Interview Transcript
Paul Rogers, from a background in development studies, joined an embattled Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, playing a major role in making it one of the most trustworthy, non-governmental information sources on nuclear weapons and security issues.
Paul Rogers is another peace researcher who came into the field from a background in the natural sciences – in his case biology – and was led to a study of peace through an early recognition of the linkage between food availability, development, and conflict. He spent the early part of his career in Africa and came back to education in Britain at the time of marked expansion of the tertiary level and a national level commitment to increase the number of graduates in all fields, but especially those associated with technology.
As he explains in his interview, this commitment did not last very long and, having moved across to the newly formed Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, at the same time as his similarly qualified colleague, Malcolm Dando, Professor Rogers found himself in the midst of a series of struggles to keep the Department "in being," particularly in the face of major financial cuts carried out by the government of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, and some internal disagreement about the nature of 'true' peace research and its relationship to activism.
The Department's survival was not helped by its commitment to the critical examination of nuclear weapons, security strategy, and the relative costs of defense and disarmament to the U.K. so that, especially during the 1980s and on into the 1990s, the Department and its members were targeted by some in the British Government [and elsewhere] as the source of dangerous dissidence, sometimes bordering on the treasonable.
However, by concentrating on making sure that the quality of their research remained high and firmly based on empirical evidence, Paul Rogers and his colleagues were able to establish themselves as an excellent, trustworthy source of research and information – and not merely on defense related issues. This has led to the Bradford Department becoming recognized
internationally as the premier peace research facility in the United Kingdom and has ensured that Paul Rogers’ reputation in the field is second to none.
