Traditional peace research has focused on violence and its consequences. Such a focus may divert attention from nonviolent conflict resolution and similar actions, which often exist even in the midst of massive violence. It is possible that traditional peace research has thus neglected nonviolent conflict resolution as well as the capacity for nonviolence in peoples and cultures.

 

Therefore, the main task for the Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) at the University of Tromsø is to promote nonviolent conflict resolution and the creation of peace. We believe that valuable knowledge may be found in areas of low levels of violence and that more useful lessons may be learned from successful conflict resolution than from areas of atrocities and failed resolution efforts.

 

Peace studies are concerned with inter-state relations, but also with a wide range of other social conflict lines, such as those related to gender, generation, culture, class, race, ethnicity and nation, as well as the conflict between human society and nature. Our studies are global, and our position in the peaceful Far North with a vast and sparsely populated area in a tough natural climate and a history of complex ethnic and cultural relations including the problems of hierarchy, recognition and cultural oppression, gives us a chance to learn from a wide range of nonviolent conflict resolution methods. The wider region of the North of Europe also gives us a unique context in which to study conflict resolution while enabling us to compare our experience with experiences from other areas.

 

Peace studies consist of theoretical-empirical, critical and constructive work. As an applied science, peace studies should pay attention to the constructive part of the work.

 

From numerous and diverse cases ranging from everyday quarrels to large-scale massive unarmed revolutions in the last two decades, there are valuable experiences to study which may have been underestimated, lost or unjustly treated as insignificant by researchers. Even in the midst of violent conflicts, there are often actors using active nonviolence. CPS will study nonviolent conflict resolution empirically and comparatively and will apply a multi-disciplinary pluralistic approach. We will discuss the theoretical implications and communicate the results to a wide audience.