The Praxis of Peace and Conflict Studies: The Field of Genocide Studies

The field of Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) was launched in the mid-twentieth century with revolutionary aspirations for explaining, describing and understanding protracted violent conflicts. The field’s architects called for inquiry into the “whole person” of conflict actors that required inquiry into the social, psychological and political spheres of their lives. But the proposed research perspectives for carrying out such inquiry were devoid of revolutionary prescription. Regarding such perspectives, they set the stage that continues to this day for disciplinary conservatism by invoking research traditions from the positivist social sciences and from the interpretative social sciences. A third research tradition that underpins certain areas of inquiry in PCS is Phronesis research, according to which the social sciences are fundamentally pragmatic endeavors that are organized around strategies to address pressing social and political challenges of society. Yet, importantly, Phronesis research has garnered little theoretical attention among conflict analysts. No conflict analyst has ever explicitly cited Phronesis as a basis of their research practice. With this chapter, we offer the first theoretical reflection of Phronesis research in PCS. From this perspective, PCS constitutes forms of research praxis, that is, an objective inquiry into the critical conditions—personal, social, and political—for the liberation of conflict actors from the internal drives and external forces that lead to mass violence. Genocide Studies serves as a prototype of such praxis. After providing critical remarks about positivist and constructivist research traditions in the social sciences (section 1), we offer a short genealogy of social science as praxis, including the contributions of Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School (section 2). We then present the defining elements of Phronesis research in the social sciences generally (section 3). Such elements are realized in the research praxis of Genocide Studies (section 4).