Like many of the parents of the field of peace and conflict research, Tony De Reuck came to an interest in the study of social conflict, its sources and remedies, from a background in the natural sciences. His training as a physicist was one source of his interest in efforts to build scientific bridges between the two sides in the Cold War, but in later years he developed a strong interest in anthropology and the manner in which what in the 1960s were called “simpler societies” managed their conflicts and prevented community collapse.
However, as De Reuck makes clear in this long and informative interview, it was his early experience growing up in Belgium in the shadow of war – and later service in the Royal Air Force - that shaped his grasp of the need for a scientific approach to analyzing the factors that led to the Second World War and thence to the US-Soviet confrontation in the Cold War. He was an early member of the Pugwash process and its informal but regular contacts between Soviet and Western scientists. While working for the CIBA Foundation in London, De Reuck played a major part in bringing together some of the other early pioneers of the conflict research movement and edited one of the first of the collections of papers -- Conflict in Society -- that began to study conflict from a multi-disciplinary background.
In the mid-1960s Tony De Reuck played a major role in the foundation of the Conflict Research Society in London. Later in that decade, having helped John Burton arrange and conduct the very first of Burton’s problem solving workshops, he became a key member of the Centre for the Analysis of Conflict at University College, London – the first of the [often regrettably short lived] British academic research centres that struggled to establish a new field of study in the United Kingdom. De Reuck went on to establish the study of social conflict at the University of Surrey and to play a major role in parenting the linking of conflict research and general systems theory at City University in London.
Our interview with Tony De Reuck thus opens a window on the struggle to establish conflict and peace research in Britain and on efforts to make its early findings of practical relevance to resolving protracted conflicts. It is a story well worth recounting.
JB/CRM
