The Four Stages of Peace Studies
The Four Stages of Peace Studies
The direction
From disciplines working apart toward one problem-led method. Trans- rather than inter-disciplinary.
The four stages
- Multi-disciplinary: specialists each contribute from their own angle.
- Inter-disciplinary: fields discuss the same problem together.
- Cross-disciplinary: fields learn from each other, both ways.
- Trans-disciplinary: the problem picks the tools, from any field.
The Transcend approach
Johan Galtung’s name for the trans-disciplinary stage. No group owns peace, so peace studies belong to all.
Peace has no single home discipline. A strong peace researcher stops being an economist or a psychologist first and becomes someone who reaches for whatever a problem needs. Peace studies arrive there through four stages, moving from separate fields working apart to one problem-led method.
The Four Stages, in Order
Peace studies are still a young field, so the mature, fully blended form takes time to reach. The road usually runs through four stages, each one bringing the disciplines closer together.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Multi-disciplinary | Specialists from several fields each contribute their own view of peace. |
| Inter-disciplinary | Fields open a dialogue and address the same event or problem together. |
| Cross-disciplinary | The dialogue deepens into mutual learning, usually running both ways. |
| Trans-disciplinary | The problem decides which tools to draw from any field. This is the Transcend approach. |
Multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary.
Specialists first contribute from separate angles, then discuss a shared problem, then learn from one another both ways, and finally let the problem itself decide which tools to borrow from any field.
The stages describe a direction, not a strict ladder. What matters is the move away from isolated fields and toward a method built around the problem itself.
Stage One and Two: Contributing, Then Talking
In the multi-disciplinary stage, a university or a conference invites specialists from several fields to contribute to peace from their own angle. An economist, a sociologist, and a psychologist each see peace differently, and gathering those views makes the subject richer.
The inter-disciplinary stage goes a step further and encourages dialogue among the approaches. The usual method is to point several fields at the same event, the same period in history, or the same problem, which takes at least two departments willing to share the focus.
Getting even this far is not automatic. It depends on fields being willing to sit in the same room.
Stage Three: Learning From Each Other
The cross-disciplinary stage turns dialogue into mutual learning. It is not enough to present a view and hear another in return; each field takes something home and changes because of it. The exchange usually runs both ways.
A short example makes it concrete. A psychologist might pick up a sociologist’s idea about status disequilibrium, where someone ranks high on one measure such as education but low on another such as power, and study the mind behind it. The sociologist, in turn, might study the social effects of a settled, untroubled mind. Two fields, one problem, each learning from the other.
The fields actually learn from each other.
Earlier stages have fields presenting or discussing. In the cross-disciplinary stage they actually learn from each other, usually both ways. A psychologist might take up a sociologist’s idea about status gaps while the sociologist studies its social side.
The test of this stage is whether each field walks away changed by the exchange.
Stage Four: The Transcend Approach
The trans-disciplinary stage is the one Johan Galtung named the Transcend approach. Here the problem, not any single field, decides which intellectual tools to use, and those tools are pulled from several disciplines’ tool chests at once, much as health studies work. It may build on the first three stages or arrive on its own.
Something happens to the disciplines along the way: they learn and change too. Historians start to focus more on peace and on how a war could have been avoided. Economists lean toward survival and equity. Each field leaves the exchange a little different from how it entered.
Johan Galtung’s name for the trans-disciplinary stage.
The problem, not any one field, decides which intellectual tools to use, and they come from several disciplines’ tool chests. Along the way those disciplines learn and change too, as historians focus more on how war could be avoided and economists on survival and equity.
No group holds a monopoly on peace. Not a country, a gender, a generation, a race, a class, or a nation. Peace belongs to everyone, and so the study of peace belongs to everyone too. Peace work is also trans- rather than inter-national: a serious conflict rarely gets solved by the two parties trading concessions on their own, so others step in from wherever the needed expertise sits.
Each actor sees the conflict from its own angle.
Family, community, or nation, every party reads the same conflict differently. Because the study of peace is tied so closely to the study of conflict, understanding those separate angles is where resolving it begins.
That last point sets up the harder question underneath all of this: why people end up in conflict at all.
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