Carolyn Stephenson is perhaps best known in the field for her excellent survey articles on the field of peace studies and of peace education, although she has written extensively on issues of gender, non-violence, international peacekeeping and alternative security systems, as well as on a wide variety of other, related topics. Dr. Stephenson entered the field at the beginning of the 1980s when she obtained her doctorate from Ohio State University, having studied there with an early leader of the Peace Studies field, Professor Chadwick Alger. She became a Scholar in Residence at Radcliffe College, and then the Director of the Peace Studies program at Colgate University before moving in 1985 to her present position at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
As Carolyn Stephenson explains in her interview, her background was a traditional political science/international relations one, and she became part of the field virtually by accident–an almost chance encounter with Professor Ted Hermann of Colgate University at an International Studies Association (ISA) Conference. However, this perhaps gave her an ability to look at the state of the field in the early 1980s and to see clearly what differences existed between the three background influences--international relations, conflict analysis and resolution, and peace studies, that were then competing for prominence within what Dr. Stephenson insists was, and still is, a “field” but not a “discipline.” The point she makes about peace studies being almost uniquely concerned with conflicts that were not at the international level – the influence, she contends, of one of its main roots in ADR – is an interesting echo of both Paul Wahrhaftig’s arguments in his own “Parents of the Field” interview, as well as Haakan Wiberg’s analysis of the various “tribes” that make up the field as we know it today.
Dr. Stephenson’s description of her own “education” while preparing to become Director of the Peace Studies Program at Colgate should be encouraging to listeners striving to sort out their own place in and understanding of contemporary peace and conflict studies. Having taken up and then rejected the quantitative approach fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s (her thesis was based upon data from David Singer’s Correlates of War Project), she lists four figures as being key to her own intellectual development – Kenneth Boulding, Gene Sharp, Herbert Kelman and Johan Galtung, although her later association with Louis Kriesberg from Syracuse was also seminal. Her attendance at the then Consortium of Peace Research Education and Development (COPRED), ISA, and International Peace Research Association (IPRA) conferences were also important, as were her links to the World Order Models project and her editorial connection with the Peace History movement. When she moved to the University of Hawaii in 1985 she was more than ready to become a member of the Matsunaga Institute of Peace and Conflict Resolution (PACE) there.
As with many in the field, Carolyn Stephenson comes from a Quaker background. This, plus her eclectic experience in the field from the 1980s onward, does much to explain her wide ranging list of publications, her varied research agenda and her interest in the UN (and other international government organizations) which she inherited from Chad Alger. If she became part of the peace and conflict studies rather later than some of our other Parents, Dr. Stephenson’s reflections on some of her predecessors and contemporaries are insightful, considered, and well worth hearing.
JB/CRM
