The public value of the sociology of peace processes
Professor John D Brewer*
Innovation and Engagement Public Lecture Series
Cardiff University
2 December 2014
*John Brewer is Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Institute for the Study of Conflict
Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded a
DocSocSci honoris causa from Brunel University in 2012 for services to social science and the
sociology of peace processes. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2004), a Fellow of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008), a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2003)
and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (1998). He has held visiting appointments at Yale
University (1989), St John’s College Oxford (1991), Corpus Christi College Cambridge (2002)
and the Australia National University (2003). In 2007-2008 he was a Leverhulme Trust
Research Fellow. He has been President of the British Sociological Association (2009-2012)
and is now Honorary Life Vice President, and is also a member of the Governing Council of
the Irish Research Council and of the Council of the Academy of Social Science. In 2010 he
was appointed to the United Nations Roster of Global Experts for his expertise in peace
processes. He is the author or co-author of fifteen books and editor or co-editor of a further
three. His latest books are Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press, 2010),
Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2011), ExCombatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2013) and The Public Value of
Social Sciences (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is General Editor of the book series Palgrave Studies
in Compromise after Conflict. He is Principal Investigator on a £1.26 million cross-national,
six-year project on compromise amongst victims of conflict, funded by The Leverhulme
Trust, focusing on Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka. He regularly teaches peace
and reconciliation workshops in Sri Lanka. In 2013 he gave the Academy of Social Science
Annual Lecture, in March 2014 the Annual Lord Dunleath Lecture, in April the Annual Lord
Patten Lecture, in May 2014 he spoke at the Westminster Faith Debate on the motion that
religion is a positive force in peace building, and in June 2014 delivered the Annual David
Stevens Memorial Lecture.
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Let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to speak at this event. As a miner’s son from
the Shropshire Coalfield and with Welsh blood in my veins, I am pleased to be speaking here
tonight.
The social sciences are under attack. This has led a number of social scientists to formulate
statements about the inherent public value of the social sciences that go beyond accounts
of their economic usefulness. In this talk I outline my own view of the public value of the
social sciences. I argue, however, that we need more than enthusiastic statements, what I
call ‘grand narratives’ of public value. Social science itself needs to change in order to realise
this public value. We have spent so much time criticising the rise of neo-liberal universities
that we have overlooked the responsibility to critique ourselves. What I call the 'new public
social science' puts my notion of public value into practice, and in so doing helps social
science respond to the complex problems and challenges affecting the future of humankind
in the 21st century. I illustrate this with reference to some of my recent work in formulating
a new area of social science, ending with some preliminary reflections on the public value of
what I call the sociology of peace processes.
Before I outline the new public social science, I must refer quickly back to my depiction of
public value since public social science only makes sense in the context of the public value it
seeks to realise.
There are different types of value. I referred to use, price value, and normative value.
Normative value is an evaluation of social worth, involving judgements of the esteem
involved in possessing something, which can be entirely independent of its price and use
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value. It comes in private and public forms. In its private form it describes the worth an
individual places on something; its public form is the worth society places on it, which can
be independent of any individual’s private estimation of worth.
The normative public value of social science – its worth to society – is that it nurtures a
moral sentiment in which we produce and reproduce the social nature of society, enabling
us to recognize each other as social beings, capable of living only with each other in social
groups, where we have a common responsibility for our shared future.
Public value is more than the social and cultural relevance of social science research,
significant as this is; more than its policy engagements, as profound as these can be; and
greater than the many cognitive accomplishments and learning skills derived from a social
science education, plentiful as these are. Put simply, the social sciences not only generate
information about society, they are the medium for society’s reproduction. They are the
way in which society finds out about itself and in so doing generates the very idea of society
itself.
Use and price value are located in the immediate here-and-now of current time and space;
public normative value is attentive to the humanitarian future. Part of the moral sentiment
and sympathetic imagination of social science is its capacity to alert humankind to its
potentially threatening future. This is what makes social science relevant to the 21st century.
The social sciences are engaged with the ‘big issues’ of future industrial, scientific and
economic change – sustainability, environmental justice, climate change, demographic
shifts, labour migration, organised violence and peace processes. But even more
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significantly, future change will be mediated by the capacity of the social sciences to hold a
mirror up to society to enable it to make sense of these changes.
Social science thus becomes a public good for its own sake, for two reasons. First, because it
cultivates this moral sentiment and sympathetic imagination through its subject matter,
teaching, research and civic engagements that reproduces the idea of society; and secondly,
because it makes itself relevant to our humanitarian future by understanding, explaining,
analysing and ameliorating the fundamental social problems stored up for us all in the 21 st
century.
However, there is nothing inevitable about social scientists practising this form of social
science. As recently as 21 November, seven umbrella groups of the world’s leading research
intensive universities, including the Russell Group, signed up to the Leiden Statement, which
promotes the contribution of the humanities and social sciences to what it referred to as
‘global challenges’. What it does not say is that social science has to change to meet these
challenges. I want now to outline the new form of public social science I see as necessary to
put this public value into practice.
The new public social science can be defined in a way that embeds it in this depiction of the
public normative value of social science. The new public social science studies the social
nature of society, the way in which society is produced and reproduced in culture, the
market and the state, generating information about society, the market and the state that
informs society about itself and the big issues that shape its humanitarian future. This
simultaneously promotes moral sentiments and a sympathetic imagination through
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garnering a body of citizens educated to social awareness and appreciative of the distant,
marginalized and strange other. In this way, social science teaching and learning has
civilizing, humanizing and cultural effects.
Social science is both theoretically informed and empirically driven, committed to
developing evidence-based observations, descriptions and explanations through theoretical
and empirical investigations. This makes social science explanatory rather than just
descriptive, combining theoretical insight with empirical rigour. The research agenda of the
new public social science is distinguished by applying these scientific skills to the analysis of
the fundamental problems of culture, the market and the state in the 21 st century.
This is more profound than it sounds. Since the problems of the 21st century are complex
and have technical features incapable of analysis by a single discipline, and are not even the
responsibility of any one branch of science, the research agenda of the new public social
perforce privileges post-disciplinarity in a way that distinguishes it from traditional social
problems research.
I mean by post-disciplinarity more than the ritualized calls for inter- or multi-disciplinarity.
Post-disciplinary social science is problem oriented rather than discipline oriented, with
disciplinary ideas, of theoretical and empirical kinds, used in combination as the problem
determines across all branches of knowledge. Problems are no longer defined in terms of
the received wisdom of individual disciplines, but by the technical features required to
understand, analyze, explain and ameliorate them. I am only too pleased when post-
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disciplinarity elicits a reaction along the lines of ‘that’s what I and many others do’ – I’m
merely suggesting we want more of it.
This may or may not involve collaboration with others across disciplinary boundaries, as
inter- and multi-disciplinarity usually mean; it may involve instead single researchers moving
outside their intellectual orthodoxies to themselves approach the topic from perspectives
outside their own discipline.
Post-disciplinarity also extends the range of collaborations to include other branches of
knowledge in the humanities and the natural and medical sciences. Again this may or may
not involve large research teams with disciplinary skills combining to deal with the various
technical features of the problem; it could involve single social scientists becoming familiar
with the humanities, natural science or medical research necessary to address their topic.
Transgendered sexuality, for example, can no longer solely be understood from within social
science but requires biological and medical knowledge. Neurological research animates
some anthropological studies of culture and sociological studies of child behaviour.
Behavioural economics is pushing the boundaries of our understanding of market behaviour
by returning to ideas now out of favour in social psychology that explore the cognitive and
affective bases of decision making. The study of organized violence, genocide, and postconflict recovery, for example, now popular in the social sciences in international relations,
transitional studies, political science, social psychology and what is called ‘conflict
economics’, sees healing as a medical and social process, relevant to the human and social
body, and not able to be accomplished properly without also involving trauma studies,
cognitive science, medicine, and victimology studies, amongst others.
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As well as being problem rather than discipline focused, there is another distinguishing
feature of the research focus on fundamental social problems within the new public social
science. This is its collaboration with government, NGOs, civil society, and different forms of
publics in what is researched, the way it is researched and in the proposed outcomes of the
research. Research becomes participative, in which research questions are not defined
solely as the preserve of professionals; it is a form of co-produced knowledge. Public social
science needs to be co-produced with the publics that name it as public. Fear of the loss of
research autonomy, which is associated with traditional disciplinarity, must be secondary to
involving publics in the research.
The key question here, of course, is which public are we to be responsible to? In my view,
there are multiple publics that extend beyond the tyranny of the majority and we require
openness to them all. My view of our research agenda requires, I suggest, that the new
public social science is open to insight from all stakeholders involved in a problem, including
the very different publics associated with it. Some of these may well be regressive and,
using Jeffrey Alexander’s phrase, ‘uncivil’. I think, for example, of research on right-wing
extremist groups or anti-peace movements. Others will be in positions of power, whom
social science has kept at arm’s length in the past.
If ‘big issues’ direct our attention, the multiple interests involved in them require research
agendas that successful tap the impact on all parties and from all their points of view. This
means government as well as powerless and marginalized groups, business as well as NGOs,
policymakers as well as the underprivileged subjected to policy. Amongst the several
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publics which we should be receptive to and engaged with, we still need to speak truth to
power – whether government ministers, officials, civic groups, parties, trades unions or
business organizations.
Therefore, theoretically driven and empirically engaged research on complex problems
transcends disciplinary boundaries and political ones, and needs to rise above the
‘strangers’ whom social scientists kept at arm’s length in the past. If big issues demand big
science, this also involves a ‘big attitude’. I mean by this by improving social science links
with the local publics social scientists feel represent their more natural constituencies, but
also with government and policymakers, people normally considered as ‘strangers’.
The research agenda of the new public social science requires a further change to
conventional research practice. Post-disciplinary research implicates different modes of
communication and language. Inter-working across the social sciences and with other
branches of science, and in liaison with co-producers of knowledge amongst publics with a
stake in the research, requires a common language. This will mean lessening the use of ingroup, professional vocabulary, and it involves a stylistic change, in which social scientists
write to make themselves understood rather than for professional acclaim.
I want to pursue this notion of public engagement since it is central to the new public social
science. One of the most familiar responses to the neo-liberal emphasis on the need for
universities to be publicly accountable has been the demand to improve dissemination;
dissemination is presented as a form of public engagement, and a method of garnering
impact. It needs to be forcefully asserted that civic engagement is more than dissemination.
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In the new public social science, civic engagement begins with the formulation of the
research problem when different publics can be involved as co-producers of research, and it
also enters into the teaching strategy of the new public social science, when civil society
groups, INGOs, and other publics can be brought into the classroom – and provide
placements and fieldtrips outside the classroom – to lessen the gap between it and the real
world of big issue problems. Civic engagement in the new public social science is thus not
left as the final outcome, to be done at the end. Dissemination and civic engagement are
different processes. Dissemination involves communicating the results to broader
audiences; civic engagement, however, also involves holding conversations with relevant
publics and stakeholders in a problem at all stages of research, as well as in teaching.
One of the reasons why public social science is at once difficult and profound is because it
challenges the boundaries between normative and scientific practice. Traditional normative
social scientists may well dislike the idea of public social science because it challenges their
preference for the naysayer role of critic, since they know that in order to make a difference
to people’s lives they will have to engage upwards to powerful publics, rather than just
downwards to the organic publics we feel more comfortable with. Others may well dislike it
because the focus on big issues risks their detachment and threatens to get them engaged
with problems that have clear moral dimensions. However, I do not see the new public
social science as involving a simple bifurcation between science and normative practise – it
is science with a normative dimension and moral commitment scientifically undergirded.
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The public value of social science is explicitly normative. The way I have constructed this
public value – cultivation of moral sentiments and a sympathetic imagination toward each
other as social beings and ethical concern about the humanitarian future of humankind –
makes it a particularly normative pursuit. The new public social science which is predicated
on this notion of public value therefore cannot avoid being normative. Indeed, it is designed
in order for social scientists to live ethically and act politically in their practise as social
scientists.
I claim, however, that public social science is still science, and its normative and scientific
dimensions can be easily reconciled. The new public social science is scientific through its
commitment to the idea of science and by its separation of values and evidence. This means
that public social scientists with value commitments should not distort the evidence for the
sake of the values they hold. It also means that the new public social science needs to
continue to reflect on methodological issues and research practice in order to improve its
science.
Incidentally, I believe Weber’s notion of science as a vocation is greatly misunderstood and
serves us ill in the 21st century, for it was really a maxim to accompany the
professionalization of the social sciences in the 20th. This is why I have also written on the
need to replace it with a new maxim: society as a vocation. Even with society as our
vocation, however, social science remains scientific but now the commitment to science is
accompanied with an ethical responsibility to promote the social good. Weber would not
have disagreed with this.
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Let me begin to conclude by bringing us to the sociology of peace processes. Public social
science is about creating global citizens with a responsibility to our shared humanitarian
future and I see my re-conceptualisation of peace processes as very much the sort of public
social science I have outlined here. It is part of the same intellectual project – to define a
new type of social science suitable for the next millennium that is capable of addressing
issues that help social science respond to the threats engulfing our humanitarian future –
which in the case of the sociology of peace processes is to be better capable of
understanding the nature of peace processes and the sorts of issues they throw up for
analysis and amelioration. Its public value is that the sociology of peace processes helps
societies emerging out of conflict make sense of themselves, helps them respond to rapid
social changes provoked by peace, and to understand the structural factors that privilege
some groups and disadvantage others in peace processes.
Let me first explain why we needed this re-conceptualisation. Peace processes are normally
approached from the standpoint of political science, International Relations and human
rights law. The emphasis was upon the introduction of good governance structures and thus
on institutional reform. Peacebuilding in effect turned into statebuilding. The assumption
was that once problematic politics was sorted out through new governance structures,
everything else fell into place and the society would naturally over time become reconciled
to itself and its past.
This approach is naïve. I distinguish between the political peace process, which concerns
itself with institutional reform to introduce new governance structures, and the social peace
process, which is about reconciliation between erstwhile protagonists, social relationship11
building across a communal divide, civil society repair, and the replacement of brokenness
by the development (or restoration) of tolerance and compromise. These concerns are
either ignored by negotiators in the political peace process or assumed to follow naturally
from the signing of the agreement itself. The sorts of actions that focus the social peace
process include truth and reconciliation procedures, forgiveness and atonement strategies,
policies that facilitate and encourage public tolerance and compromise, new forms of
memory work, memorialisation and remembering, public apologies, new cultural symbols,
such as national flags, anthems and the like, and the reassessment and re-evaluation of
identity.
If we focus attention on the political peace process, the domain for its operation and
implementation are naturally political. Peace processes become the responsibility of
governments, and the political actors that make up or aspire to be governments. However,
once we recognise there is also a social peace process, peace processes become everyone’s
responsibility and the domain in which they function and are consolidated widens to include
civil society. The social peace process thus depends for its progress on the empowerment of
civil society rather than statebuilding.
The aftermath of organised violence and civil war and the difficult demands of post-conflict
reconciliation and healing are examples of just the sorts of issues that threaten our
humanitarian future in the 21st century and which form the remit of the new public social
science as I have described it.
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Let me anticipate an accusation of inconsistency. As I emphasised, one of the marks of this
new form of public social science is its emphasis on post-disciplinarity, where the nature of
the problem determines the perspective not approaches from within closed disciplinary
boundaries, and where collaborations should extend across large subject areas rather than
narrow cognate fields in order that all its technical features can be addressed in the one
piece of research.
The sociology of peace processes as I envisage it is inherently post-disciplinary. Sociologists
of peace processes need to link with mental health specialists when dealing with posttrauma growth, say, or with computer scientists and electrical engineers when exploring
cybercrime and it role in organised violence, or, with public health specialists when
considering the medical health issues of children born of rape or HIV-AIDs, which are
legacies of conflict, or with drama and creative art experts when exploring the role of
performance art in helping people manage the problems of dealing with the past. The social
peace process brings together theologians when reflecting on the meaning of political
forgiveness, planners and architects when redesigning for shared space, or geographers
when conflict transformation impinges on territory and borders, and so on. The social peace
process is inherently post-disciplinary.
Why then, you may be thinking, call it the sociology of peace processes? My defence echoes
that of C Wright Mills when in the second footnote to his book The Sociological Imagination
he wrote that he was describing an approach for the whole social sciences and that he first
thought of entitling it ‘The Social Studies’, but changed his mind, he said, because he was a
sociologist and it was the discipline he knew best. I suspect this is a weak defence. Perhaps
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a more accurate phrase might be the new public social science of peace processes, but I
hope you agree that is a mouthful.
But whatever we call it, what is its public value? It is that it helps create global citizens with
a responsibility to our shared humanitarian future. This affects the teaching of peace
processes, the kind of research topics we address, and the sorts of civic engagements we
undertake. Co-produced knowledge is well suited in the study of the social peace process
and it requires that the engagements go upwards to governments and international
agencies as well as downwards to victims and survivors; and this civic engagement must
include the uncivil parts of civil society, such as ex-combatants, dissidents, spoilers and
opponents of peace.
The capacity of the sociology of peace processes, as part of the new public social science, to
garner moral sentiment and sympathetic imagination is essential when it comes to
emotionally empathising as researchers with the categories of people affected by violence
and who have the difficult take of learning to live together after it. Garnering these qualities
in students on courses dealing with peace processes is also an essential task of our teaching,
so students empathise with the marginalised and distant other suffering the consequences
of violence and living in fear or anger as they try to develop a shared future with former
enemies. By so doing we help to create global civic awareness about people living in
societies emerging out of conflict. The ethical responsibility of our science is to try to make a
difference to their lives. The new public social science of peace processes has a normative
public value that can be summarised as follows: To try to make a difference to the lives of
ordinary people who are struggling with the aftermath of conflict by empowering them to
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realise fairness, justice and tolerance. Societies emerging out of conflict need public social
science more than most, and the sociology of peace processes helps them come to terms
with their violent pasts and assists them in inheriting a more peaceful future.
Thank you very much.
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