Paige, Glenn D. Nonkilling Global Political Science,
Xlibris: Philadelphia, 2000, 239 pp.
ISBN# Hardcover 0-7388-5744-0,
Paperback 0 -7388-5745-9

(Publishers: Xlibris Corporation, 436 Walnut Street, 11th Floor Philadelphia, PA 19106-3703, This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it , Tel. +1 (215) 923-4686) Paperback $18.69, Hardback $28.79, eBook $8.00

We have just entered the third year of the new millennium and war and terrorism is becoming the norm to resolve international conflicts. All the experience of bloody wars of the previous century and the wisdom thereby gained seems to have been wasted.

Professor Glenn Paige in his recent book, Nonkilling Global Political Science argues if political scientists, scholars who dedicate their lives to the study of political power in its multi-faceted manifestations do not challenge seriously the assumption of lethality, then why would one expect political leaders and citizens of the world to do so.

Is a nonkilling global society feasible? Paige in this path-breaking book asks this simple yet profound question, but goes a step further to challenge his discipline, questioning, if a nonkilling global political science is achievable? On both counts, through insightful analysis and substantive evidence, his answer is a resounding 'yes'.

Glenn Paige, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, writes from experience, having served in the Korean war. The work represents the synthesis of decades of his research which includes a number of books: The Korean Decision (1968), The Scientific Study of Political Leadership (1977), and To Nonviolent Political Science: From Seasons of Violence (1993).

The term Nonkilling unlike nonviolence is not as comforting because it confronts us with the modern violent reality that we witness regularly on our tv screens. The reality is that mighty nations still consider that they can assert pre-emptive wars, last experienced during the Third Reich and the Soviet period, without qualms. Professor Paige's use of the term is very specific, neither advocating pacifist philosophy nor religious faith, it's grounded in the evidence-based approach of behavioral sciences.

Paige shows that both violence-accepting politics and political science, in the last century have failed to suppress violence by violent means. The study of government and international politics has been unable to lay the groundwork and methodology for policy advice that goes to the roots of the causality of global violence.

Paige's vision is for political science to dedicate itself to a diagnosis of the pathology of lethality, and to discover both prescriptions and treatments that can be shared with all who seek to remove killing from global life. He shows that at most only about five percent of human beings have ever killed another person. Perhaps less than two or one percent of all homo sapiens have been killers of fellow humans. (p.27) Why not then to train, people and nations globally to strengthen their resistance to kill?

He uses life-affirming medical science as a metaphor. Medicine, through its continual research and training programs on prevention, intervention, and post-traumatic transformation strategies have proven successful in producing both knowledge and practitioners for the moral interest of preservation of life. Paige considers that same rigor and commitment to non-lethality can be made equally applicable to social sciences.

The last three chapters of the book lay out a road-map for a large-scale reconstruction of a nonkilling global society. In a chapter on Implications for Political Science, the author proposes changes that might accompany a shift towards non-lethality in the areas of political philosophy, political theory, leadership and polity, policy studies, comparative politics, and international politics.

For instance, why has the study of successful leadership in conflict resolution without military intervention remained neglected? There is a long list of Nobel Peace Prize winners who dared to take the nonviolent route for complex regime-change in their respective countries, and succeeded. Their accomplishments, leadership styles, skills, and strategies are waiting to be examined and analyzed.

Perhaps, a more important question political science ought to be exploring is the place of a sovereign nation-state, international law, multilateral institutions of civil society in an uni-polar world. Within the United States, political scientists may also ask whether that country wants to be seen as championing a democratic world order, or as an empire striving to impose its economic and security interests globally at any cost.

Paige calls into question the Weberian dogma that the acceptance of violence is imperative for the practice and science of politics. On this bias, he writes that

unlike natural sciences that encourage development of pure theory as a contribution to practical applications, political science has tended to be unreceptive to theoretical imagination, and this is especially true with regards to nonviolence creativity. By dismissing it in professional training as 'utopian'¯, 'idealistic'¯ and 'unrealistic'¯, political science is condemned to support perpetual lethality.

Consequently, killing that has been expected to liberate, protect, and enrich has become instead a source of insecurity, impoverishment, and threat to human and planetary survival. This "pathology of defense"¯ is such that Paige points out that what it is intended to defend becomes itself the source of self-destruction. Bodyguards kill their own heads of state, armies violate and impoverish their own people, and nuclear weapons proliferate to threaten their inventors and possessors.

Paige concludes that the time has come for a paradigm-shift in the discipline: "If tradition has taught that we must kill to be free, equal and secure -- the present teaches that unless we stop killing not only freedom and equality are in jeopardy but our very survival -- individual, social, and ecological -- is imperiled. We have reached a point where the science and practice of politics must be aligned with the life-supporting forces of society and nature. It (nonkilling) is not only good morality, and good practically, but it is also this era's imperative for good political science."

 

Paige is optimistic that this goal is neither utopian nor idealistic, but one that is reachable and essential. He courageously identifies and defines in its Nonkilling approach an imminent need for a new sub-field of political science. The book is both provocative and creative, an original work and a wonderful tonic for these troubled times.


Book reviewed by Bill Bhaneja. Dr. Bhaneja, a former Canadian diplomat, and currently working as a Senior Fellow , Program of Research in Innovation, Management and Economy (PRIME), University of Ottawa, Canada