… A history of conflict – a history of the Conflict Research Society, 1963-2023:
Appendix 1 CRS people
Appendix 2 Sundries
Appendix 3 Modelling … Catastrophe theory, ECPR and Michael Nicholson
Appendix 4 Violence: Steven Pinker’s Better Angels … my writings, 2013-2022
Appendix 1 CRS people
"CRS is fifty-eight years old … remembering some of the people
The history between the CRS and Peace Science Society?
Tony de Reuck
Michael Nicholson
Chris Mitchell
CRS is fifty-eight years old … remembering some of the people
Some of them I don’t need to remember because here they are right now! Thank you, Chris Mitchell, for your Christmas greetings. Good to see you at the Zoom AGM, Jim Bryant. When I heard that David Runciman had died, I thought of Keith Webb who used Runciman’s theory of relative deprivation. When I heard of the violent exchanges on the India-China border I thought of Frank Edmead’s paper on cutting losses, and of Maurice Yolles’ quite different mathematical model, both at Michael Nicholson’s ECPR group on catastrophe theory. We have been remembering two people this past year: Steve Wright 1952-2019; and Elizabeth Rosenthal,1927-2019: “… but I am also a citizen of the world and try to work for peace and harmony of all mankind through education”. [At the end of her 4-hour interview.] All this prompted by former CRS Secretary, Steve Hills. Good to see you at the Zoom meeting, Steve.
Happy New Year [2020?] everybody, from Gordon Burt!"
The history between the CRS and Peace Science Society?
It's a good and important question ... and one that has been in my mind recently.
(1) link between Cedric Smith and Walter Isard, organisationally, right from the start.
(2) link between Michael Nicholson and Walter Isard, David Singer, etc. and all the top PSSI researchers, right from the start
(3) joint PSSI/CRS conferences in the UK in 1980s ... Reading 1982? ... Kent a bit later
(4) links PSSI/NEPS/CRS and Regional Science people ... Rotterdam conference in the 1980s?
... I lost touch
(5) I went to PSSI conference in Columbia in 2005??? met again Walter Isard and David Singer, established contact with Glenn Palmer ...
... I invited people to come to our CRS conference
... Glenn gave the lecture at the Essex 50th anniversary
(6) Manas Chatterji linked up with me ...
... Glenn, Steve Pickering, and I were at Manas' conference in China in 2010??
(7) Glenn has been on my mailing list and for a time I would ask hilton publicise our CRS conferences
(8) Since Glenn stood down, I don't feel I know anyone in the organisation of PSSI.
Finally I think it would be good for CRS to have strong links with PSSI.
That's what comes to mind for the moment.
Tony de Reuck
[Editor of the 1966 Book]
Tony de Reuck - Parent of the field
A brief personal note
Tony de Reuck 1965
Tony de Reuck 1974
The letter I received
Mortlake Crematorium at 12.40pm on Thursday 8th December
Tony de Reuck - Parent of the field
http://scar.gmu.edu/parents-of-field/anthony-de-reuck
A brief personal note
Tony had been central to the CRS from the very beginning. When I joined in 1982 he was one of a small group of people at the centre of CRS; and at the joint CRS-PSS(I)
conference in Reading in 1982 he gave a vivid and emotionally intense account of the CRS problem-solving workshops in Cyprus. Thereafter I met him on many occasions, he encouraged me in my work and it was always a pleasure to be in his company. The last time we met was at the celebration of John Burton’s life at Kent in 2010 (the special event was organised by John Groom and attended by John Burton’s family).
Tony de Reuck 1965
The year 2015 was the centenary of the birth of one of those who attended the San Francisco conference in 1945, namely John Burton, founder of the Conflict Research Society. To mark the centenary, the Conflict Research Society’s annual conference had the following theme: ‘Peace and Violence Explained? Assessing John Burton’s Legacy’. A highlight of the conference was The John Burton Memorial Lecture 2015, delivered by Kevin Clements ...
In 1965 John Burton had been a central figure in organising a CIBA Foundation Symposium on Conflict in Society. Those participating included: Barbu, Boulding, Burton, Chance, Cohn, Deutsch, DeVos, Dicks, Emery, Galtung, Glass, Haddow, Lapter, Lasswell, Marcuse, Nicholson, Rapoport, Röling, Sondhi, Tomkins, Trist, van Doorn and Washburn. Anthony de Reuck and Julie Knight edited a collection of the contributions. De Reuck's Preface is interesting, not least for its indication of the broad scope of the project:
“About three years ago there began to emerge in this country a new discipline, or more properly, perhaps, a multi-disciplinary field of inquiry into the causes and control of conflict in human society. The subject had already been recognized for some time in the United States where a Centre for Research on Conflict Resolution had been created at the University of Michigan in 1959, and also in continental Europe where, for example, a Peace Research Institute exists within the Institute for Social Research in Oslo. The Centre in Michigan publishes the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the Institute in Oslo produces the Journal of Peace Research as vehicles for research papers in this field.
Formal recognition of this new area of discourse in Britain occurred in June 1963 when a meeting was convened at Windsor which resulted in the formation of the Conflict Research Society. The present symposium arose out of the ensuing discussions from a suggestion by Dr. Jack Mongar, of University College, London, that such a meeting might be held to mark the new status of the subject. In the meantime a senior research fellowship in conflict studies had been established in the University of Lancaster, and happily Dr Michael Nicholson, the present incumbent, was able to attend this symposium …
… The programme does not reflect any firm theoretical view of the proper limits of the field or of the nature of conflict …
… The intention of this symposium is to discuss conflict between social groups at a hierarchy of levels, ranging from situations involving small groups of people face to face, and proceeding through confrontations of large and apparently relatively impersonal institutions such as occur, for example, in industrial disputes between management and trade unions, right up to international conflict and nations at war …
… The symposium is essentially inter-disciplinary, involving sociology, anthropology, social psychology, psychiatry, ethnology, systems analysis, political science, history and international relations …”[1]
Tony de Reuck 1974
Later in 1974 John Burton and his colleagues John Groom, Christopher Mitchell and Tony de Reuck characterised the study of world society as follows:
“International Relations or World Society? … What is it that we are studying? … The contention is that international relations is broader than the traditional study of 'politics' or relations amongst states, strategy, war, or history. Rather the field is a multi-faceted compilation which forms a 'world society'. Amongst other concepts introduced are authority, decision-making, legitimacy, functionalism and deterrence and conflict. This paves the way for the discussions to follow which include: aspects of quantification, general systems theory, units of analysis, conflict, participation, penetration and linkages and finally, values.”[2]
Michael Nicholson
Burt, G. (2008) Draft entry for International Encyclopaedia of Peace. Oxford University Press.
Michael Nicholson (1933-2001) was an economist and scholar of international relations. He gained a double first in the economics tripos and a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge. In the late 1960s he was a member of John Burton's Centre for the Analysis of Conflict at University College, London. Between 1970 and 1982 he was the Director of the Richardson Institute for Conflict and Peace Research, based in London and later in Lancaster. His career included appointments at MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stockholm, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and Yale. He was Professor of International Relations at the University of Kent in 1990-93, and was appointed to an established chair as Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, 1993-2001. The European Consortium of Political Research awarded him the first Lewis Fry Richardson Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001.
The subject of his thesis was ‘Oligopoly and Conflict’ (1972). This marked the persistent theme in all his writings that mathematical modelling, much of it having its origins in economics, could be applied to the understanding of conflict in general and to international relations in particular. His 1992 book ‘Rationality and the analysis of international conflict’ provides ‘an exposition … of a social scientific approach to conflict in international relations’. The core concepts and topics are: rational choice, uncertainty, decision making, game theory, bargaining theory, alliance theory, models of the arms race, catastrophe theory and systemic models. His treatment of rationality has two parts. First is the question, do actors in conflict situations behave rationally? His conclusion is that the theory of rational choice is an invaluable basis for a research programme in the more general theory of decision making. However there is a need to take account of certain problems. Game theory shows that paradoxes arise in situations where there is social interaction. Also an actor’s goals may go beyond instrumental rationality to include identity and emotion. The origins of preferences need investigation. In times of crisis, rationality is warped as an individual’s performance deteriorates under stress and as collectives indulge in group-think. The second question is: how might one establish beliefs that are rational? Hypotheses about conflict situations are generalisations about classes of events - they are not concerned only with specific individual events. Typically these generalisations are probabilistic in nature. Also, generalisations about events require empirical evidence about events – hence the virtue of the early data sets of Quincy Wright and Richardson and the later Correlates of War data set established by Singer and Small. This evidence is then used in the statistical testing of the hypotheses. Models may be considered as complex assemblies of hypotheses. The application of this approach to models of the arms race leads Nicholson to a rather qualified evaluation of these models. He applies this same demand for rational belief to global environmental changes. With respect to the natural world, how good are our environmental models and data? Also what beliefs can we rationally hold concerning the response of society to these changes? Turning to alliance theories, empirical testing leads him again to a qualified evaluation.
However his 1992 book is not just an ‘exposition’ – it is also a ‘defence’, a defence and a debate with competing approaches. ‘The approach of this book has its critics, opponents and detractors’. It is a theme which runs throughout his work. In an article in World Politics in 1966 Hedley Bull had noted that the classical approach to international relations which derived from philosophy, history and law had until recently enjoyed a monopoly but was now being challenged by a scientific approach. Three decades later Smith (1996, p. 11) was able to look back and conclude that for the past forty years the discipline of international relations had been dominated by positivism (p. 11). In the same book Nicholson (1996, p. 130) comments: ‘with a few exceptions, the British international relations profession treated the overtly social scientific approach with disdain as just another American fad. … [the explicitly positivist approach] … has never been more than a fringe movement in the United Kingdom, certainly in its quantified mode, and hardly central in any behavioural mode’. Addressing challenge from another quarter, Nicholson comments: ‘in itself, positivism concerns what is, not what ought to be …’. Throughout Nicholson’s defence of the scientific approach is characterised by deep knowledge of the philosophical issues and a carefully nuanced stance. By 1996 the debate was not so much with the classicists as with the interpretativists (Carlnaes et al., 2002). His continued advocacy of formal approaches and his willingness to acknowledge current weaknesses and take on board alternative views is well illustrated in his final joint article (Fierke and Nicholson, 2001, p. 21): ‘… I suggest that rational choice and game theory should be viewed as a research programme in the Lakatosian sense …’.
References
Bull, H. (1966) International theory: the case for a classical approach. World Politics, 18, 3, 361-377.
Carlnaes, W., Risse, T. and Simmons, B. A. (Eds.) (2002) Handbook of international relations. London: Sage.
Fierke, K. M. and Nicholson, M. (2001) Divided by a Common Language: Formal and Constructivist Approaches to Games. Global Society, 15, 1, 7-25.
Nicholson, M. (1972) Oligopoly and conflict: a dynamic approach. Liverpool University Press.
Nicholson, M. (1992) Rationality and the analysis of international conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nicholson, M. (1996) The continued significance of positivism|? In Smith, pp. 128-145.
Nicholson, M. (2002) International Relations: A Concise Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Press.
Sen, A. (2001) Obituary: Michael Nicholson. The Independent.
Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (Eds.) (1996) International theory: positivism and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chris Mitchell
https://web.archive.org/web/20150228021317/http://scar.gmu.edu/people/christopher-mitchell
Appendix 2 Sundries
John Burton … 1940s … 1990s … Chris Mitchell
https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/burton-john-wear-15790
his papers:
https://aspace.gmu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5
a new family biography:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2tsxmtr;
https://www.navy.gov.au/history/feature-histories/ran-pacific-war
The Contemporary Conflict Resolution Reader:
https://www.wiley.com/en-cn/The+Contemporary+Conflict+Resolution+Reader-p-9780745686776
The Richardson Institute:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/richardson-institute/about/
Michael Nicholson
[It so happens that in 1953 Amartya Sen was at Cambridge with a key foundational figure in the CRS, Michael Nicholson, and Sen wrote the obituary for Nicholson which appeared in The Independent in 2001 - see link below.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-michael-nicholson-9256802.html ]
Essex
https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/conflict-and-cooperation
https://www.prio.org/publications/12363
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-31589-4Appendix 2 Modelling …
https://www.prio.org/publications/13513
[https://reliefweb.int/report/world/conflict-trends-global-overview-1946-2022]
Appendix 3 Modelling … Catastrophe theory, ECPR and Michael Nicholson
[This is section 6 in Click: Positive Value 9: Being the same … Ukraine 56: catastrophe]
There is simple mathematics and there is complex mathematics. Sometimes reality is modelled by simple mathematics and sometimes by complex mathematics. Reality can be complex in space and also complex in time. ‘Catastrophe’, ‘chaos’ and ‘complexity’ have each been invoked to refer to theories of complex reality.
…
Catastrophe theory, ECPR and Michael Nicholson
Catastrophe theory was an exciting new area in mathematics in the 1970s/1980s. The theory did relate to catastrophes in the ordinary sense but it conceptualised a more abstract notion. Catastrophes could be good or bad – that was irrelevant. A catastrophe in abstract was when a system displayed not only slow gradual change but also sudden large change. The sudden large change was the catastrophe.
To conflict researchers it seemed that the sudden outbreak of wars might well be conceptualised in terms of catastrophe theory. And so it was that catastrophe theory was a topic at the ECPR Group Sessions at Lancaster University in 1981 - the group was chaired by Michael Nicholson, Director of the Richardson Institute of Conflict Studies at Lancaster. The group included Iain Stewart, Bob Holt, Frank Edmead, Maurice Yolles, myself and others.
…
Ian Stewart, 1978: Catastrophe Theory and its Applications, with Tim Poston, Pitman, 1978. ISBN 0-273-01029-8.
Review of Stewart, 1979:
Ian Stewart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)
Bob Holt, 1979: Catastrophe Theory and the Study of War
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002200277802200201
Michael Nicholson, 1981: Catastrophe theory and international relations:
ECPR 1981, no details: https://ecpr.eu/Events/AcademicProgramme/Programme?EventID=26
…
“In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory “
Critics:
Zahler and Sussmann, in a 1977 article in Nature.;
…
Chaos theory
I came across chaos theory in 1978 when I was attached to the course team producing the foundation course in mathematics M101 at the Open University. One of the units was on recurrence relations. A simple quadratic equation y=ax(1-x) taken as a recurrence relation can exhibit chaotic behaviour over time:
The Logistic Map: Attractors, Bifurcation, and Chaos (Part 1 of 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z-e7N99-rI
…
“Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.[1] Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.[2] The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning that there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions).[3] A metaphor for this behavior is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.”
…
Complexity theory
[In a later report]
Appendix 4 Violence: Steven Pinker’s Better Angels … my writings, 2013-2022
Steven Pinker and Joshua Goldstein were joint winners of the CRS Book of the Year award in 2013. At the time I wrote:
Steven Pinker’s book sets an exciting agenda;
At the following year’s conference, 2014, I organised a panel on Pinker’s book – one of the speakers was Larry Ray:
Review of Pinker’s Better Angels (Larry Ray, 2013?)
Dark diagnostics and idealized modernities (Larry Ray, 2014?)
Pinker’s response to review in Sociology (2015)
Last year in Autumn 2021, Dwyer & Micale’s critique of Pinker was published. It occurred to me that I could relate the chapters of the book to my own writings (November 2021):
Pinker’s Better Angels and Dwyer & Micale’s Darker Angels:
an introduction to the VWSM website
NOT AVAILABLE:
https://sites.google.com/view/values-world-society-modelling/vwsm-notes/x
In December 2021, I wrote a note which included the ‘angels’ theme:
Nobel, peace, Penrose … AI, Kissinger … angels/prophets/gods … our values
https://sites.google.com/view/values-world-society-modelling/vwsm-notes/vwsm-note-1-december-2021
I had been invited to write a brief 300-word review of Dwyer & Micale for the Journal of Peace Research Book Notes:
Violence: my review of the Dwyer & Micale “refutation” of Steven Pinker:
https://www.prio.org/journals/jpr/booknotes/283
An earlier draft of the 300 words was included in a separate note which also referred to “a mathematical model”.
https://sites.google.com/view/values-world-society-modelling/vwsm-notes/vwsm-note-2
In my recent note, Ukraine 8, I briefly addressed:
Violent Russia? Steven Pinker
Violent Russia? Nancy Shields Kollman
Ukraine: 8 Trauma then triumph? … Violent Russia? … Fractured France?
END