A Tribute

The spring 2001 edition of the International Journal of Peace Studies has largely been written as a tribute to one of the pioneers of the field of conflict analysis and resolution, John W. Burton, who is now in retirement in Australia, his native country. The issue pays tribute to Burton in part because of his pioneering work—both intellectual and practical—between 1960 and 1990, but especially because of his work in the early days of the development of the field, when it was struggling to achieve acceptance among dubious academics and skeptical policy makers.

Burton was one of a generation of men and women— Kenneth and Elise Boulding, Morton Deutsch, Johan Galtung, Anatol Rapoport, Herbert Kelman, and Chadwick Alger—who worked to make the field not only accepted but rigorous, relevant, and challenging. The fact that, today, there are more than 200 conflict and peace studies programs in U.S. universities alone, that alternative dispute resolution is deemed an essential part of any legal system, and that politicians and journalists routinely use and sometimes understand the concepts and language of the field, is in no small part due to this initially small number of scholar practitioners.

Among them, Burton played a pre-eminent role. The articles in this issue of the International Journal of Peace Studies are of two types. Some represent recent unpublished writings by Burton himself, short and pithy but continuing a number of themes he has written about extensively elsewhere, such as the links between domestic politics and external conflict and the need for systematizing innovative ways of coping with conflicts. Other articles, written by some of Burton’s colleagues, assess Burton’s contributions to the field of conflict analysis and resolution. David Dunn discusses Burton’s contribution to the parent field of international relations and the impact of Burton’s ideas on the very conservative British branch of this discipline. Dennis Sandole, who has worked with Burton on both sides of the Atlantic, examines some of Burton’s ideas and their impact on his own thinking.

Richard Rubenstein takes up Burton’s theory of basic human needs and comments on the way these ideas have been extended since Burton published his pioneering works in the 1980s and early 1990s. My own piece looks back over 30 years to the beginnings of problem-solving workshops and the manner in which these were developed as a basic tool of conflict resolution. Undoubtedly, some readers will feel that we have left out important aspects of Burton’s work or that we have wrongly emphasized the effects of some of his ideas. With a figure like John Burton, however, doing full justice to the range of issues he has taken up and discussed and the contributions he has made to the field is difficult.

However, we hope there is enough here to provide some flavor of Burton’s work, of the impact he has had on the development of our field, and of that field’s intellectual and practical debt to him.