studies is a discipline that seeks to understand war and peace, violence and nonviolence, conflict and conflict transformation, and that looks for ways to promote human well-being through this understanding. Peace researchers also study concepts of justice and the ways in which people organize and wage conflict to achieve what they perceive as just ends. By focusing attention on problems of conflict, particularly of a violent nature, researchers attempt to improve our methods of analyzing and dealing with these problems. Peace Studies is an interdisciplinary field, encompassing subject areas from the Faculties of Science and Social Sciences as well as Humanities.

Peace Studies is distinguished from other disciplines by its focus, its integration of approaches from varied disciplines, its explicit values and its engaged scholarship.

Focus: While many academic disciplines regard war and peace, violence and non-violence, conflict and conflict transformation as important aspects of human social life, Peace Studies is the only one that puts them at the centre of its study.

Integration: While Peace Studies is committed to drawing on the contributions of existing disciplines and disciplinary approaches, it insists on integrating these within its distinctive values and approaches.

Values: Peace Studies is one of a number of emerging disciplines that explicitly regards certain conditions as problematic and commits itself both to understanding and to changing these conditions. Just as Women's Studies regards male domination as problematic, and Environmental Studies regards some kinds of environmental destruction as problematic, Peace Studies regards war and certain kinds of violence as problematic. This does not mean one must be a pacifist to enter this discipline and it does not mean one must condemn all violence or every call to arms; but it does mean that Peace Studies as a discipline seeks the diminishment of war and large-scale violence and does not pretend to be neutral on the issue of whether these will dominate the human future.

Engagement: Peace Studies is an engaged discipline. This means that the student of Peace Studies will be encouraged to become engaged in practical action in society and to relate this action to what is learned in the classroom. Practical action is crucial to the student's learning (theory and practice are intricately related) and to the empowerment of the student as an agent of change.

The Centre for Peace Studies pursues its mission through the innovative and interdisciplinary undergraduate program, the integrated research and action of its members and associates, and the conferences and lectures it organizes with renowned scholars and activists. The Centre for Peace Studies seeks application of knowledge in its research and teaching.

Peace Studies seeks to create peace practitioners who will have the knowledge, skills and values essential to the building of a world where conflict is handled and justice is achieved humanely and creatively. Undergraduate students choose from an interdisciplinary selection of courses to complete either a Combined Honours B.A. in Peace Studies or a Minor in Peace Studies. The core Peace Studies courses introduce the concepts, skills and values of Peace Studies and shape the student’s capacities in later inquiry, research and applied courses. These capacities are expanded by relevant courses from History, Philosophy, English and Cultural Studies, Communication Studies and Multimedia, Comparative Literature, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Economics, Labour Studies, Political Science, Religious Studies, Sociology and Indigenous Studies. McMaster’s program puts particular emphasis on nonviolence as an overarching value and practice area, and it has developed expertise, which it shares with students in the program, on health as an arena for practical peacebuilding. Students are strongly oriented to apply their knowledge and to learn from doing. Classes encourage problem-based and inquiry learning processes in small groups.

Themes

Teaching and research at McMaster’s Centre for Peace Studies currently focuses on four main themes:

Peace Through Health

Peace through Health is an emerging academic discipline focusing on how health interventions in actual and potential war zones may contribute to peace. The Peace through Health Working Group examines and promotes initiatives such as humanitarian ceasefire, the use of health expertise to restrict weapons and war strategies, and the combining of individual and social healing in war zones.

Human Rights

Human Rights are intrinsically connected with peace and social justice. Peace is often a precondition for the effective promotion of human rights and sustainable peace is founded on respect for basic human rights. The Centre for Peace Studies focuses on both historical and contemporary global issues of human rights, social justice, peace and conflict. Peace Studies courses and research explore the interrelationship between peace, human rights and social justice.

Peace Education

Both locally and globally, the Centre for Peace Studies explores and applies strategies for educating for a culture of peace. Since 2001, it has worked in a local partnership with the Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace to facilitate the Annual Conferences on Peace Education in Canada, which provide opportunities for participants to exchange knowledge and develop critical skills for nonviolent social change. The Centre’s focus on peace education has also been an important part of its projects in areas of conflict; for example, the Afghanistan project resulted in introducing peace education into the national curriculum and getting 40,000 copies of a peace education book into Afghan schools.

Peace Activism/Advocacy

Through research and teaching, faculty and students further their understanding of the causes and effects of conflict and violence and test strategies to transform conflict. Several Peace Studies courses, work studies and internships are aimed at providing Peace Studies students with opportunities to apply and expand knowledge gained in the classrooms to practical community settings by working with local activist organizations on specific projects. Courses also expose students to the practical and career-oriented aspects of Peace Studies drawing in the Centre’s own extensive international peace work.

Student Stories

Branka Marijan
in Switzerland

Branka Marijan

“The Peace Studies program shows you the world, literally. It allowed me the opportunity to study at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (where I was introduced to international law and the work of international organizations) and to contribute my knowledge about the Balkans. Informative staff and faculty, relevant courses and diversity of opinions contribute to an understanding of issues shaping our world.”

Julie Hyde
in Costa Rica

Julie Hyde

“My experiences within the Peace Studies program – both as a student and Teaching Assistant – provided unique insights into the complex challenges to peace at both local and global levels. During this time I discovered my own passion for education and this inspired me to enrol in the Peace Education M.A. program at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace (located in Costa Rica). I have since completed my studies and I am working at McMaster, educating about peace and for peace within an undergraduate setting. The theoretical and practical avenues explored within the McMaster Peace Studies program set me on this course.”

Julia Hitchcock
in Angola

Julia Hitchcock

Julia Hitchcock spent several summers teaching English in the southern Angolan city of Lubango. She first went to Angola – a country that has suffered years of devastating civil war – with a high school friend who had grown up there, and who was organizing an English language summer program through a local church. Right after this first experience in her first year of Humanities at McMaster, Julia found what she wanted in Peace Studies. “I did a course on the theory and practice of nonviolence that made a big impression on me. I was always thinking of the Angolan context, and the suffering I’d seen there and wondering how that could be transformed. So I was always connecting Peace Studies and Angola in my mind.” As a result, Julia took an applied humanities course that allowed her to develop and offer peace workshops in Angola and to get credit towards her degree.

Aly Ostrowski

Aly Ostrowski
in India

Aly Ostrowski

“With the assistance of the Centre for Peace Studies and Association of Universities and Colleges Canada (AUCC), I had the unique opportunity to travel to India for three months to interview grassroots activists from a nonviolent social movement. The Mahila Shanti Sena (MSS) or “Women’s Peace Brigade” is a revolutionary project embraced by NGOs, peace educators and individual women throughout north and northeastern India. It is transforming individual consciousness and greater communities through an array of nonviolent methods firmly rooted in Gandhian philosophy. This trip not only exposed me to the precarious circumstances women face in India, but it also revived my faith in the practical power of nonviolent activism. Unlike other programs, Peace Studies offers a unique, trans-disciplinary framework that bridges progressive theories with creativity, community building and engaged activism.”

Members of the Centre for Peace Studies share a commitment to the application of knowledge and have worked in many areas of the world suffering from violent conflict.

Peace Through Health

In 1991 following the first Gulf war, an International Study Team which included several people from McMaster University visited Iraq and gave an early report of the impact of war and sanctions on the Iraqi population. When the first of the wars in the Balkans broke out, concerned individuals from McMaster (from both the Centre for Peace Studies and the then Centre for International Health) came together to consider how to make a positive difference in an increasingly terrible situation. From this concern came the idea of peace through health. The result was an initiative to carry out field projects while simultaneously reflecting on and analyzing the actions, and evaluating when possible. The first was an epidemiologic project on the physical and mental health of children in the occupied territory of Gaza. This was followed by an epidemiologic study of child mental health in Sri Lanka, and an intervention on mental health and peacebuilding for war-affected children in Croatia. The Sri Lankan work evolved into an unusual and wonderful intervention – the Butterfly Garden – a healing garden where children from several sides of ethnic divides come together to grow things, make things, sing and dance and tell stories. The Croatian work was evaluated in a controlled trial and showed evidence of effectiveness in improving mental health and reducing ethnic hatred.

A later project grew from this work. The Canadian International Development Agency-funded “Building Peaceful Societies” project strengthened the peacebuilding capacities of social institutions in Afghanistan. The achievements of this project include training large numbers of governmental staff, integrating peace education into the national school curriculum, establishing two model “peace schools,” sparking plans for centres for Peace Studies at two Afghan universities, and spreading proposals for national reconciliation. The Centre for Peace Studies continues its involvement in Afghanistan through its membership of the Canadian Coalition for Afghan Peace and Development, a broad-based, non-profit and apolitical coalition of Canadian universities, non-governmental organizations and individuals, which developed out of McMaster’s Afghanistan Working Group.

The Peace through Health dialogue continues among a global network of thinkers and workers in the Peace through Health framework, focussing on the context of current war, the substantial challenges of research in this area, and on education of both health and peace workers in this framework, with the McMaster-Lancet Challenge conferences on Peace through Health as centrepoints. Publications resulting from the Peace through Health work include chapters for a new textbook on Peace Studies edited by Johan Galtung and Charles Webel (Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, Routledge 2007), and a textbook published by Kumarian Press on Peace through Health, by Joanna Santa Barbara and Neil Arya (who has taught the Peace through Health course).

The Butterfly Garden
– a healing garden
where children from
several sides of
ethnic divides come
together to grow
things, make things,
sing and dance and
tell stories.

Mahila Shanti Sena

The Centre for Peace Studies cooperated with the Gandhian organization Shrambharati, based in Patna, India, to sponsor a conference in Vaishali, India in 2001, which led to the formation of the Women’s Peace Brigade (Mahila Shanti Sena). Since its founding in 2002, MSS has facilitated training for over 65,000 women and empowered over 400,000 women leaders from six different states in India. Undergraduate students from McMaster have been able to conduct research through internships with MSS.

Events

Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures

This prestigious annual lecture series is sponsored by the Centre for Peace Studies and held at McMaster University. The series focuses on issues related to the maintenance of world peace based on respect for human rights, democracy and justice. Of particular importance in the selection of peace lecturers, besides their academic depth, is their demonstrated commitment to active engagement in peace making. The presence of the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster led to the naming of the series, which was launched in 1985. This lecture series is endowed in part by the Keith Leppmann Memorial Fund of McMaster University, established in 1990 by Keith’s family and friends. Past lecturers include E.P. Thompson, Mary Kaldor, Sir Shridath Ramphal, Randall S. Forsberg, Richard Falk, Elena Bonner, Edward W. Said, Vandana Shiva, Ursula Franklin, Ramsey Clark and Kenneth Coates

Our aim is not
to put Gandhi on
a pedestal, but
rather to take
seriously the
tradition for which
he gave his life.

Mahatma Gandhi Lectures on Nonviolence

Established at McMaster University under the direction of the Centre for Peace Studies in order to make the value and strategies on non-violence widely known, and to develop the concept and practice of nonviolence through intellectual analysis and criticism, dialogue, debate and experimentation. Each year a respected analyst or practitioner of nonviolence, chosen by a subcommittee of the Centre for Peace Studies, is brought to McMaster to deliver one or more lectures or workshops on nonviolence. The series is named after Gandhi to honour his role in the revitalization and development of nonviolence. Gandhi brought together East and West, spirituality and practical politics, the ancient and the contemporary, and in so doing he helped rescue nonviolence from sectarianism and irrelevance. Our aim is not to put Gandhi on a pedestal, but rather to take seriously the tradition for which he gave his life. Our inaugural lecture was given by Ovide Mercredi in 1997.

The Gandhi Peace Festival

The peace festival was started in 1993 by the India-Canada Society of Hamilton in cooperation with the Centre for Peace Studies. Linked with the Mahatma Gandhi Lectures on Nonviolence, the festival aims to promote nonviolence, peace and justice, to help various peace and human rights organizations within the local community of Hamilton and Burlington to become collectively visible, to exchange dialogue and resources and to build on local interest in peace and human rights issues. It is held annually on the weekend closest to October 2, Ghandi’s birthday.