Nils Petter Gleditsch: Pioneer in the Analysis of War and Peace

Front matter

SPRINGER BRIEFS ON PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND PRACTICE 29

Nils Petter Gleditsch: Pioneer in the

g Analysis of War and Peace

Foreword

Nils Petter Gleditsch: A Peace Research Pioneer

From an early date, Nils Petter Gleditsch was a well-known person in the Nordic peace research community. He had joined the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) in 1964. At that time, as my then fiancée Lena (now wife) and I observed when we arrived in 1967: PRIO had all the enthusiasm of a pioneering environment. I did not meet Nils Petter in his own milieu until a year later. In 1967, he was at one of the centres for peace research at the time: University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Its Center for Conflict Resolution is often mentioned as one of the early originators of peace research in North America (Wiberg 1988). Certainly this is where the Journal of Conflict Resolution was born, but by this time it was in crisis. Importantly for Nils Petter Gleditsch and for peace research, this was where J. David Singer had just initiated the seminal Correlates of War project. It was exciting in that it used new approaches (systems analysis), new forms of data collection (punch cards!) and new statistical methodologies. '

In Oslo, however, Johan Galtung was the key person, only 36-years old, but already the ‘guru’ for many. Few of us in the younger generation got to know him as well as Nils Petter did. Galtung originally defined himself as research leader, ‘forskningsleder’. The researchers of the institute were against hierarchy, thus PRIO aimed to have a flat structure. I encountered skepticism to academic degrees and academic traditions. To be an independent institute was deemed preferable and gave researchers greater leeway than in a traditional structure. It certainly did not prevent PRIO researchers from getting involved with university departments, and Galtung was appointed to the chair in conflict and peace research that was established at the University of Oslo in 1969. Galtung told us that he had deliberately not pursued a Ph.D. as a reaction against an arrogant and conservative system. Nils Petter shared this sentiment. As testimony to

‘A volume edited by J. David Singer (1968) provided first insights into the possibilities of quantitative measures for peace research.

Vii viii Foreword their brilliance, both these men became professors at universities, without having the normal entrance ticket to the academic life of a Ph.D. degree!

At this time, Nils Petter was engaged in a project dealing with air travel. He was mapping the actual routes of commercial airlines in the world. The project aimed to understand the structure of world interaction with the help of this simple indicator. It may have said more about PRIO than we realized at the time. The project focused on ‘interaction’ as a key concept. Clearly inspired by recent advances in sociology, notably Homans (1961), it developed the so-called contact (or exchange) hypothesis, which talked about the beneficial impact on peace of more contacts. There was considerable interest in interaction, and my own project at PRIO dealt with the opposite: sanctions, the breaking off of interaction. One could perhaps even talk about ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ interaction, in line with the description of concepts of peace in the famous editorial of the first issue of Journal of Peace Research.? We all had read it, of course, and assumed that it was written by Galtung, although it was not signed.

However, Nils Petter was doing more than the contact hypothesis. He was concerned with the 'structure' of interaction, that is: which parts of the world were tied together and which ones were not. The message became extra powerful, when he showed a map of the world in terms of what a more equitable distribution of world air routes would look like. There would be more connections between South America, Africa, and Asia than were provided at the time. There was, he explained, also a ‘rank’ element: the centers were interacting more, the peripheries less. It turns out that the air routes were a good indicator of global integration or lack thereof. Nils Petter had found a measurement that is still relevant and the picture can be confirmed by any traveller today; just by pulling out the airline magazine from the seat pocket in front of all air passengers. Even today, the patterns Nils Petter demonstrated remain a testimony to the existence of a solid structure of interaction.

The study appeared in JPR (Gleditsch 1967). It served as an empirical validation, or, perhaps even as an inspiration, for Galtung’s later works on the structure of imperialism. From the study of interaction it was not difficult to make sense of the politically more loaded term of ‘imperialism’ (Galtung 1971).? Nils Petter certainly saw this, and in a related article (included in this collection), he suggested the notion of ‘time imperialism’, how those in the center of interaction networks also can control the setting of schedules (cf Chap. 3 of this volume). Even today, we can observe such imperialism by assessing from which spots one can travel the most comfortably in terms of the daily flight schedule and where one has to board the plane in the middle of the night.

What is striking in this story is the role JPR already played at this time. First of all, the journal was widely read. It quickly occupied a central position in the peace research community. Every issue was read in detail (at least I speak for myself) to see what new topics, methods, or sources were being used. Critical articles also received a forum in the journal. Second, the journal’s policy was to invite contributions from

?An Editorial, Journal of Peace Research 1964, 1(1): 1-4. This was one of many Galtung articles in this period with the term ‘structure’ in the title.

Foreword ix young researchers. Nils Petter was 25 when his first article was published, and several other authors were the same age. Few journals have displayed such strong support for younger scholars. Third, it also encouraged new milieus of peace research, by offering them special issues. Certainly a risky approach from a journal’s perspective as the contributions may vary in quality and not appear on time. Still, it was very important for aspiring groups to develop credibility in a field that could have been easily marginalized. Fourth, the logical and empirical strength and innovation of the articles drew scholarly attention and were widely quoted.

By the late 1960s, Nils Petter Gleditsch was already an established resource at PRIO. He has remained a backbone of the organization. He personally constitutes its historical memory. He has served in most functions of the institute, even being involved in the controversial policy of equalizing the salaries of all employees that was executed in 1972. He repeatedly served as director of PRIO in the 1970s when directorships were rotated on an annual basis among leading researchers in the institute. This was a way to deal with the departure of Galtung, replacing his rule with a more ‘democratic’ structure. The inner life of PRIO would constitute a fascinating study of organizational experiments, including what such a test could do to productivity. The present PRIO incorporates some of the features of those trials, although on the surface it may look like any other research organization, the history tells us something different and the person to go to for information is Nils Petter.

Gleditsch’s wisdom came to its optimal expression as the editor of Journal of Peace Research. JPR was central to PRIO from the beginning, but Nils Petter made it crucial not only to peace research but to all social sciences dealing with politically relevant matters of world affairs. This is no small achievement. He took up the editorial position in 1983, although having served for a short spell in the 1970s (another element of the rotation principles that characterized the institute at that time). He held it for the following three decades. It was a remarkable period of the growth of the journal. He established it as a leading, high-quality journal. The commitment of the editor as well as the editorial staff, the many reviewers and the constant feedback to the authors made it a preferred outlet for contributions with high ambitions. It expanded from four to six issues a year in order to accommodate the flow of high-quality articles, but at the same time providing more space than many other journals.

This coincided with a period where journals also became the preferred form of publication. Early on in peace research history, working papers, in-house publications, and occasional works were seen to be enough. They constituted ‘alternative’ forms of publications. However, it was obvious that they were not read and had little impact. The same applied to dissertations, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition where they were not even printed. However, evaluation of scholars was largely based on their publication record. Journal articles became an appealing option. The book publishers were also interested. Thus, academically oriented publishers went into journals. JPR and PRIO made an agreement in 1987 with Sage and the first issue with this publisher appeared in 1987. It was a path-breaking deal that was advantageous to all. Nils Petter was at the heart of this negotiation, resulting eventually in an income that made it possible to sustain editorial staff. Other journals were to follow, but JPR led the way.

x Foreword

The journal is also a leader in a number of other regards. Its readership has grown dramatically; today best indicated by downloads of journal articles around the world. The new measures that have been developed, notably impact factors, tell the same story, as do the number of submissions and the rejection rates. The importance for peace research to have a journal with that very name and with the recognition for quality cannot be exaggerated.

There are three examples of JPR ’s pioneering role: replication of data, publication of datasets, and data-based articles on novel topics. The first one concerned the demand that the authors provide replication data. This became a requirement for JPR authors in 1998 and today seems almost self-evident. If arguments and conclusions are based on data, and nobody is able to replicate the study, how can it by credible? Certainly there were embarrassing cases, published in other journals, when the author could not provide such information, as the original dataset had not been preserved. There seems still to be more space for actually doing such replication studies.

The second example is the data feature segment of the journal. One of the first such arrangements was the cooperation between the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and JPR, beginning with an article in 1993 on armed conflicts since 1989 (Wallensteen and Axell 1993). At this time, UCDP was strengthening its definitions, not the least by clarifying the notion of incompatibility as central in the concept of conflict. Thus, the agreement with JPR was a way to publish this new and more valid understanding. It led to further cooperation, when Nils Petter Gleditsch managed to secure a grant from the World Bank (negotiated with Paul Collier who was at the World Bank at the time), to *backdate' armed conflicts from 1988 to 1946, thus creating a dataset for all conflicts since the end of the Second World War. The work was done, and continues to be done, by UCDP (Themnér and Wallensteen 2014). It has retained the name, however, the UCDP/PRIO dataset, mostly in order to distinguish it from all the other UCDP data sets of conflicts, actors, peace agreement, etc. The annual publication of the updated version of this data article, after appropriate review, certainly has given JPR a wider readership and contributes to the attraction of the journal.

It has been followed by further publications of datasets, which, by today, is one of the marked features of JPR. Now, almost every issue introduces a new and significant collection of data. JPR, in other words, has been a leading actor in the *data revolution' that today characterizes social sciences. I would even say JPR has pioneered this revolution as it pertains to issues of violence, war, and peace.

The third example, providing space for data-based articles on central issues of the time, is well reflected in this volume. Important recent findings in peace research have rested on data, notably the hypothesis of the democratic peace. It is undoubtedly one of the most debated notions in the past decades, and it seems the dust has still not settled. There are continuous challenges to the thesis that democratic states do not fight each other and have fewer civil wars. There are notions of a

^A point of departure was a list of candidate cases developed by Hávard Strand at PRIO, while the criteria and the final version was the work of the UCDP team, see Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg and Strand (2002). For a history of UCDP see Wallensteen (2011: 111—124).

Foreword xi

‘capitalist’ as well as a ‘territorial’ peace. JPR, and Nils Petter Gleditsch personally, have contributed to this discussion, as can be seen in Chaps. 4 and 8 in this volume.

A similarly data-based discussion is the one on whether wars are declining or not. Today, it is mainly associated with Steven Pinker (2011), who takes a long-term historical perspective, but also with the works of Andrew Mack (2005) and Joshua Goldstein (2011) who focus more narrowly on the post-World War II or post-Cold War periods. Again, this is a conversation where Nils Petter Gleditsch has participated (see Chap. 10) and it has not ended conclusively—and can it, ever?

In the 1990s, Nils Petter returned to the geographic variables that were important in his early days. At that time it was reflected in the study of air routes, but this time in terms of the connection of climate issues and conflict. A debate framed around “environmental security’ had emerged in the 1980s and PRIO was engaged in it early on, as was the Department in Uppsala. The 2000s saw even more attention to this issue, particularly with the publications from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). JPR, PRIO and Nils Petter Gleditsch have all become leaders in this field of inquiry. These studies say that, as of now, there is no convincing evidence of a close connection between changes induced by climate variables and the onset of war, but there are many elements that need to be sorted out. This is definitely an issue that is of a lasting nature and will continue to be challenging. JPR is an important venue for this discussion. The articles on this topic are among the journal’s most cited and Nils Petter’s contribution in 2012 with a massive special issue of JPR with an introduction by himself (Chap. 9 in this volume) is at the very top of the league.

Certainly, this volume illustrates the multifaceted work of one of the pioneers of peace research. On many accounts, the fundamentals of peace research and of the scholarly work of Nils Petter Gleditsch have remained the same. There is an adherence to a precision in terminology, finding indicators that are not only reliable but also valid for the question at hand, searching for reproducible evidence that can be scrutinized by others, locating the relevant topics that will be important in the future for peace research. This is the Nils Petter that I met in the 1960s.

There are also some changes: Peace research now is firmly entrenched within universities, although the first chair in Scandinavia that was held by Galtung was lost to the field when he resigned in 1978. Nils Petter was appointed to Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim in 1993 and still retains an affiliation as professor emeritus. With the experiences from Uppsala in mind, I would say that creating chairs is the only way to establish peace research as a discipline within the universities and placing peace research on par with other forms of social science inquiry.

Leading an organization is another unexpected and notable achievement. Nils Petter Gleditsch held the position as President of the world’s largest professional organization for international studies, International Studies Association in 2008— 2009. Again, this was a remarkable achievement. Only three ISA Presidents had been based outside North America before this, and so far, none after his term. Nils Petter Gleditsch demonstrated that the North American domination could be broken. Furthermore, very few of the previous presidents have had such a close xii Foreword connection to organized peace research. Thus, Nils Petter's tenure was another founding experience.

These remarkable achievements have helped bring attention to the advances of peace research and its continued vitality. Debates and controversies remain, but today arguments are based on a stronger empirical footing. Nils Petter Gleditsch has been crucial in attaining this breakthrough. For this and all his other accomplishments those of us engaged in peace research are immensely grateful!

Uppsala, Sweden Peter Wallensteen January 2015

References for articles authored or co-authored by Nils Petter Gleditsch are found in the bibliography in Chap. 2.

Galtung, Johan, 1971: *A Structural Theory of Imperialism", in: Journal of Peace Research, 8,2: 81-117.

Goldstein, Joshua S., 2011: Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton).

Homans, George C., 1961: Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World).

Mack, Andrew (Ed.), 2005: Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press).

Pinker, Steven, 2011: The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking).

Singer, J. David (Ed.), 1968: Quantitative International Politics: Insights and Evidence (New York: Free Press).

Themnér, Lotta; Wallensteen, Peter, 2014: “Armed Conflicts 1946—2013", Journal of Peace Research, 51,4: 541—554.

Wallensteen, Peter, 2011: Peace Research: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge).

Wallensteen, Peter; Axell, Karin, 1993: *Armed Conflicts after the Cold War", Journal of Peace Research, 30,3: 331—346.

Wiberg, Håkan, 1988: "The Peace Research Movement", in: Wallensteen, Peter (Ed.): Peace Research: Achievements and Challenges (Boulder: CO: Westview): 30-53.

Peter Wallensteen obtained his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in 1973 and served (1985-2012) as the first Dag Hammarskjóld Professor of Peace and Conflict Research in Uppsala, where he now is Senior Professor. Since 2006 he is also the Richard G. Starmann Sr. Research Professor of International Peace Studies, Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame. He was the Head of the Department for Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University 1972-99. He is the Director of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and leader of the Special Program on International Targeted Sanctions (SPITS), both at Uppsala University.

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On 16 May 1945, just eight days after the German occupation forces in Norway surrendered, the Military Permit Office in London issued a permit from the Allied Expeditionary Force for Nils Petter Gleditsch (3) ‘to enter the Zone of the Allied Forces in NW Europe, Norway’. Apparently, he was exempted from signing.

Nils Petter Gleditsch (3) arrived in Norway for the first time on the British ship Andes on 30 May 1945, safe between his parents and accompanied by his aunt. Photo Unknown press photographer

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments are given in the first footnote to each of the reprinted articles. My work in recent years has been supported by the Research Council of Norway through the core grant to PRIO and various project grants. I also acknowledge support for recent projects from KORO (Public Art Norway), the Norwegian Non-Fiction Literary Fund, and the Gløbius Fund. PRIO supported the purchase of open access for this volume. Three publishers—SAGE, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley—granted permission to reprint my journal articles. I am also grateful to Hans Giinter Brauch for his entrepreneurship in academic publishing and for inviting this volume, to Peter Wallensteen for his overly complimentary preface, to Olav Bjerkholt, Ådne Cappelen, Mats Hammarström, and Henrik Urdal for comments on the introduction, to PRIO's librarian Odvar Leine for tracking down obscure articles and bibliographic details, to Maria Iselin Bjerkelund for competent technical assistance, and to Sarah Pettersen for copyediting. None of them bear any responsibility, etc. Halvard Buhaug set me straight on the noise level of the V2. And, of course, thanks to my family for (mostly) tolerating my excessive devotion to various projects, including this one.

XV

With some advance planning, conferences can be combined with outdoor activities. A group of participants from a PRIO-sponsored conference in Nicosia went hiking in the Trodos mountains on 26 April 2006. Left to right (front row): Ragnhild Nordås, Andrew John Feltham, Halvard Buhaug, Helga Malmin Binningsbø, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, David Cunningham, (second row): Jan Ketil Rød, Håvard Strand, Tove Grete Lie. Photo Nils Petter Gleditsch

Part I On Nils Petter Gleditsch

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Part II Key Texts by Nils Petter Gleditsch Contents xix

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XX Contents

Left-wing publishing still a boys’ club. Editors at Pax publishing house, 1965. From left to right: Hans Fredrik Dahl, Tore Linné Eriksen, Nils Petter Gleditsch (holding a copy of his first book), Kjell G. Rosland, Theo Koritzinsky, and the publisher Tor Bjerkmann. Photo Aage Storløkken, Scanpix

The author stands trial for a national security violation, Oslo City Court, May 1981. Photo Arne Pedersen, Dagbladet

Part I On Nils Petter Gleditsch

Nils Petter Gleditsch delivering his presidential address to the International Studies Association, San Francisco, USA, 27 March 2008. Photo Stein Tønnesson (PRIO)

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Graphs speak louder than words. A first version of the curve showing the decline in battle-related deaths (combatants as well as civilians) after World War II was first published in Lacina/Gleditsch (2005), based on the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset generated by Bethany Lacina. It has been reproduced in numerous shapes and forms since then. This updated version shows the UCDP battle deaths data (1989-2013) and the PRIO data (1946-2008) in two separate time series. The Uppsala criteria for inclusion are slightly stricter, but the two series are roughly parallel for the 20 years that they overlap. No best estimate has yet been fixed for the casualties in Syria in 2013, so a high and a low estimate are given instead. This graph was created by Ida Rudolfsen for Gleditsch et al. (2015). The on-line appendix to that article includes a similar graph corrected for population size (i.e. depicting the probability of being killed in battle); it shows an even stronger decline of violence

Chapter 1 A Life in Peace Research

Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien.*

My personal life has been influenced by war in several ways. During the Spanish Civil War, my parents were active in the solidarity movement for the Republic and under the auspices of the Norwegian Committee for Spain they helped to support a hospital in Alcoy and a children’s orphanage in Oliva. Although their efforts didn’t succeed in saving the Republic, it had the inadvertent happy consequence of adding a little Spanish girl to our family—so when I was born, I had a lovely older sister. During the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, my parents were recruited to the transport of the gold reserves of the Norwegian Central Bank to safekeeping outside Norway, an operation led by my uncle. As a result, my parents ended up in England for the duration of the war. I was born in the London area in the summer of 1942 and spent some early years in the company of incoming V1s and V2s. Back in occupied Norway, two of my close relatives were tortured for their participation in resistance activity and a third was shot during the emergency in Trondheim when I was close to three months old (Berg 2007). Obviously, I don’t remember any of this, so it would be an exaggeration to claim that experiencing war in my formative years influenced my choice of profession. My parents’ political attitudes and activities were obviously more influential in leading me to join the peace movement and the labour movement.'

My professional life (I hesitate to think of it as a career) largely coincides with the history of peace research in Norway. I joined PRIO as a graduate student of

"My parents have described their experiences in Spain and the two-month campaign in Norway following the German invasion in Gleditsch/Gleditsch (1954). For the rescue of the Norwegian gold, (see Pearson 2015).

“Lyrics by Michel Vaucaire in 1956, as immortalized by Edith Piaf in 1960. Regrettably, her recording was dedicated to the French Foreign Legion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non,_je_ne_ regrette_rien.

© The Author(s) 2015 3 N.P. Gleditsch, Nils Petter Gleditsch: Pioneer in the Analysis of War sociology? in January 1964 and have remained there until today, with outside adjunct positions and shorter leaves of absence that have not really interrupted the continuity. Organized peace research started in Norway in the spring of 1959, with the formation of the Section for Conflict and Peace Research at the Institute for Social Research, which became PRIO in 1964 and a fully independent institute in 1966.

1.1 The Beginnings

For the first five years I followed the activity at a discreet distance, fuelled mainly by my interest in the writings of Johan Galtung, PRIO’s founder. I joined the Norwegian section of the War Resisters’ International around 1959. I was greatly inspired by its pacifist manifesto (Galtung 1959) and became a conscientious objector. I am unable to put a date to my interest in social science. I grew up in a family with many natural scientists on my father’s side, including an aunt who was a professor of chemistry and the second women professor in Norway.* Consistent with everyone’s expectations, I enrolled as a science student at the University of Oslo in fall 1960, but didn’t stay long. After (barely) finishing the introductory courses, I took a year off, including a four-month peace march from London to Moscow—the European part of the San Francisco to Moscow Walk for Peace.” My ambitious parents had put me in primary school a year early (as a result I was always the smallest kid in class until the final year of high school)°; now I ‘wasted’ that year. When I went back to the university, it was to study sociology, with minor degrees in philosophy and economics. Galtung (originally a statistician) and my father (a civil engineer and geographer) ganged up to try to persuade me to take at

?My ‘defection’ to political science (which I never studied) occurred much later.

The Section was renamed Peace Research Institute, Oslo in 1964, although it remained part of ISR. In 1966, PRIO became fully independent and the name was changed to International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. The acronym was retained. This led to some confusion, which finally ended in 2010 when the name became Peace Research Institute Oslo (no comma!), with the banner ‘Independent, International, Interdisciplinary’ proudly displayed on the web pages. I will refer to the institute as PRIO throughout. For a history of PRIO, with an emphasis on its various engagements with Norwegian authorities, see Forr (2009).

“For brief biographies of Ellen Gleditsch, see www.physics.ucla.edu/ ^ cwp/Phase2/Gleditsch,_ Ellen @842345678.html and www.epigenesys.eu/en/science-and-you/women-in-science/773-ellengleditsch.

>See Lehmann (1966) and Lyttle (1966) for extensive descriptions from two of the participants and Wernicke/Wittner (1999) for a study by two peace movement historians.

°For a brief retrospective on my high school days, see Gleditsch (2003a).

1.1 The Beginnings 5 least one minor in science, but I was more interested in Galtung’s sociology and peace research than in his intellectual starting-point. In retrospect, I realize that I should have taken them more seriously and spent at least a full year studying mathematics and statistics.

Box 1.1: Brief CV

Born 17 July 1942 in Sutton, Surrey, England by Norwegian parents. Married (1966) to Kari Skrede, two children (1971, 1973), two grandchildren (2008, 2010).

Educated at the University of Oslo and University of Michigan. Mag.art. in sociology from University of Oslo (1968). Co-chair of the campaign against the Norwegian doctoral degree (1970).

Worked at PRIO since 1964, as research professor since 1988, editor of JPR (1975-76, 1983-2010). Professor of political science (part-time), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (1993—2013).

Served on various editorial boards and committees; president of the International Studies Association (2008-09).

Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Awarded the Lewis F Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award, Award for Outstanding Research (Mobius Prize) of the Research Council of Norway, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conflict Processes Section, American Political Science Association.

Outside academia served as editor of Pax magazine (1962-65), president of the Norwegian Students' Association (1966), chair of a local branch of the Norwegian Labour Party (1980s and 1990s), chair of the board of Bestum School Band (1986-88), and as a columnist in Aftenposten (1992-99) and in Forskningspolitikk (2008).

For further details, see www.prio.org/staff/npg.

My first task as a research assistant at PRIO was in a project on nonviolent national defense. Galtung (1965) contributed an important conceptual article and I edited a volume in Norwegian featuring historical examples of nonviolent resistance (Gleditsch 19652), but my contribution to the academic literature was modest (Gleditsch 1968c). The impressive record of Norwegian civilian resistance to the nazification of Norwegian society during World War II made the idea of building a national post-occupation defense seem plausible. Less realistic (as I see it today) was the idea of building a nonviolent national defense that could deter foreign invasion. The project petered out after a year or so. But nonviolence has remained close to my heart, and I am happy that the study on nonviolent resistance as an alternative to armed insurgency has recently spawned a special issue of Journal of Peace Research (Chenoweth/Cunningham 2013) and a new PRIO project that has become part of the ‘family business’ (Rivera Celestino/Gleditsch 2013).