In Memoriam, Dr. John W. Burton, 1915 - 2010: Always Ahead of His Time.

On June 23, 2010, one of the leading figures in the field of conflict analysis and resolution, and a former member of the ICAR Faculty, Professor John W. Burton, DSc., Ph.D., passed away at his home in Australia. 

Professor Burton’s contributions to the field were unique in that he pioneered both conceptual and practical conflict-handling approaches to intractable, identity-based conflicts and their resolution. On the conceptual side, Prof. Burton developed a theory on the etiology of violent conflict that highlighted the frustration of basic human needs (BHNs) for identity, recognition, and security as precursors to the emergence of violent conflict. On the practical side, he developed the problemsolving approach to conflict resolution which has been extensively used by, among others, Professors Herbert Kelman of Harvard and Christopher Mitchell of ICAR.

Prior to entering academic life in the early 1960s at University College London (UCL), University of London, where he did most of his groundbreaking work (and where I had the pleasure of working with him for three years), Professor Burton had been an extraordinarily gifted, successful civil servant and diplomat in his native Australia. During this period, he attended the opening sessions in San Francisco of the establishment of the United Nations and later became “High Commissioner” (“ambassador” within the British Commonwealth system) to what was then Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Subsequently, as a private citizen, Burton attended the international gathering that led to the establishment of the Nonaligned Movement and was part of a small Australian delegation to visit China during the Korean War to enlist China’s aid in ending that conflict. Before Burton became an academic at UCL at nearly 50 years of age, therefore, he had led an extraordinarily eventful, significant, and impactful professional life as a practitioner of politics in the “power political” world that he so disdained and wrote much about.

Burton earned a first class honours degree from the University of Sydney in Psychology (1937), and a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics (LSE). In his doctoral dissertation, Restrictive and Constructive Intervention (1942), we start to see glimmers of Burton’s later emphasis on the domestic sources of international conflict. Burton spent World War II at the Department of External Affairs in Canberra where, as Secretary, he worked with the major players of his day in affecting Australian foreign policy, which continued into the post-war period. After his departure from public service, he continued to be involved in politics, including critiquing the Australian Labour Party and the direction in which it was or was not moving, plus campaigning unsuccessfully for political office. During this period, he held radically unconventional views of Communism, especially as expressed in China, resulting in his first published book in 1954, The Alternative, in which we start to see signs of his later emphasis on “the power of human needs.” In his subsequent book Peace Theory, published in 1962, he launched an effective critique of power politics and “Political Realism,” arguing that the strategies and tactics associated with the conventional wisdom – e.g., deterrence and containment, in effect, keeping things as they were while frustrating people in the developing/post-colonial world who were calling for change – were counterproductive and self-defeating. Three years later, after Burton arrived in London to teach at UCL, his International Relations: A General Theory (1965) appeared, in which he again delivered a critique of power politics and conventional IR in general, citing its self-fulfilling nature, and putting forward an alternative view comprised of some of the latest “behaviouralist” ideas of the time (e.g., drawn from Karl Deutsch’s Nerves of Government), with an emphasis on explanation as a basis for prediction, “steering” instead of power, and processes instead of static conditions.

The shift between Burton the maverick finding his way out of the “box” of traditional International Relations during a time of great ferment in IR thinking, with many cross-disciplinary ideas coming from the United States, to Burton the architect of a new paradigm, plus of an analytical means for addressing deep-rooted conflicts within it, came with the companion publication of his Systems, States, Diplomacy, and Rules (1968) and Controlled Communication (1969). The first volume focused on the macro level, dealing with “states” as one subset of “systems” that could adapt to change, as part of a general systems theory orientation that clearly transcended traditional IR discourse. The second volume, focusing on the micro level, dealt with Burton’s “controlled communication” approach to conflict resolution. This was concerned with decisionmaking subsystems adapting to change in their environment – clearing up “wrong assumptions” and misperceptions in the process -- to resolve deep-rooted conflicts that remained unresolvable as long as they remained within the traditional power frame.

In Burton’s next book World Society (1972), he continued his search for a coherent replacement to the conventional wisdom, examining interstate and communal relations and conflicts as subsets of the whole, with references to “social-biological values” as early harbingers of his later focus on needs as part of his overall quest to scientifically articulate the full breath of human behavior beyond any particular ideological, cultural, or normative view of it.

Burton’s clear “ontological break” with traditional IR followed his encounter with Paul Sites’ 1974 work on needs, and is expressed in Burton’s 1979 publication of Deviance, Terrorism, and War: The Process of Solving Unsolved Social and Political Problems. This volume comprises four main issues where, the core concept was needs; the core problem, conflict; the core process, problem-solving; and the core idea was the issue of paradigm shift.

“The rest,” as they say, “is history.” He left UCL to help found a peace and conflict studies program at the University of Kent at Canterbury with his former UCL colleague John Groom. After retiring from the British academic system, he traveled to the U.S. where, first, he was an International Studies Association (ISA) Fellow at the University of South Carolina, then joined the late Ed Azar at the University of Maryland, and then eventually came to ICAR where he served for a brief period as director. During his American phase, he produced Dear Survivors (1982); Global Conflict: The Domestic Sources of International Crisis (1984); Resolving Deep-Rooted Conflict: A Handbook; (1987); and the 4-volume Conflict Series (1990), prepared together with Professor (then ICAR doctoral student) Frank Dukes. In the latter volumes, Burton’s unique concept of provention appears in print for the first time, “to signify taking steps to remove sources of conflict, and more positively to promote conditions in which collaborative and valued relationships control behaviours.” Burton’s next, and last book Violence Explained (1997), makes an eloquent case for a holistic approach to understanding and dealing with society’s complex challenges at all levels.

Reflecting on his overall contribution to our field, Burton will be remembered for his emphasis on the need to question conventional wisdom with its wrong assumptions, wrong perceptions, wrong behaviours, and counterproductive outcomes, as a point of departure for a “paradigm shift” to a system of thinking and action more relevant to, and effective for the times. His body of theory and practice clearly singles him out -- in a field which includes, among others, Adam Curle, Kenneth and Elise Boulding, Johan Galtung, Anatol Rapoport -- as the “founding father of the philosophy of Conflict Analysis and Resolution!”

Burton’s “philosophy” is even more relevant now than it was when he first started to articulate it, especially given the dysfunctional and counterproductive policies emanating from many of the world’s major players in response to a growing array of complex global challenges. Burton’s staying power, even for the world’s surviving superpower, is guaranteed for some time to come!