John Burton "pioneered" peace and conflict studies through three major conceptual innovations: his challenge to 'realist' power political thought, the creation of 'problem-solving workshops,' and developing a theory of 'human needs' as a major source of social and intractable conflicts.
John Burton was a young Australian diplomat at the end of the Second World War, involved in post war planning for both reconstruction and redevelopment and the establishment of international institutions intended to prevent a repeat of that dreadful War. As such, he attended the San Francisco Conference which set up the United Nations and was part of the effort by some of the then “Middle” Powers – including India, Canada, and Australia – to try to prevent the U.N. being dominated by the militarily powerful Allies that had just won the war and were preparing to dominate the peace.
When he returned to Australia he first became private secretary to the Australian foreign minister, “Doc” Evatt and then the youngest ever permanent head of the Australian diplomatic service. All of this, plus his experiences of witch hunting during the McCarthy period in Australia, gave him a very different intellectual background and mindset compared to colleagues from Europe and North America when he started a second career as an academic, first in England during the 1960s and 1970s and then in the United States during the 1980s.
In his early years as a full time academic, Burton launched a critique of the “realist” or power political school of thought that dominated International Relations thinking in the years immediately after the Second World War and then throughout the Cold War. His book Peace Theory; Preconditions for Disarmament was an attempt to switch attention from the existence of dangerous nuclear weaponry to the issue of why leaders felt they had to have such weapons and why there were so few efforts to remove the underlying reasons for arming at all. It was followed by a whole series of works that put forward a wholly different framework for thinking about relationships of conflict and cooperation, initially between separate, “sovereign states,” but then gradually at all social levels, from individuals through groups and then communities.
At the same time, Burton and his colleagues began to develop the technique of small group, analytical dialogues between adversaries, originally known as “controlled communication,” but later and more familiarly as “problem solving workshops.” These were intended as an alternative to coercive diplomacy and hard bargaining within a “power framework” and were the precursors of many of the modern “Track Two” processes in use today. The technique later become connected to Burton’s third major conceptual innovation, that of basic human needs and the role the lack of “satisfiers” for those needs played in the creation of intractable conflicts.
After a spell in the United States where he helped his colleague Ed Azar establish the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, and then developed the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution [later ICAR] at George Mason University, Burton retired to Australia where he continued to write until his death in 2010.
[This interview took place before the formal start of the “Parents of the Field” project. Hence it is less formally structured and somewhat more discursive that other interviews in the series.]
