Håkan Wiberg would probably have been pleased to be called a Nordic peace researcher or even a European one, as he spent much of his career helping with institution building outside his own native Sweden, while playing a major intermediary role in bridging the kinds of divide that inevitably arise in a new discipline, struggling for academic respectability.
He was another of the group of early conflict and peace researchers who came initially from a background in mathematics and philosophy, and – as his interview reveals - was much influenced in his early career by the often forgotten debate in Sweden about whether the country should achieve some form of security through the possession of nuclear weapons. However, his first major academic appointment was to a chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lund, where he was the Director of that university’s Peace Research Institute between 1971 and 1980.
Wiberg then took up a post in Denmark as the Director of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute [COPRI], which he held for 14 years, retiring as Director in 2001 just before the conservative government of Anders Rasmussen launched a major attempt to close down the Institute for good. The eventual compromise saw COPRI merged with a number of other Danish institutes into the Danish Institute for International Studies [DIIS] where Wiberg remained as a senior scholar until his retirement in 2007.
He was also closely associated with the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, with its Journal of Peace Research and with other well known European peace centers such as those in Austria, Macedonia, and Finland. He was a frequent visiting scholar and teacher at the Inter-University Center in Dubrovnik for over 40 years, and in 1992 was one of the 12 scholars from Italy, Greece, Denmark, and the United Kingdom who founded the “Europe and the Balkans International Network” at the height of the war over break-up of Yugoslavia.
Håkan Wiberg was admired and loved as a fine scholar, as an open minded and tolerant leader and organizer, and as an inspiring encourager of young scholars. He knew the field he had chosen as he grew up with it, and had an unequalled grasp of its strengths and failings. His article “Peace Research; Past, Present and Future” remains a classic of its kind and obligatory reading for any newcomer seeking to understand where conflict and peace research came from and where it is likely to be going.
JB/CRM
