James’ O’Connell’s first teaching appointments were in Nigeria initially at the University of Ibadan from 1958 to 1967, a period which covered the colonial handover of the country into independence, and subsequently as Professor of Government at Ahmadu Bello University from 1967 to 1975. The latter period covered the brief but costly civil war over Biafran independence, so that Dr. O’Connell had the opportunity to observe the effects of intra-state conflicts that were pursued through extreme violence; and on the possible roles that mediators might play in such circumstances. After a brief spell at the University of Warwick and at Northern Ireland Polytechnic, Dr. O’Connell was appointed as the second Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in Yorkshire, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Adam Curle who had launched the Department in 1975. While Curle came from a Quaker background – and the Department had been founded largely on the initiative of a group of northern English Quakers – O’Connell was a Catholic and thus focused on the linkages between freedom and justice, and also peace as a necessary pre-condition for all three to flourish.
Dr. O’Connell arrived at Bradford at a time when peace studies was struggling – there and elsewhere – to achieve a minimum of academic respectability in the face of some academic skepticism; he made it his task to achieve this during his time as the occupant of what was then the only Chair of Peace Studies in the country. In the 1970s the field was divided by fierce debates over activism versus academic research, justifiable uses of violence and both the ends and means of peace research – disputes that were reflected in the Department. O’Connell firmly believed that the best way forward was through what he subsequently called “the hard purification of scholarship” and that the main justification for a Department of Peace Studies was study -- and thanks to his management this became and remains the unifying principle of work in the Department. Under his leadership, the academic credentials of the Department were further strengthened and its program was slowly built up.
Once achieved, academic respectability became an important defense in the early 1980s when the Department as well as the whole idea of peace studies came under fierce attack by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes on the grounds of its members publicly expressing skepticism about the whole Falklands War adventure. The Conservative government’s attacks on James O’Connell’s Department led to an investigation by the University Grants Committee which produced a “clean bill of health” for the Department. It also survived the draconic cuts in university funding imposed in 1981.
James O’Connell retired as Department chair in 1993, by which time he had helped to build up a Department that has become the leading research peace research institution in the country with a solid list of publications and a record of consultations for both government departments and non-governmental organizations. As an emeritus professor he continued to be active in the Department and in the field of peace research in Britain that he had done so much to establish.
