SIPRI’s Biggest Failure: Why the West Can't Imagine Peace Anymore | Dr. Jan Oberg

## A disappearing vocabulary: why peace fell out of the conversation The most striking theme to emerge from the conversation is not simply institutional drift but a deeper epistemic loss: Europe and much of the West have stopped thinking about peace as a distinct, actionable project. What was once a recognized field with its own concepts, methods, and public presence—peace research—has been gradually swallowed by a security paradigm that privileges weapons, deterrence, and managerial crisis responses. The consequence is not just semantic. When policy debates, university departments, and prestigious think tanks stop asking whether a course of action promotes peace, they stop trying to design policies that might actually reduce violence in all its forms. This exchange, and the critique voiced throughout by Dr. Jan Oberg, lays bare how such a reorientation happened, why it matters, and what it costs democracies and the prospects for nonviolent conflict resolution. ## SIPRI’s metamorphosis: from peace institute to security brand SIPRI’s trajectory serves as a vivid emblem of the wider transformation. Founded with a double mandate—rigorous data collection on armaments and an active role in thinking about peaceful resolution of conflicts—the institute built a respected dataset and a reputation. Yet over decades, the balance shifted. The emblematic change on its homepage from “peace” to “peace and security” and now to “security” is more than rhetorical. It signals a re-prioritization in research agendas, partnerships, and the types of expertise invited into public debates. The conversation recounted the early SIPRI years—when the institute produced the armaments data the world relied upon and also sought to propose alternative pathways toward reduced violence—and contrasts that with a contemporary SIPRI whose analytic frames revolve around military capabilities, threat assessments, and strategic deterrence. Dr. Oberg’s experience in the 1970s provided a baseline: peace research historically combined empirical work with theory-building about nonviolence, reconciliation, and structural change. The contemporary shift is not just a loss of topics; it is a loss of an entire normative grammar that asks for proposals aimed explicitly at reducing violence rather than managing or legitimizing it. ## What counts as peace research: theory, alternatives, and the missing spectrum A central analytical point from the conversation is definitional but consequential: peace research is not anodyne empirical description of the international environment; it is a program dedicated to understanding and reducing violence in its many forms—military, structural, cultural, and psychological. This requires robust theory, historical sensitivity, and an orientation toward alternatives—mechanisms such as civilian conflict resolution, reconciliation processes, nuclear abolition strategies, and institutional reforms that change incentives away from violence. When institutions that still bear the name “peace” stop producing conceptual work—on nonviolence, forgiveness, civic resilience, or the political economy of militarism—they cease to be peace research centers in any substantive sense. Instead they become producers of what Dr. Oberg calls “security knowledge”: analyses that presuppose a military-centric toolkit and that predominantly address how to manage, deter, or outcompete adversaries. The result is a narrowed intellectual ecosystem that trains scholars and advisers to think within a militarized frame rather than to imagine and design alternatives that might prevent violence before it escalates. ## The power of discourse: narratives, memory, and the practical silencing of alternatives Language shapes possibility. The conversation repeatedly returned to how repeated use of framings like “invasion,” “unprovoked,” or “full-scale” subtly molds public understanding and policy windows. Once a dominant narrative takes hold in media, policymaking, and academia, it structures which causal factors are permissible to discuss. In the present moment, the conversation argues, public debate in many Western countries is constrained by a single narrative about Russia, NATO, and the causes of conflict—one that omits or marginalizes historical commitments, broken promises, and the long reach of geopolitics. This narrowing is reinforced by generational shifts in memory. Older cohorts who remember détente, Olof Palme, or the collapse of the Berlin Wall brought lived experiences that fostered alternative imaginaries of peace. Younger scholars, socialized into current academic and policy environments, often lack such experiences and find career incentives aligned with institutions that emphasize security. Over time, institutional cultures, terminologies, and research agendas ossify; what once might have been controversial analytical claims—about NATO expansion, or about civilian conflict resolution—become unsayable or simply unasked in mainstream forums. ## Militarism, MIMAC, and the structural incentives that silence peace The conversation names an entrenched coalition that helps explain how this cultural and intellectual shift occurred: what Dr. Oberg calls the military-industrial-media-academic complex (MIMAC). This shorthand captures how defense industries, media frames, political elites, and academic institutions can mutually reinforce one another, creating an environment in which armed approaches to security are normalized and rewarded. Financial dependencies are central. State funding, institutional partnerships, and career trajectories incline universities and think tanks toward analyses that remain within acceptable doctrinal limits. When peace research centers become state-funded or closely allied with security institutions, their room to critique orthodoxy narrows. That narrowing has political implications: calls for increased military spending, doctrinal shifts toward nuclear deterrence, and promotion of alliances like NATO are presented as the only rational responses to threats. Alternative strategies—UN-centered diplomacy, civilian peacekeeping, negotiated settlements—become marginalized as unrealistic or naïve, regardless of empirical evidence of their past effectiveness. The conversation underscores that this is not merely an academic squabble. Policy choices follow from the dominant frames. If peace is not a metric for evaluating proposals, governments will not ask whether initiatives actually reduce violence in the long term. Instead, they prioritize force-capabilities, readiness metrics, and alliance signaling—measures that may well increase the probability of confrontation and lock societies into cycles of escalating armament. ## Reclaiming peace research: institutional, intellectual, and public remedies If the diagnosis is accurate, remedy requires a multi-pronged strategy that restores peace as a legitimate object of study and public concern. The conversation offers several practical pointers worth distilling. First, independence matters. Small, citizen-financed or donor-diverse institutions can preserve intellectual space for critical inquiry. The example cited—an institute surviving without state support—shows how independence allows researchers to challenge dominant narratives without fear of funding reprisals. Second, theory must come back to the center of research. Peace research should not be an applied afterthought to strategic studies; it ought to regenerate conceptual work on nonviolence, civilian conflict resolution, and structural causes of violence and test those frameworks empirically. Third, education and memory matter. Universities should ensure that curricula include historical experiences of peace-building, alternative diplomacy, and case studies where nonviolent strategies worked. Bringing practitioners from civil-society peace movements, UN peacekeepers, and community reconciliation initiatives into academic dialogues can widen horizons for stude

Why the West Can't Imagine Peace Anymore | Dr. Jan Oberg Why is the West so hell-bent on solving all its problems through warfare? What happened to those lofty goals and ideals of peaceful coexistence in Europe and the world? What happened to the visions of non-violent international relations and Europe as a peace project? Dr. Oberg is a Danish Peace Researcher in Sweden who recently wrote a noteworthy Substack article about the ongoing deterioration of peace research Europe, specifically about the gradual transformation of “Peace” into “Security”, most notoriously exemplified by SIPRI, the “Stockholm International Peace Research Institute” which today more or less exclusively works on “security” rather than peace. In Memoriam: Jan Oberg and Pascal Lottaz dedicate this conversation to Alva Myrdal - who chaired the Commission that proposed the establishment of the SIPRI, the real peace research institute, with a vision in 1966 and in 1982 received the Nobel Peace Prize - and nuclear physicist Frank Barnaby, director of SIPRI 1971-1981, and advocate of nuclear abolition. Neutrality Studies Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Dr. Oberg's Substack Article on SIPRI: https://substack. com/home/post/p-161454241 #M3 We have completely mistreated the great opportunities we got when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact fell apart. And we said, now we can do whatever we want. We can intervene, we can create Kosovo, we can do wars in Iraq, we can do Afghanistan, we can do this and that. And then you got the victim of 9/11, the victim psychology. Victim psychology is very important. Look at Israel's activities today. Look at 9/11 and Bush. Look at Trump today saying we have been an economic victim all the time. You know, the moment people say victim, you should be very, very careful. There's nothing worse. There's no violence worse than victim violence. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking again to Dr. Jan Oberg, a Danish peace researcher in Sweden, who I am sure you all remember from previous episodes on this channel. Dr. Oberg recently wrote a noteworthy Substack article about the ongoing deterioration of peace research in Europe, specifically about the gradual transformation of peace into security, most notoriously exemplified by SIPRI. SIPRI is the so-called Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which today more or less exclusively works on security and not anymore on the question of peace. What happened? That's what we want to discuss today. So Jan, thank you very much for coming online again. -- 1 of 17 -- #M3 Well, thank you very much for having me once again. #M2 Always. Because, I mean, this article that you wrote is very telling. SIPRI, which is an important think tank in Europe—it's one of the big ones that gets cited all the time—is now basically only working on security. Can you maybe outline a bit of the trajectory of what you've observed over the decades that you've been looking at it, and maybe start with how it was formed? #M3 Well, it so happens that when I worked on international arms trade in the '70s as a preparation for my PhD, I worked at SIPRI. I learned how they collected data and made, at the time, paper cuttings and put them together, which ended up in the SIPRI yearbook. I also had the great honor of meeting Alva Myrdal, who was, if you will, the mother of the invention of SIPRI, with the wish that there should be an institute that got the data the world needed about armament, and they have been doing that very well. And then also, and that's in the statutes, an institute that should come up with ideas about how to solve conflicts peacefully. And that's what they don't do and have not done. So I followed it on and off, of course, made use of SIPRI's military expenditure figures because they are good—the most reliable, I think, we have. But I think it's fair to say that it's no longer peace research. The focus, the framework, the main concepts, et cetera, are not peace research. And then people might say, well, it says that it's an institute of peace research. So let me define roughly what I think peace research is. There are many approaches to it, but one very important for me is that, like medicine, it is a study of the reduction of all kinds of violence. Let's say, if you will, what Johan Galtung would call negative peace. And then, of course, peace research is about coming up with alternatives, ways, and strategies for a better world with less violence, be it gender violence, physical violence, territorial violence, military violence, direct violence, psychological violence, or cultural violence. And that's where I think we have seen a trend over the last few years that this study, endeavor, and goal-oriented academic intellectual purpose of reducing violence has disappeared. It's not only SIPRI; it's Johan Galtung's own institute in Oslo. It is lots of peace research institutes at our universities, which, of course, have become state-financed and therefore very controlled. There are limits to what they can do. My own institute at Lund University in Sweden, where I was the director, was closed down in '89. The Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, led by one of my mentors internationally, went through two evaluative processes. The Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, COPRI, under Håkan Wiberg's leadership, was closed down at the time when Anders Fogh Rasmussen was the prime minister and later NATO secretary-general. So what I've seen around me is tons of institutes that have been -- 2 of 17 -- mainstreamed completely into security, international relations, doctrines, or have been closed down. And I think it goes for the US Institute of Peace. You can go on like that. Peace has been deleted from politics, from the media, and from research. The reason we survive at the Transnational Foundation, of which I'm the co-founder and director, is that we have no state support; we're people-financed. And we're all volunteers. That means we can be free. And my final point would be you don't do peace research without theory. All research is about theory and practical stuff. Now, a peace research that calls itself peace research but does not do theoretical studies, conceptual studies, development, things like nonviolence, peaceful conflict resolution, conflict analysis, reconciliation, forgiveness, the whole spectrum of theoretical deliberations and concept development, is not peace research to me. So, long story short, that's why I'm critical of SIPRI, which we focus on today. #M2 Yes, and you also outlined how the entire topics that SIPRI is working on have been refocused, right? Not only away from peace research, but toward just understanding implements of war, basically, exclusively, and then the application of what these new types of warfare and so on mean, which is basically the opposite of peace research, right? #M3 Yeah, if you define, if you change, which they have done also on top of their homepage, from leading source on peace to leading source on peace and security, and now leading source on security, and you define security. I'm not against security. There's human security, there's global security, there's security through use. Of course, we need security. That's not my point. My point is that when you do that, and like governments, think that security is first and foremost a matter of weapons, then you are on the wrong track. Then you end up, as the present director and others, supporting NATO, not even seeing NATO as a problem from a peace point of view, and the amassment of weapons in NATO countries, the overspending of NATO countries, and the nuclear doctrine of NATO, but also legitimating the expansion of NATO against all the promises made to Gorbachev and leading to where we are today. I'm not defending the Russian invasion, but I can explain it without defending it. You end up having a focus on inviting researchers who are either trained in mainstream institutes, in institutions like NATO and the European Union, or happen to have been somewhere at an American institute, either in the US or elsewhere. The new director will be from the American University in Cairo. And so, you know, the radical alternatives that peace is in a militarist culture are deleted. They are left there. And you cooperate with the Munich Security Conference, which is the most militarist forum anywhere in the world. -- 3 of 17 -- You have had a former director of it, Jan Eliasson, who has been sitting for, if not hours, many minutes talking about how it pained his heart to accept Sweden's entry into NATO, etc., etc. And much of what you hear in videos and comments on the blog of SIPRI is what I would simply call platitudes—nothing to do with new thinking, alternatives, conflict resolution, or proposals for peaceful solutions. Where is the proposal for stopping the genocide, which they haven't touched, by the way, in Palestine? Where is the proposal for a peaceful solution to what is going on in Ukraine? You can't find it at SIPRI, and that's another reason it's not a peace research institute. #M2 How did that happen? Again, as you said, like Alva Myrdal, this great Swedish diplomat, who was a mother and one of the founding members of SIPRI, clearly even installed this in the title of the institute, right? From there, from the 70s up until the 2020s, within these 50 years, you had this shift change in what this institution works on. And to me, this seems so important because it seems to reflect what is happening in European societies in general. While we had a peace movement in the 1970s, when we had this idea that peace needs to be created and peace needs to be, you know, also on the streets, be demonstrated for and against nuclear weapons and so on and so forth, all of that was swept away. And it was swept away in a very natural manner. It just left the scene. It's as if the actors that were on the stage at some point got tired of the play and just went away, and now we have an empty stage and still pretend that the play is still going on. And, you know, the rhetoric is still the same: we want Europe as a force for good and a force for security and strength and so on. But not playing anymore? How did it happen? Because I don't think the SIPRI people consciously tried to undermine their purpose. This is more of something that fizzled out. #M3 I'm not sure what my answer to that very complex long-term question is. I would say it has, of course, to do with—I've said that before and written it in tons of places—when the West is going down, it's becoming weak. And that also means it does not have the strength to have an open debate about alternatives. It coexists very well with, for instance, having no serious debate in Sweden about joining NATO. It coordinates very well with the fact that there is only one narrative in Europe today about Russia and Ukraine, and it deletes completely NATO's expansion and over- armament vis-à-vis Russia. It ties in very well with, as I said, peace having been deleted from the public discourse. When did you last hear a journalist ask a prime minister whether the proposal the prime minister makes is good for peace or will lead to peace, or how the prime minister, foreign minister, or defense minister defines peace? I see it in Denmark, where you have a bunch of people representing a kakistocracy with a militarist attitude. It's just the more weapons, the better, no matter the price. You have the -- 4 of 17 -- Europeans now arguing for 800 billion-plus euros to be spent on top of what has already been spent, in a period in which we're in economic crisis and we are facing two cold wars, one with the Trump regime and one with Russia, and to a certain extent with China too. Three, if you will, three cold wars. And we're going to waste all the money in Sweden and my children's and grandchildren's lives on arming, and perhaps the more we arm, the more likely a war. So p