A PEACE ACADEMY
TO BUILD THE CHANNELS
Milton C. Mapes, Jr.

In a society as conflict-ridden as ours, it would be hard to imagine an institution more timely or more greatly needed than a National Academy of Peace and Conflict Resolution.

We stand today at the nexus of three major historical developments. Two of them our demonstrated inability to apply the ways and means of peace and the continued growth of violence as a method of resolving conflict tend to threaten the very existence of society. The third one the recent development of conflict resolution as a new field of knowledge appears to offer at least a hope of salvation if it can be developed rapidly enough.

For at least two millennia, western civilization’s primary goal and highest value has been peace, but throughout that period our society’s fabric has been rent time and again by the violence of war. While “Peace on Earth” has been the constant theme of our religions and our politicians, we have never learned how to achieve it on either the international or interpersonal levels. In the words of Patrick Henry, “Gentlemen may cry, ‘Peace! Peace!” but there is no peace!”

Until the 1940s, the search for peace was an interesting but not critical social saga; but the scientific developments of the past four decades have changed all that and made the management of conflict a suddenly desperate challenge. Our response to that challenge has become the single dominant issue of our times and, in a real sense, of all history. If our society does not learn to handle conflict far better than the human race has ever handled conflict in the past, our civilization shall not survive. As Professor Kenneth E. Boulding wrote earlier this year in his testimony to the Senate Education Subcommittee.”The present system has with in it a certainty of our eventual destruction in nuclear war.”

On the interpersonal and community level, conflict has been accepted as at least the intermittent norm: and while society has frowned on physical violence as a method of settling disputes, it has often treated acts of violence as discrete actions unrelated to the initial conflict. At the same time it has developed a number of substitutes for physical violence and has unhesitatingly accommodated legal, social, or structural violence as socially acceptable forms of conflict resolution. Nevertheless, when we see today the well-recorded growth of all forms of intra-societal conflict, we may well ask if both the form and structure of our society may not be threatened. With half our marriages destined to end in divorce, with violent crime emerging as a leading growth industry, and with personal security declining precipitously, it appears certain that our future society will be radically different from anything we have known in the past.

The Advent of Conflict Resolution:

In this context it is peculiarly appropriate that the advance of science, which has provided the means to destroy our civilization, may have simultaneously provided the means to preserve it. The application of the insights and techniques emerging from the work of our social and behavioral scientists to the problem of conflict has created a new field of knowledge which can best be described as the emerging social science of conflict resolution. While conflict resolution has yet to achieve the full framework and substance of a mature social science, the demonstrated effectiveness of its methods and techniques when utilized in conflicts at every level of society offers real hope for the future. The rapid development and dissemination of conflict resolution theory and techniques may hold immense promise for the dynamic stability of our future social structure. Conflict may indeed be as inevitable in human society as tomorrow’s sunrise, but its effective, nonviolent resolution can often make it a creative and constructive social force, rather than a destructive factor.

Building Institutions and Channels:

Our analysis thus far raises the obvious question of what is required to accelerate the development of conflict resolution and its application to solve our society’s problems. When we realize that peace has been a nearly universal goal of our civilization for over three thousand years and is still as far from realization as ever, we have to ask ourselves why. We have done a superb job of applying science to the arts of destruction, but we have barely begun to apply the accomplishments of our social and behavioral scientists to the art of survival, to teach us to live together on this shrinking globe in peace.

General Omar Bradley described the problem in 1948 when he told us:
“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace-more about killing than we know about living.”

When we ask ourselves why this is true, we quickly realize that it is simply a matter of getting what we pay for. Since General Bradley made that statement, we have invested over $2 trillion in a vain search for security through military arms, and spent almost nothing to develop a science of peace. We have four excellent military academies and at least five war colleges all dedicated to maintaining peace by armed force. Yet, at the present time we have no major institutional commitment to research or training in the field of peacemaking.

The effect of all this is to develop and deepen the channels for utilizing resources in military methods of conflict resolution. At the present time, we plan to direct over $800 million per day of military expenditures through those channels for the next five years-a daily expenditure far beyond any king’s ransom ever imagined.

The problem is that we have allowed a terrible gap to develop between the application of our national resources to war and their application to the cause of peace. This has occurred largely because we have unwittingly created the institutions and deepened the channels to utilize unlimited amounts of money for the systems of war, while we have not yet begun to develop the equivalent channels to direct investment funds into the search for peace. The solution is apparent from the analysis. We can close that terrible gap by creating new institutions.

MILTON C. MAPES. JR. is executive director of the National Peace Academy Campaign, a public interest lobby devoted to the enactment of legislation to establish a United States Academy of Peace.
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NOTE: Milton C. Mapes passed away June 10th 1984 at the University of Maryland Hospital.