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Although my personal life was influenced by war in several ways, my parents’ political activism and my growing interest in social science were more influential factors in my road to peace research. The personal influence of Johan Galtung was also very important. This introductory chapter reviews briefly my personal history and various main topics of my work, notably international interaction, the peace dividend and the arms race, Norway in the nuclear arms race, secrecy and espionage, the waning of war, and academic publication.

The bibliography is ordered chronologically within four general categories. I have included more or less all my academic work, broadly defined. Thus, the list includes some popular and even polemical articles and books that deal with topics on which I have also done research.

Physical distance appears to act as a restraint on interaction at all levels of social organization. However, there is one specific problem connected with high-speed interaction over great distance in the international system—that of . In international travel the ‘jet lag’ causes fatigue and related phenomena. (The problem of a sudden associated with rapid North–South movements has not been studied to the same degree, but appears to be less serious.) In attempting to circumvent these unpleasant effects by interacting through telecommunication (moving information rather than moving people), one runs into a related problem—that of non-overlapping office hours. Informal data from several organizations with international activities are cited as examples of how these problems are dealt with. Technological and social ‘solutions’ to the problem of time differences are discussed. Several of these raise new problems, among them the possibility of an emerging ‘time imperialism’—with dominant nations, organizations, and individuals imposing their own time cycles on their dependent individuals and groups—seems particularly ominous.

The observation that democracies rarely if ever fight each other was made by Dean Babst nearly three decades ago, but has had little impact on the literature on peace research and international relations until recently. But now every volume of the leading journals contains articles on minor and major aspects of this theme. Professional jealousy and confusion of levels of analysis are possible explanations for the late acceptance of the idea of a democratic peace, but above all it seems to have been hampered by the Cold War. Erich Weede has taken a bold step in reconsidering his own previous view and other should follow. The Cold War has ended in the real world, and it should end in peace research, too.

The spy charges and court case against Arne Treholt, a Norwegian civil servant and politician, have led to a long-standing controversy in the Norwegian media. This article examines the literature on the Treholt case for the first ten years after his arrest. The literature is classified under a scheme borrowed from Cold War history: traditionalist (‘Arne Treholt was the greatest spy ever caught in Norway’), revisionist (‘Treholt was a victim of a political vendetta against the left’), and post-revisionism (studies using greater historical distance and declassified archives to gain a more independent perspective – and it remains to be seen what the conclusion will be). Most of the published literature is revisionist, but none of the books classified under this heading offer a fully satisfactory answer to the traditionalist account. In particular, the revisionist literature fails to explain plausibly why Treholt and his case officers engaged in so much risky and covert behavior if all they did was to exchange political views. The effects of Treholt’s espionage in the sense of traditional national security may have been overestimated; his value as a political informer was probably far greater.

Conflict over scarce resources, such as minerals, fish, water, and particularly territory, is a traditional source of armed struggle. Recently, wide-ranging claims have been made to the effect that environmental degradation will increase resource scarcity and therefore contribute to an increase in armed conflict. So far, there has been much controversy and little relevant systematic study of this phenomenon. Most scholarship on the relationship between resources, the environment, and armed conflict suffers from one or more of the following problems: (1) there is a lack of clarity over what is meant by ‘environmental conflict’; (2) researchers engage in definitional and polemical exercises rather than analysis; (3) important variables are neglected, notably political and economic factors which have a strong influence on conflict and mediate the influence of resource and environmental factors; (4) some models become so large and complex that they are virtually untestable; (5) cases are selected on values of the dependent variable; (6) the causality of the relationship is reversed; (7) postulated events in the future are cited as empirical evidence; (8) studies fail to distinguish between foreign and domestic conflict; and (9) confusion reigns about the appropriate level of analysis. While no publications are characterized by all of these problems, many have several of them. This article identifies a few lights in the wilderness and briefly outlines a program of research.

has now introduced ‘double-blind’ or ‘masked’ review procedures. In other words, the author’s name and affiliation are removed from the manuscript. This article explains why we make this change now, why we did not make it before, and why the decision was not obvious. The main argument in favor of blinding is that the reviewer should judge the article on the basis of its merit rather than on the basis of the prior reputation or record of the author. However, the empirical evidence whether or not blinding makes any difference is mixed, and the practice varies greatly among quality journals. We make this change mainly because double-blind seems to be the accepted standard among journals that cater to the same readers and authors, and because we do not want there to be any doubt as to the journal’s commitment to peer review. At the same time, we reiterate our commitment to transparency, by permitting referees to sign their reports if they want to, by letting the authors see all the referee reports, by copying the editorial correspondence to the reviewers, and by strengthening our data replication policies.

Fifteen years ago, Charles Kegley spoke of a neoidealist moment in international relations. This article examines how the number of armed conflicts has declined in the decade and a half since Kegley’s presidential address and shows that the severity of war has been declining over a period of over six decades. The number of countries participating in war has increased, but this is in large measure due to coalition-building in several recent wars. Overall, there is a clear decline of war. It seems plausible to attribute this to an increase in the three factors identified by liberal peace theorists: democracy, trade, and international organization. Four alternative interpretations are examined: the temporary peace, the hegemonic peace, the unsustainable peace, and the capitalist peace. The article concludes that the latter, while running close to the liberal peace interpretation, also presents the greatest challenge to it. Indeed, we seem to be living in a commercial liberal period rather than a world of neoidealism.

Until recently, most writings on the relationship between climate change and security were highly speculative. The IPCC assessment reports to date offer little if any guidance on this issue and occasionally pay excessive attention to questionable sources. The articles published in this special issue form the largest collection of peer-reviewed writings on the topic to date. The number of such studies remains small compared to those that make up the natural science base of the climate issue, and there is some confusion whether it is the effect of ‘climate’ or ‘weather’ that is being tested. The results of the studies vary, and firm conclusions cannot always be drawn. Nevertheless, research in this area has made considerable progress. More attention is being paid to the specific causal mechanisms linking climate change to conflict, such as changes in rainfall and temperature, natural disasters, and economic growth. Systematic climate data are used in most of the articles and climate projections in some. Several studies are going beyond statebased conflict to look at possible implications for other kinds of violence, such as intercommunal conflict. Overall, the research reported here offers only limited support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict. However, framing the climate issue as a security problem could possibly influence the perceptions of the actors and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The debate on the waning of war has recently moved into higher gear and this symposium contributes to the debate. This introductory article outlines briefly some of the major issues: nature versus nurture, the reliability of the data, how broadly violence should be defined, whether there is more agreement on the phenomenon than on its causes, and finally whether the future will be like the past.