Careers in Conflict Transformation and professional peaceworking: Why study this body of knowledge?

 Why?

Why do people study conflict transformation and peace? That is a question with two major parts. 

One, what prompted the origins of this field of study, a field that is itself transforming into a discipline?

Two, why do students study all this today?

The first broad question about the emergent genesis of this field has a few strands. 

War has been studied for more than 11,000 years, itself erupting in all likelihood out of the development of agriculture. When foraging was the normal practice, little food storage was possible, with some minor but important exceptions. Storage of food for long periods turned nomadic peoples, not quite so much "owning" any particular land with clear boundaries, into more stationary people, with grain storage in larger and larger amounts, hedging against starvation in bad years of crop failure, but also presenting larger and more valuable--literally tasty--target to acquire. The long history of small raiding parties out to steal a horse or a bride from another tribal band--a long history that did not include grand armies marching against each other--transmogrified into a world of war that slowly produced the heavily armed, legally bounded nation-state system we have all inherited. In that former world, it was bands of tribal folk as dots of human influence in a vast, bountiful sea of Mother Nature's wilderness without any need or temptation to fight en masse for a piece of land. In our world that has been emerging since the dawn of storable agricultural products, we've thus been pondering war--how to defend against armies marching to seize walled cities and the surrounding productive lands and how to organize armies that can conquer neighbors and take those cities and the farms that support them.

Thus, as wars have become destructive enough to present existential threats to life itself, the question has been called: who will study peace? Who will learn how to transform conflict?

Why do students study this today?

Because, as an examination of news, history, and academic research reports inform us, there are far wiser methods than threatening to blow up others. This new understanding is opening a new vista into careers of practitioners at every level of all manner of conflict who can show us how to get more gain with less pain. This is true at the interpersonal, the community, the governmental, and international levels, cracking open an entirely new line of specialists from the individual family to the global human family. It is quite complex and will take a great deal of exploration to understand the width and depth of what can be transformed by these new specialists graduating with degrees in conflict transformation and peace studies.