bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2004) — Fall/Winter 2004 // Automne/Hiver 2004, pp. 31–32
NONKILLING GLOBAL POLITICAL
SCIENCE, by Glenn D. Paige, Xlibris:
Philadelphia, 2002, 267 pp.
We have just entered the fourth year of the new millennium and war and terrorism are becoming the norm to resolve international conflicts. All the experience of bloody wars of the previous century and the wisdom thereby gained seems to have been wasted.
Professor Glenn Paige, in his recent book Nonkilling Global Political Science, argues that if political scientists, scholars who dedicate their lives to the study of political power in its multi-faceted manifestations, do not challenge seriously the assumption of lethality, then why would one expect political leaders and citizens of the world to do so?
Is a nonkilling global society feasible? Paige, in this path-breaking book, asks this simple yet profound question, but goes a step further to challenge his discipline, asking if a nonkilling global political science is achievable. On both counts, through insightful analysis and substantive evidence, his answer is a resounding “yes.”
Glenn Paige, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, writes from experience, having served in the Korean war. The work represents the synthesis of decades of his research, which includes a number of books: The Korean Decision (1968), The Scientific Study of Political Leadership (1977), and To Nonviolent Political Science: From Seasons of Violence (1993).
The term “nonkilling” is not as comforting as “nonviolence” because it confronts us with the modern violent reality that we witness regularly on our television screens. The reality is that mighty nations still consider that they can start pre-emptive wars, last experienced during the Third Reich and the Soviet period, without qualms. Professor Paige’s use of the term is very specific; neither advocating pacifist philosophy nor religious faith, it is grounded in the evidence-based approach of behavioral sciences.
Paige shows that both violence-accepting politics and political science in the last century have failed to suppress violence by violent means. The study of government and international politics has been unable to lay the groundwork and methodology for policy advice that goes to the roots of the causality of global violence.
Paige’s vision is for political science to dedicate itself to a diagnosis of the pathology of lethality, and to discover both prescriptions and treatments that can be shared with all who seek to remove killing from global life. He shows that at most only about five percent of human beings have ever killed another person. Perhaps fewer than two percent of all homo sapiens have been killers of fellow humans (p. 27). Interestingly, a pioneering World Health Organization (WHO) global study on Public Health and Violence affirms that lethality resulting from suicides (50%) and homicides (30%) worldwide is much higher than war (20%).! Paige suggests why not then train people and nations globally to strengthen their resistance to killing? He uses life-affirming medical science as a metaphor. Medicine, through its continual research and training programs on prevention, intervention, and post-traumatic transformation strategies has proven successful in producing both knowledge and practitioners for the moral interest of preservation of life. Paige considers that same rigor and commitment to non-lethality can be made equally applicable to social sciences.
The last three chapters of the book lay out a road map for the large-scale reconstruction of a nonkilling global society. In a chapter on “implications for political science,” the author proposes changes that might accompany a shift towards non-lethality in the areas of political philosophy, political theory, leadership and polity, policy studies, comparative politics, and international politics.
For instance, why has the study of successful leadership in conflict resolution without military intervention remained neglected? There is a long list of Nobel Peace Prize recipients who dared to take the nonviolent route for complex regime change in their respective countries, and • succeeded. Their accomplishments, leadership styles, ideologies, skills, and strategies are waiting to be examined and analysed. The Graeco-Roman writer Plutarch (40 -120 BC), in his comparative studies of be used to evaluate peaceful leadership in rulers, suggests some principles that can modern social science terms – personality, role, organization, tasks, values, setting, and errors.? Perhaps the more important questions political science ought to be exploring are the place of a sovereign nation-state, international law, and the multilateral institutions of civil society in a uni-polar world. Within the United States, political scientists may also ask whether that country wants to be seen as the champion of a democratic world order, or as an empire striving to impose its economic and security interests globally at any cost. Discussing the institutional implications of a nonkilling approach, Paige asserts that needed at all levels of governance are public service departments of non-violence with cabinet responsibilities. Their tasks would be to monitor community conditions related to the logic of nonkilling political analysis, to support professional training for prevention and post-lethal transformative rehabilitation, and to advise on public policies that will facilitate community wellbeing. Such a department would aggregate violent statistics and recommendations for violence-eliminating actions from all public and private sources and would make periodic status reports together with nonkilling policy recommendations to governmental decision-makers. The author suggests that non-violence specialists be included within diplomatic establishments, just as conventional military attaches or officers responsible for economic relations are. A position of “non-violence cultural attaché” is proposed for embassies to “seek to build bridges of discovery, mutual learning, and co-operation between all sources of non-violent well-being in home and host countries” (p. 135). Paige calls into question the Weberian dogma that the acceptance of violence is imperative for the practice and science ot politics. On this bias, he writes that unlike natural sciences that encourage development of pure theory as a contribution to practical applications, political science has tended to be unreceptive to theoretical imagination, and this is especially true with regard to non-violence creativity. By dismissing it in professional training as “utopian,” “idealistic” and “unrealistic,” political science is condemned to support perpetual lethality.
Consequently, killing that has been expected to liberate, protect, and enrich has become instead a source of insecurity, impoverishment and threat to human and planetary survival. This “pathology of defense” is such that, as Paige points out, what it is intended to defend becomes itself the source of self-destruction. Bodyguards kill their own heads of state, armies violate and impoverish their own people, and nuclear weapons proliferate to threaten their inventors and possessors. Again, in this there is an immense need for studying the psychological consequences of killing both within and outside of a war situation. More knowledge of post-killing stress would lead to policy changes in society to reduce murders, support for war, genocide, and mass killing by certain population segments and individuals.3
He asks that the role of political science in transition to non-lethal security is to develop theory and practice to provide credible alternatives to threat or use of lethal force — including preventive nonlethal transformation of the will to kill among potential adversaries. He points to a growing body of literature and experience on the subject providing a basis from which to advance.
Paige concludes that the time has come for a paradigm shift in the discipline: “If tradition has taught that we must kill to be free, equal and secure – the present teaches that unless we stop killing not only freedom and equality are in jeopardy but our very survival – individual, social, and ecological – is imperiled. We have reached a point where the science and practice of politics must be aligned with the life-supporting forces of society and nature. It (nonkilling) is not only good morality and good practically, but it is also this era’s imperative for good political science.”
Paige is optimistic that this goal is neither utopian nor idealistic, but one that is reachable and essential. He courageously identifies and defines in his nonkilling approach an imminent need for a new sub-field of political science. The book is both provocative and creative, an original work and a wonderful tonic for these troubled times.
The text is also available on direct link for download at: www globalnonviolence org/ docs/nonkilling/nonkilling.text.pdf_#
References:
1. WHO, World Report on Violence and Health (with Foreword by Nelson Mandela), Geneva (2002).
2. Quoted in Festschrift article in honor of George Simson by Glenn D. Paige, “Gandhi as Leader: A Plutarchan Perspective,” biography, volume 22, number 1, winter 1999, pp. 57-74.
3. Some relevant works include: Rachel M. MacNair, Perpetration- Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing, Westport: Praeger Publications (2002). Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Henry Holt and Company (2004). James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, New York: Oxford University Press (2002).
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2004) — Fall/Winter 2004 // Automne/Hiver 2004, pp. 31–32. Read the rest of this issue →
