About 'Teaching University Students Peace'
Carolyn Stephenson, Erika Simpson, and Nathan Funk all are professors of peace studies. They discuss the declining numbers of university programs in peace and the impact the movement had in academia.
When Metta Spencer sat down with three veteran peace educators — Nathan Funk of the University of Waterloo, Erika Simpson of Western University, and Carolyn Stephenson of the University of Hawaii — she was doing more than catching up with old colleagues. She was taking the pulse of an academic discipline that has spent decades fighting for legitimacy, surviving budget cuts, absorbing new fields, and asking itself the most fundamental question a field of study can ask: Have we succeeded, or have we failed?
The answer, it turns out, may be both.
Where It All Began
The story of Peace Studies as a formal academic discipline is inseparable from the Cold War. Spencer herself helped create and ran a Peace Studies program at her college for fifteen years, during an era when the threat of nuclear annihilation made the study of peace feel not merely academic but existential. The institutional infrastructure that supported this work was built through organizations like IPRA — the International Peace Research Association — founded by economists and social theorists Elise and Kenneth Boulding — and COPRED, the Consortium on Peace, Research, Education and Development, which emerged in 1970, four years after Canada’s own Peace Research and Education Association was founded in 1966.
COPRED was distinctive in its early days because it welcomed not just academics, but community organizers, activists, and people working at the grassroots level with no special university credentials. That democratic, inclusive spirit eventually became a source of tension. By the 1980s — a period defined by the Reagan administration’s nuclear buildup and a renewed popular fear of atomic war — pressure mounted to professionalize the field. The result was the Peace Studies Association, formally constituted in 1987, which prioritized academic credentials and professional development.
