The Future of Peace History

Abstract This chapter argues that peace history must be mainstreamed within the historical profession if the field is to thrive going forward. There are two challenges to overcome: (1) most historians are either indifferent to or unaware of peace history as a field, and (2) historians are underrepresented in peace studies and thus have effectively conceded peace research to other disciplines. The result is that peace research outside of history is poorly historicized, and peace as a subject within history is poorly theorized. Most historians understand “peace” to mean negative peace, and John Galtung’s normative framing of positive peace as social justice is not very useful for a profession that has an overarching ethical commitment to uncovering the violence of the past. Ironically, many historians, including those doing cutting edge work on histories of slavery and colonialism, are peace historians without being aware of it. Historians outside of peace studies must become more aware of the ways that peace is implicated in their work, and peace historians need to continue to push the historical profession toward novel and better historicizations of peace. To facilitate this transformation, the author suggests “right ordering” as a theoretical alternative to Galtung’s positive and negative peace. Viewing peace as a discourse on right ordering means looking for the ways in which people in the past sought to order their world according to their particular notions of harmony. Peace was both a language and an assertion of power. It could enable violence or seek to limit it.