Debates críticos: os estudos de segurança e o futuro dos estudos da paz e dos conflitos

Irredeemably connected by the proximity of their research objects, Security Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies were constituted and developed throughout the Cold War as antagonistic disciplines. This was a division mostly operated in Europe, where Galtung and his disciples directed the study of peace and war to a clearly normative and critical agenda, while the study of security remained mostly policy oriented. As argued in this article, there was, by the end of the bipolar conflict, a role inversion, with Peace and Conflict Studies accommodated to an empiricism void of any explicit normativity, whilst Security Studies, at least in Europe, opened up to new approaches of a more critical stance. It is here suggested that such inversion should provide important lessons for Peace and Conflict Studies, namely on the centrality of theory for the definition of a new critical agenda that could also contribute to bring both disciplines closer to each other.