Traditional peace research has focused on violence and its consequences. Such a focus may divert attention from nonviolent conflict handling and similar action which often exist even in the midst of massive violence. It is possible that traditional peace research has thus neglected nonviolent conflict handling as well as the capacity for nonviolence in peoples and cultures.

Therefore, the main task for the Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) at the University of Tromsø is to contribute to examining ways of creating peace by peaceful means and to make nonviolent handling of conflicts more known and recognized. We believe that valuable knowledge may be found in areas of low levels of violence and that more useful lessons may be learnt from successful conflict handling than from areas of atrocities and from failures.

Peace studies are concerned with inter-state relations, but also with a wide range of other social conflict lines, such as those related to gender, generation, culture, class, race, ethnicity and nation, as well as the conflict between human society and nature. Although our studies are global, our position in the peaceful Far North, a vast and sparsely populated area in a tough natural climate, with a history of complex ethnic and cultural relations including the problems of hierarchy, recognition and cultural oppression, gives us a chance to learn from a wide range of nonviolent conflict handling. The wider region of the North of Europe also gives us a unique context in which to study conflict handling. Another aim is to compare our experience with experiences from other areas.

Peace studies consist of theoretical-empirical, critical and constructive work. As an applied science, peace studies should pay attention to the constructive part of the work.

From numerous and diverse cases, ranging from everyday quarrels to large-scale massive unarmed revolutions in the last two decades, there are experiences to be learned which may have been underestimated, lost or unjustly treated as insignificant by researchers. Even in the midst of violent conflicts, there are often actors using active nonviolence. CPS will study nonviolent conflict handling empirically and comparatively and will apply a multi-disciplinary pluralistic approach. We will discuss the theoretical implications and communicate the results to a wide audience.