John W.Burton

John Wear Burton was born in Melbourne on 2 March 1915, the son of the Reverend Dr John Burton, who was President-General of the Methodist Church of Australasia in 1945-47. John W. Burton, B.A. Ph.D., D.Sc. began his career in the Australian public service, becoming Permanent Head of the Australian Foreign Office in 1947 and High Commissioner for Ceylon in 1951.

After his retirement from government service, he pursued a distinguished career in research, writing, and teaching at the University of London (1963-1978)' in the course of which he became Director of the Center for the Analysis of Conflict in Canterbury. Dr. Burton was professor at the University of Kent from 1979 until 1982, and then served as Director of the Conflict Resolution Project of the Center for International Development at the University of Maryland. He joined the faculty of the Center for Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in 1985 and - retired to his home in Australia in 1992. John Burton's career has combined scholarship with practice in unusual degree. As a practitioner of conflict resolution, he has participated in numerous problem-solving workshops and international facilitation, including efforts to resolve conflicts in Ceylon, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, the Falklands- Malvinas Islands, and Lebanon. As a theoretician, he has written some fifteen books, the best known of which are Systems, States, Diplomacy and Rules (1968), Conflict and Communicating (1969), World Society (1972), Deviance, Terrorism and War (1972), Dear Survivors (1982), Global Conflict (1983), and Conflict Resolution, Theory and practice (1986, with E. Azar). He wrote a guide to practical problem solving in 1987, entitled Resolving Deep-Rooted Conflict: A Handbook and, three years later, together with Dr. Frank Dukes, published his four volume survey of conflict theory, the Conflict Series [St. Martins Press]. This work, completed while Dr. Burton was a Visiting Fellow at - - the United States Institute of Peace, consists of two books written by Burton and Dukes, and- two sets-of readings edited by the same authors. The whole set makes an admirable summation-of John Burton's work and ideas in the field. Dr. Burton's path-finding work in the theory of international relations has been recognized by a book of essays written in his honor, Conflict in World Society, edited by Michael Banks (1984).

He is widely considered to be one of the principal founders of the emerging field of conflict resolution. As Professor Herbert C. Kelman of Harvard has written, "John continues to innovate at all levels, challenging old assumptions, modes of thinking, and decision-making models, and proposing new paradigms, methods, and institutional arrangements. In doing so, he has established a unique place for himself among scholars concerned with the understanding and improvement of international relations. His work is a living organism an open system which allows others to draw on, to build on, and indeed to criticize the novel insights and imaginative formulations it contains."