In July 1989, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special issue entitled “Peace Studies: Past and Future.” These essays were to explain the significant growth of American collegiate programs examining problems of war, peace, the arms race, justice, and nonviolence. Chad Alger titled his concluding essay, “Peace Studies at the Crossroads: Where Else?” He argued that peace studies should always be centered on the most controversial and pressing intellectual puzzles and uncertain actions facing society. This call to action is just as relevant today as the peace field faces a new crossroads.
In the spirit of that claim, the diagram accompanying this article depicts the role of peace studies as a dynamic feedback loop, wherein researchers generate key concepts and evidence-based findings that are meant to be relevant to the action communities of policymakers and grassroots peacebuilders. Simultaneously, faculty researchers receive experience-based feedback from these communities regarding the adequacy of their ideas and findings. Research is processed and then refined. As this dynamic further unfolds, through teaching and training, the knowledge base and experience of future policymakers and peacebuilders, is tested in the classroom.
Today, peace researchers are providing systematic findings to the action community as never before. These range from synthetic analysis of various large-scale societal peace issues and trends, to new annual reports, to ongoing projects about what builds and sustains peace after terrible violence. Well-recognized publication records of the ‘Everyday Peace Indicators’ and the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) projects are two prominent examples. That the latter’s methodology was embedded into the final Colombia Peace Agreement is a singular testament to the policy relevance of university-based research.
Further, the empirical data and action implications of research on the efficacy of nonviolent direct action – especially work produced by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan – are informing civil resistance movements in various countries, including strategies unfolding in early 2026 on the streets of Minneapolis. If space permitted, dozens of other projects in the U.S. and worldwide could be listed, many that are driving pioneering thinking and research for an expanding diversity of puzzles for achieving peace with justice.
Peace studies has evolved and grown through its collaboration and integration with a range of traditional disciplines: from religious studies to international relations to neuroscience. The standard disciplines now have field concentrations of peace research embedded into their professional associations and journals. Additionally, peace studies have been increasingly interactive with scholars of intersectionality and decolonial thinking, drawing on our close ties with gender and ethnic studies. Peace studies’ intersection with the growing field of environmental studies has produced the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and a range of new textbooks, as well as informed critical policymaking connections.
Finally, peace studies matured through the development of more defined and robust pedagogy and curricula for supporting a range of students and practitioners. The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) initiated and remained the mainstay agency, providing various trainings, course development grants, and in the past decade, a wide range of accessible online courses for those interested. From 2009 to 2021, the Kroc Institute fielded growing demand from faculty across the United States for increased professionalization in peace studies and accompanied more than 100 programs through our week-long sessions, “Teaching Peace in the 21st Century.”
As highlighted at the recent “American Peacebuilding at a Crossroads” convening, Americans face, at horrific new levels, wars and atrocities, an unrestricted arms race, and attacks on environmental stability. To this are added challenges to justice and human security, and a political polarization that jeopardizes our democracy. These intertwined dilemmas provide conceptual, practical and pedagogical challenges to the current peace studies field and its dynamic of how to navigate issues while simultaneously creating new ways of addressing them in the policy and action fields.
As Chad Alger indicated long ago: This positionality of being at a perilous crossroads is precisely where those in peace studies should be! To navigate this moment, peace studies should be leaning into the very things that have fueled its growth over the past half-century: engaging and embedding with the action community, forging interdisciplinary connections and partnerships, and investing in education initiatives that can reach wider audiences, especially at local levels across the United States. Working together, we can have an even greater impact in the era ahead. Our collective future depend on it.
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This essay is dedicated to the memory of Bernard Lafayette Jr., who passed away on March 5.. A renowned civil rights leader of the 1960s and beyond, several of us were influenced in the late 1970s and 1980s by his mentoring and impact on collegiate peace studies education, including his ideas shared in the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development.
About the Author
George A. Lopez is the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he was a founding faculty member.
Recommended Citation
Lopez, George A. “At the Crossroads, Always: Peace Studies for a Perilous Moment.” Peace Policy: Solutions to Violent Conflict, No. 63, (March 2026). https://doi.org/10.7274/31843000
