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figure a

Graphs speak louder than words. A first version of the curve showing the decline in battle-related deaths (combatants as well as civilians) after World War II was first published in Lacina/Gleditsch (2005), based on the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset generated by Bethany Lacina. It has been reproduced in numerous shapes and forms since then. This updated version shows the UCDP battle deaths data (1989–2013) and the PRIO data (1946–2008) in two separate time series. The Uppsala criteria for inclusion are slightly stricter, but the two series are roughly parallel for the 20 years that they overlap. No best estimate has yet been fixed for the casualties in Syria in 2013, so a high and a low estimate are given instead. This graph was created by Ida Rudolfsen for Gleditsch et al. (2015). The on-line appendix to that article includes a similar graph corrected for population size (i.e. depicting the probability of being killed in battle); it shows an even stronger decline of violence

My personal life has been influenced by war in several ways. During the Spanish Civil War, my parents were active in the solidarity movement for the Republic and under the auspices of the Norwegian Committee for Spain they helped to support a hospital in Alcoy and a children’s orphanage in Oliva. Although their efforts didn’t succeed in saving the Republic, it had the inadvertent happy consequence of adding a little Spanish girl to our family—so when I was born, I had a lovely older sister. During the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, my parents were recruited to the transport of the gold reserves of the Norwegian Central Bank to safekeeping outside Norway, an operation led by my uncle. As a result, my parents ended up in England for the duration of the war. I was born in the London area in the summer of 1942 and spent some early years in the company of incoming V1s and V2s. Back in occupied Norway, two of my close relatives were tortured for their participation in resistance activity and a third was shot during the emergency in Trondheim when I was close to three months old (Berg 2007). Obviously, I don’t remember any of this, so it would be an exaggeration to claim that experiencing war in my formative years influenced my choice of profession. My parents’ political attitudes and activities were obviously more influential in leading me to join the peace movement and the labour movement.Footnote 1

My professional life (I hesitate to think of it as a career) largely coincides with the history of peace research in Norway. I joined PRIO as a graduate student of sociologyFootnote 2 in January 1964 and have remained there until today, with outside adjunct positions and shorter leaves of absence that have not really interrupted the continuity. Organized peace research started in Norway in the spring of 1959, with the formation of the Section for Conflict and Peace Research at the Institute for Social Research, which became PRIO in 1964 and a fully independent institute in 1966.Footnote 3

1 The Beginnings

For the first five years I followed the activity at a discreet distance, fuelled mainly by my interest in the writings of Johan Galtung, PRIO’s founder. I joined the Norwegian section of the War Resisters’ International around 1959. I was greatly inspired by its pacifist manifesto (Galtung 1959) and became a conscientious objector. I am unable to put a date to my interest in social science. I grew up in a family with many natural scientists on my father’s side, including an aunt who was a professor of chemistry and the second women professor in Norway.Footnote 4 Consistent with everyone’s expectations, I enrolled as a science student at the University of Oslo in fall 1960, but didn’t stay long. After (barely) finishing the introductory courses, I took a year off, including a four-month peace march from London to Moscow—the European part of the San Francisco to Moscow Walk for Peace.Footnote 5 My ambitious parents had put me in primary school a year early (as a result I was always the smallest kid in class until the final year of high school)Footnote 6; now I ‘wasted’ that year. When I went back to the university, it was to study sociology, with minor degrees in philosophy and economics. Galtung (originally a statistician) and my father (a civil engineer and geographer) ganged up to try to persuade me to take at least one minor in science, but I was more interested in Galtung’s sociology and peace research than in his intellectual starting-point. In retrospect, I realize that I should have taken them more seriously and spent at least a full year studying mathematics and statistics.

Box 1.1: Brief CV

Born 17 July 1942 in Sutton, Surrey, England by Norwegian parents. Married (1966) to Kari Skrede, two children (1971, 1973), two grandchildren (2008, 2010).

Educated at the University of Oslo and University of Michigan. Mag.art. in sociology from University of Oslo (1968). Co-chair of the campaign against the Norwegian doctoral degree (1970).

Worked at PRIO since 1964, as research professor since 1988, editor of JPR (1975–76, 1983–2010). Professor of political science (part-time), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (1993–2013).

Served on various editorial boards and committees; president of the International Studies Association (2008–09).

Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Awarded the Lewis F Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award, Award for Outstanding Research (Møbius Prize) of the Research Council of Norway, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conflict Processes Section, American Political Science Association.

Outside academia served as editor of Pax magazine (1962–65), president of the Norwegian Students’ Association (1966), chair of a local branch of the Norwegian Labour Party (1980s and 1990s), chair of the board of Bestum School Band (1986–88), and as a columnist in Aftenposten (1992–99) and in Forskningspolitikk (2008).

For further details, see www.prio.org/staff/npg.

My first task as a research assistant at PRIO was in a project on nonviolent national defense. Galtung (1965) contributed an important conceptual article and I edited a volume in Norwegian featuring historical examples of nonviolent resistance (Gleditsch 1965a), but my contribution to the academic literature was modest (Gleditsch 1968c). The impressive record of Norwegian civilian resistance to the nazification of Norwegian society during World War II made the idea of building a national post-occupation defense seem plausible. Less realistic (as I see it today) was the idea of building a nonviolent national defense that could deter foreign invasion. The project petered out after a year or so. But nonviolence has remained close to my heart, and I am happy that the study on nonviolent resistance as an alternative to armed insurgency has recently spawned a special issue of Journal of Peace Research (Chenoweth/Cunningham 2013) and a new PRIO project that has become part of the ‘family business’ (Rivera Celestino/Gleditsch 2013).

2 International Interaction

Although peace research has been most concernedFootnote 7 with negative interaction (i.e. armed conflict), the analysis of positive forms of international interaction occupied a central position in PRIO’s research program in the first decade. My next project concerned international aviation. This became a source of some amusement to my friends, who argued that the Vietnam War was more important—a point that I didn’t dispute. The study of international organization memberships (Skjelsbæk 1971), international diplomacy (Kvadsheim 1970), and related topics promised to inform us about the structure of the international system. During a stint of teaching sociology at FLACSO in Chile, Galtung had observed that in order to fly from one Latin American country to another, one frequently had to travel via the US. In his early work, hypotheses from one level of organization transferred seamlessly to another. The international airline network looked to Galtung like a ‘feudal system’. The underlings related mainly to the overlord (known as the ‘underdogs’ and the ‘top-dog’ in his terminology, or the ‘serfs’ and the ‘slave-master’ among those a bit further left politically) and were prevented from organizing or even communicating between themselves. Data for my project were readily available in international airline guides. This became the topic of my master thesis (Gleditsch 1967, 1968d) and it also led me to some work in graph theory (Høivik/Gleditsch 1970), ably guided by my colleague Tord Høivik, who like Galtung had degrees in statistics as well as sociology. Chapter 3 on time differences and international interaction is one of my publications in this area.

A wider significance of international interaction patterns was that at the time ‘positive peace’ (as distinct from ‘negative peace’, the reduction of war) was somewhat vaguely defined as ‘the integration of human society’ (Galtung 1964: 2). Thus, studying international interaction patterns was a legitimate and important part of the study of peace. It was not until much later that peace research started taking an interest in the idea of liberal peace (Oneal et al. 1996) and connected positive and negative peace empirically. I don’t think I saw this link clearly at the time. Neither do I remember being very concerned with ‘the contact hypothesis’, despite what Peter Wallensteen says in his preface. In fact, even after I became convinced that there was something to the idea of a democratic peace (Gleditsch 1992c) my argument was tainted with skepticism about the most pervasive form of positive peace: Could economic interdependence really have anything to do with reducing armed conflict?Footnote 8 My attitude was undoubtedly reinforced by the heated Norwegian debate on EU membership. I voted ‘no’ in both referenda (1972 and 1994) and in 1971–72 contributed to the fighting spirit of the anti-membership movement by a series of newspaper comments on the polls. In these articles, several colleagues and I argued (correctly, as it turned out) that there was a majority against Norwegian membership and that those who said otherwise were tweaking the data. We eventually summed this work up in a book (Gleditsch/Hellevik 1977), but at the end of the day this probably had greater political than academic significance.

Returning for a moment to our early view of democracy, one of the early lessons from my mentor was to dismiss its importance for peace (Galtung 1967: 29). Galtung would later characterize democracies as particularly self-righteous and belligerent (Galtung 1996: Chap. 4), while I moved in the opposite direction. But prior to my conversion, when in an article (Gleditsch 1977) I listed five key ‘global values’, democracy (or even good governance) was not one of them.Footnote 9 We were more concerned with reversing dependency and promoting equality, a trait that was also reflected for many years in PRIO’s governing structure. When Galtung stepped down as director in 1970, PRIO adopted a ‘flat’ governing structure, although it retained a position as director. The salary structure was amended in 1972 to a system where everyone was on the same ladder and you could only move up by seniority (Gleditsch 1974a, 1980). But contrary to our hope, the system was never copied by other scholarly institutions, not even by those that had adopted a more revolutionary rhetoric.Footnote 10 When a majority of the researchers tired of equality in practice, PRIO reverted to a traditional governing structure and salary system for the public sector.

3 The Peace Dividend and the Arms Race

Another aspect of my work concerns the peace dividend or, more broadly, the economic effects of disarmament. In the 1960s, developing countries pressed for diverting resources from the arms race to development aid and this concern was picked up by the UN. Early on, I played a minor role in helping to organize a major conference on this topic (Benoit 1967).Footnote 11 Much later, I joined forces with two economists from Statistics Norway and wrote several reports for the UN on disarmament and development, eventually resulting in two books on the peace dividend in Norway (Gleditsch et al. 1994) and world-wide (Gleditsch et al. 1996). The global project was conducted through Project Link, an international network for econometric modeling. It was a source of some pride that our 1996 book had a preface by one Nobel laureate (Wassily Leontief) and a chapter by another (Lawrence Klein). In retrospect, I am now inclined to believe that the key theme of linking development to disarmament was an intellectual and political mistake. But the many econometric studies conducted under this rubric certainly contributed to undermining facile notions that the arms race was necessary to avoid economic collapse in market economies. My work in this area was totally dependent on the insights of my economist colleagues. Although I wasn’t completely a free rider, intellectually speaking, I chose not to reproduce any of this work here. A brief introduction can be found in Gleditsch et al. (1983) and my most recent effort (in Norwegian) is Cappelen/Gleditsch (2012).

The economics of disarmament is, of course, closely related to the arms race. The Richardson (1960) model of arms races is a true classic in peace research and is mostly tested by using arms expenditures as the indicator of arming. This model was challenged in peace research in the 1970s, notably by Senghaas (1979) who thought of the arms race as inner-directed or ‘autistic’. A PRIO-sponsored conference assessed this debate, leading to an edited volume (Gleditsch/Njølstad 1990). My own modest contribution was an introductory article (Gleditsch 1990b). In a review of the book, Andrew Mack generously suggested that my introduction was something that ‘students would kill for’,Footnote 12 but no casualties have been reported.

4 Norway in the Nuclear Arms Race

I have spent a lot of time (probably too much) looking into the Norwegian contribution to the military side of the East-West conflict. In a sense, this followed naturally from my early work in the peace movement.Footnote 13 Norway’s controversial decision to break with neutralism and join NATO in 1949 was accompanied by a declaration that foreign bases would not be established on Norwegian soil. This was meant to assuage Soviet fears that Norwegian territory might become a springboard for offensive attacks. The establishment of joint NATO commands after the outbreak of the Korean War put this policy under some pressure. But in 1961, after another heated debate, the social democratic government decided that Norway would remain nuclear-free. However, through NATO’s infrastructure program and bilateral arrangements with the US, Norway was littered with foreign-funded military electronic installations (radars, transmitters for navigation signals and communication, and stations for intelligence gathering), as well as airfields, all of which seemed likely to be employed in a nuclear showdown (Gleditsch/Lodgaard 1977). Some parts of this infrastructure had a clear role in the defense of Norwegian territory. Others did not, and could in my view only be understood as an exchange of strategic services: Norway gained in security by sheltering under the nuclear umbrella of the US, and in turn agreed to contribute to its strategic war-fighting capability. Some installations that served as peacetime preparations for strategic nuclear warfare were likely to be taken out in wartime by the Soviet Union, thus bringing the war to Norway even in the absence of a direct challenge to Norwegian sovereignty. Such an exchange of strategic services remained controversial domestically, particularly in the Labour Party. The Norwegian government therefore maintained a high level of secrecy and blurred the line between joint NATO projects and bilateral US operations. Of my work in this area, I am most proud of collaborative efforts with Owen Wilkes, an unorthodox Kiwi with few formal credentials but wide knowledge of the relevant science and an extraordinary knack for extracting information from the publications of the national security establishments. In a book on military navigation (Wilkes/Gleditsch 1987), we showed that the two transmitters for the Loran-C navigation system were built in Norway in 1960 at the request of the US and in preparation for the deployment of Polaris ballistic missile submarines in the Norwegian Sea. It had taken 15 years to reveal this to the Norwegian public, and even then only through investigative research and the leaking of a secret public inquiry (Schei et al. 1977). The military and political establishments were not pleased with our work. They would have been even less so, had they realized that it was I who obtained the secret report from a left-wing parliamentarian and passed it to the publisher. Indeed, the possibility of prosecuting us was considered, but no legal basis was found.

Eighteen months later, however, when we published a report on US-funded intelligence stations in Norway (Wilkes/Gleditsch 1979, 1981), the establishment struck. We were charged with a national security violation and eventually given a 6 months jail term, suspended by a 3:2 vote on the Norwegian Supreme Court (Gleditsch 1981a–c, 1982). The legal basis for the conviction was the so-called ‘puzzle doctrine’, originally formulated in a 1954 spy case. Although we claimed to have worked only with open sources, the combination of such sources could be detrimental to national security, according to the Court. At the time, the Conservative Party had just won the election and had committed itself to a public inquiry of what was going on at PRIO. But the committee appointed to look into the issue, tackled it in an academic manner (Midgaard et al. 1985), and the consequences for PRIO were limited. However, as a convicted felon I was denied entry into the US for several years—a somewhat ironic outcome given the stronger freedom-of-information tradition in the US. Unusually for a Norwegian, I still need a visa to enter the US, and mine still has several footnotes that have led me into interesting conversations with immigration officials at various airports.

5 Secrecy and Espionage

My encounter with official secrecy in Norway spurred an interest in secrecy legislation in other countries. I obtained a grant for a comparative study of freedom-of-information legislation in Norway and the US. A young lawyer, later to become head of Norway’s Economic Crimes Unit, wrote a book on this topic (Høgetveit 1981) and, with me, an article in English (Gleditsch/Høgetveit 1984).

When the Arne Treholt spy case broke in January 1984, I was naturally interested. He and I were of the same generation on the left side of student politics and his arrest as a spy for the Soviet Union came as an unpleasant surprise to all who knew him. In his initial police interrogation he confessed to being caught in a trap well known from the world of espionage: you let an intelligence agent get too close, and eventually it becomes difficult to pull out. Most of us had been exposed to Soviet agents, who were very active among young people on the left in the 1960s, but we had kept our distance or got out in time. Treholt did not. He went on to have a political career that must have exceeded his handlers’ expectations by a wide margin. Soon after his arrest, he withdrew his first statements and switched to an argument that he had only conducted private diplomacy—well hidden to the Foreign Ministry, his friends, and his family. The limited evidence for his leaking of material that was seriously detrimental to national security led to further controversy and spawned a host of conspiracy theories. I classified the relevant writings into traditionalist, revisionist, and post-revisionist, according to a scheme often used by Cold War historians (Gleditsch 1994b, 1995e). The shorter English article is Chap. 5 in this volume. The case remains controversial even today. A large number of new books have appeared, but most of them have contributed more myths than substance.

Another reason for my concern about the Treholt case was that some of his defenders drew a parallel between his ‘unofficial diplomacy’ and work undertaken in research institutes. Given my own conviction under some of the same paragraphs in the penal code, I was anxious not to let this view stand unopposed. In a short newspaper article (Gleditsch 1985), I warned against equating research conducted in full openness with covert contact with intelligence officials. I argued that ‘if for years you behave like a spy, you must reconcile yourself to the idea that someone might think that in fact you are one.’ Much to my surprise, this has over the years become my most frequently cited ‘bon mot’ in Norwegian media. It must have touched a raw nerve since Treholt (2004: 324, 476) cites it twice (albeit inaccurately).

Fear of foreign espionage and distrust of left-wing opposition were prime and intertwined motives behind political surveillance during the Cold War. When a window of opportunity appeared in 1999, I applied for my ‘secret file’ and eventually obtained a substantial sum in reparations for illegal collection and recording of information about my activities (Gleditsch 2003c). The legal window closed in 2007, and currently no private individuals can apply for their Norwegian intelligence records, however outdated (Gleditsch 2014b). Although measures for the monitoring of the secret services have been strengthened, traditional habits of official secrecy are hard to change, and today’s information society invites private as well as official invasions of privacy. An application for my Stasi file is still pending and I hope at some point to apply for my FBI file. But perhaps I should be more concerned about my file at Google.

6 The Waning of War

While peace research initially had an optimistic view of the potentialities of social science, it was quite pessimistic about the state of the world. In part, peace research was founded in protest against the nuclear arms race and the dominant position of realist thinking in international relations. Galtung (1964, 1967) had written that the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history and that the world was moving in the direction of more conflict. There was widespread fear that human civilization might not survive to see the new millennium. The number of armed conflicts was rising through most of the Cold War. Rummel (1994) had not yet taught us that the victims of ‘democide’ (violence by governments against unorganized civilians, mostly their own citizens) by far outnumbered the victims of war. Had we been more alert and attuned to this form of violence, we would have worried that the world had just experienced its largest outburst of what we now call one-sided violence. This was ‘the Great Leap Forward’ in China, with 45 million deaths over just 4 years (1958–61) (Dikötter 2010). We now know that the rising number of conflicts in part was an artifact of the decolonization process and the creation of new and fragile states, that the periodic peaks in the lethality of war generated by the Korean War, the Vietnam War etc. were progressively lower and never reached the levels of violence of the World Wars, and that despite Cambodia (1975), Rwanda (1994), and Darfur (2003), one-sided violence is also on the wane.Footnote 14 It was not until the end of the Cold War that we heard Mueller (1989) arguing that war was obsolescent, and eventually our own data collection efforts (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Lacina/Gleditsch 2005) helped to persuade us that this was so. In fact, as Payne (2004) and Pinker (2011) have argued, violence is increasingly getting discredited as a tool in human interaction. Looking back at the bloody history of the human race, Pinker and others have even cast serious doubt on the top rank of the twentieth century on violence if we adjust for population size, in other words, look at the probability that a random individual will get killed in violence. Curiously, many peace activists remain skeptical of the good news. My own view is that the peace movement (in which I am no longer very active) should claim its part of the credit for the things we have done right. Chapter 10 contains my introduction to a symposium on Pinker’s book, based on a session at the International Studies Association convention in 2012.

Another part of my generation’s introduction to peace research was that wars are increasingly harmful to participants and to civilians. A popular saying in peace research circles ran roughly like this: In the old days, 90 % of those killed in war were combatants, today 90 % of those killed are civilians.Footnote 15 As Roberts (2010) and Eck (2005) have shown, there is absolutely no scientific basis for these figures, though they are still repeated from time to time. We will probably never have accurate statistics on this, but a more reasonable hypothesis seems to be that the ratio of civilian to military casualties remains roughly stable over time, although it probably varies from one conflict to another.

My embracing the waning-of-war argument has led to occasional accusations of excessive optimism. As noted, peace research was born in an era of considerable pessimism—reasonable enough when living under a ‘balance of terror’. But after rereading the articles I have selected for this volume, I readily plead guilty to the charge of optimism. While the technological enthusiasm of Chap. 3 may now seem excessive, I have only been strengthened in the environmental optimism that shines through in Chaps. 6, 9, and 11, as well as in my more recent belief in the global decline of violence as set out in Chaps. 8 and 10. The two are related, since environmental degradation (and climate change in particular) is a main contender to fill the gap in what Mueller (1994) aptly calls the ‘catastrophe quota’.

Of course, we should not be too discouraged when we are proven wrong about things we believed in during the pioneer period. Indeed, what would be the point of doing research if we could only confirm what we already knew? Too many social scientists are satisfied by uttering periodic post hoc statements to the effect that ‘I am not surprised’. This does not advance the research frontier. We need scholars who stick their neck out with bold hypotheses and even venture into predictions (Hegre et al. 2013), even if at first they are not likely to be spot-on or even near misses.

I am happy to report that there was one widespread myth that we did not embrace. According to an obscure study, there had been only 292 years of peace since 3600 BC and 14,531 wars had claimed 3,640,000,000 lives. Moreover, 1,656 arms races had been conducted and all but 16 of them had ended in war. In the late 1950s and early 1960s these numbers made their way through countless newspapers, military journals, and peace movement periodicals. We were warned off this story by a memorandum from the Rand Corporation (Haydon 1962) that revealed that the these ‘calculations’ were cited from an article by Norman Cousins (1953) that reported on ‘an imaginary experiment’ conducted by ‘Dr. P. Storhjerne’ (Dr. P. Great Brain), a former President of the Norwegian Academy of Science. J. David Singer, founder of the Correlates of War project, tipped us about this memo when he spent a sabbatical in Oslo in 1963–64.Footnote 16 Later, we advised Readers’ Digest not to give further publicity to this tale when (to their credit) they looked for Norwegian sources to verify it.

7 Publish or Perish

A high point in the pioneer period was the launch of JPR in 1964. The journal was originally planned as Journal of Peace and Conflict Research, in line with PRIO’s own name and as a concession to those who still remained skeptical of ‘peace’ as an academic topic. However, Galtung finally settled for Journal of Peace Research and deleted ‘conflict’ from PRIO’s name. The first publisher, Norwegian University Press, was probably more skeptical about the economic prospects than about the name, and PRIO remained responsible for the finances of the journal. For over 22 years we (or rather the Research Council of Norway) paid them a subsidy for their publication services. Not until we put the journal out for competitive bidding on the international market in 1986, did we realize that, at least by then, the publisher should be paying us! Today, owning JPR, or any reputable journal, is a profitable enterprise.

Shortly after having been present at the creation, I was enlisted as an assistant editor in 1965 and served as editor for some 28 years (1975–76, 1983–2010). I also had the privilege of handpicking my successor, Henrik Urdal. Under his steady hand the journal has continued to go from strength to strength (Urdal et al. 2014). Over the years, I have written various shorter pieces about the use of referees (Gleditsch 1989c), the most-cited articles in JPR (Gleditsch 1993), the pros and cons of double-blind reviewing (Gleditsch 2002b), the importance of posting replication data (Gleditsch et al. 2003), open access Gleditsch (2012f), and the gender gap (Østby et al. 2013). Our article on replication showed empirically that those who posted their data were more likely to become famous (or at least be cited more frequently) than to be scooped. JPR also acquired a reputation as a leader in the replication movement. The gender article revealed a continuing but lessening gender gap among JPR’s authors, but no evidence of gender discrimination. Obviously one cannot serve as journal editor for such a long time without spending a lot of time pondering the importance of publishing and Chap. 7 on JPR’s review process is one example.

One of the things I learned from my mentor was the importance of publishing at an early age, and in visible channels. My first JPR article (Gleditsch 1967) was published when I was 25Footnote 17—although in retrospect I can see that it wouldn’t have hurt to have had it subjected to outside review (not common at the time) and leave at least a few more weeks for revision and polishing. Much later, I was able to publicize Erich Weede’s publication law (‘my personal rejection rate in journals is about 50 % and if I fall below that level, I haven’t been sufficiently ambitious in where I submit my articles’), after its author had forgotten it (Schneider 2005: 258). Although any incentive system has its share of perverse outcomes, I am basically favorable to the Norwegian system for funding based on publication units (Gleditsch 2007a, b).

8 About This Volume

My nine articles reprinted in this volume were written over a period of 40 years (1974–2014). I decided to reprint only single-authored work. Obviously, much of my most important and certainly my most highly-cited work was published in jointly authored articles, such as Gleditsch et al. (2002) and Hegre et al. (2001). I strongly support collaborative writing and joint publication and have co-authored with over 100 different people. However, I don’t want to appear here as a peacock in borrowed garb, so I accept the risk of being exposed as a mere jackdaw (Aesop, appr 600 BC/1820: 53). In this introduction, I have tried to place these articles in a broader context. They are republished here in the original form, except that I have corrected obvious typos and spelling errors and amended the citations and references to current JPR style. Where appropriate, I have also added references to a few published articles that were originally cited as unpublished papers. A comparison of the years of publication of the cited and the citing article will make it obvious where references have been added or updated. Beyond that, my work appears as it was originally published, warts and all.

9 Paying My Debts

I am grateful to Johan Galtung, founder of PRIO and JPR, for bringing me and many other young people into peace research 50 years ago. We were offered access to a demanding and stimulating research environment. It will be obvious to the discerning reader that Galtung and I have gone our separate ways on a number of issues. I tend to think that I am still faithful to important values that Galtung taught me in the mid-1960s, while he probably leans to the view so beautifully expressed in a the title of a Norwegian science fiction novel (Bringsværd 1974), The one who has both feet planted on the ground stands still. I am also grateful to my young Norwegian and Nordic colleagues in the pioneer days, several of whom became life-long associates and friends. Because they were so many, I hesitate to name any, but I make exceptions for three life-long collaborators, Peter Wallensteen (author of the preface to this volume), Andrew Mack (an Australian, but also an honorary Nordic), and Håkan Wiberg (former director of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, who sadly passed away in 2010).

Since the revival of a more traditional governing style at PRIO in 1986, four successive directors (Sverre Lodgaard, Dan Smith, Stein Tønnesson, and currently Kristian Berg Harpviken) have maintained the tradition of encouraging researchers at PRIO to develop their own projects and allowing a wide freedom of expression, with obvious (but perhaps not always visible or acknowledged) benefits for my own work.

For many years (and particularly since joining the faculty at NTNU in Trondheim on a part-time basis in 1993) I have been privileged to work with a large number of gifted students and younger colleagues. With their peers the world over, many of them are now taking the analysis of war and peace to new heights. This book is collectively dedicated to them.Footnote 18 I don’t want to claim a major share of the credit for their achievements, but I hope I have paid back to the collective some of what I owe to my own mentors.

Before my time, several close relatives succumbed to tuberculosis. Another uncle, a medical doctor, became a leading figure in the Norwegian fight against the disease. Towards the end of his life, he witnessed the closing of one after another of his old hospitals and the virtual eradication of TB in Norway. Even if it would be premature to claim an equally happy ending to my own professional life as a student of conflict and peace, I’m hopeful that the next generation of scholars can record another notch in the waning of war.