Conflict, Peace and Security: An International Relations Perspective with Special Reference to India

Conflict, peace and security are some of the enduring concerns of the Peace Research Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. They have become integrated in the dominant disciplines of international relations and political science and now are also part of most of the social science disciplines, such as economics, sociology, public policy, gender studies, international law and so on. This article purportedly seeks to examine some of the varied issues of conflict, peace and security and the challenges posed before the IR theorists to deal with them. It will also examine how the liberals, realists, Marxists, neo-Marxists and functionalists interpret conflict-transformation, peace-building and security. This article concludes with the argument that it is within the frontiers of critical theory as well as a class analysis of the structure of society within any state that social scientists can move from a paradigm of conflict reduction towards a more egalitarian model of peace and security. This article also concludes that only human security with a strong social welfare policy will lead to an egalitarian social order, especially in India