Overview

This open access book explains how PRIO, the world’s oldest peace research institute, was founded and how it survived through crises. In this book, twenty-four of its researchers and associates, including Johan Galtung, Ingrid Eide, and Mari Holmboe Ruge, who founded the institute back in 1959, tell the stories of their roles in inventing and developing peace research. They reflect on their personal experiences with peace and conflict, tell what drove their peace engagement, and discuss the balance sought in the field between the cold dictates from academic rigor and the hot pursuit of peace, a desire for research to make a positive difference. Most of the chapters are interviews where one colleague interviews another. Some are self-reflective essays, while others are memorial essays written about a peace researcher who has passed away. Taken together, the book presents a lively picture of a thriving world-leading research environment and a wealth of conflicting or mutually reinforcing perspectives on war, violence, conflict, conflict management and resolution, negotiations and mediation, peacemaking, peace building, and the contested concept of peace. “The Oslo Stories is an indispensable source to the history of peace research.” Dr. Olav Njølstad, Director, Nobel Institute, Oslo

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9789811647192

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Stein Tønnesson is Research Professor and former Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), associate editor for Asia in the Journal of Peace Research, a Toda Senior Research Fellow, and member of the editorial board of Global Asia. His areas of research are peace in East Asia, nation-building in Southeast Asia, conflict in the South China Sea, revolution and war in Vietnam, and the role of social media in Myanmar’s internal armed conflicts. During 2011–17 he led the East Asian Peace program at the University of Uppsala, from which he published the monograph Explaining the East Asian Peace (NIAS Press 2017) and the book chapters  ‘Peace by Development’ in E. Bjarnegård & J. Kreutz, eds. Debating the East Asian Peace (NIAS Press, 2017) and ‘The East Asian Peace,’ in T. Inoguchi, ed. The SAGE Handbook on Asia Foreign Policy (SAGE, 2020).   

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