Peace symbols painted on a pink wall in various colours Image caption: Colourful peace signs spray-painted on a purple wall. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

The Working Paper Series, Volume 2015, Issue 1, pp. 1–29
Published 2015
PDF Version

Tools from the Past for a Problematic Present: How

Relevant is Burtonian Theory and Practice for 21st

Century Conflict Transformation?

This is an excerpt from the John Burton Memorial Lecture 14 September 2015 CRS Conference at the University of Kent at Canterbury. For the full version, please see the following link.

Kevin P. Clements

Te Ao O Rongomaraeroa National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago

It gives me very great pleasure to be giving the John Burton Memorial lecture on the 100th anniversary of his birth. We are honouring a complex man who made many important contributions to the formation of an independent identity for Australia and the independent identity of peace and conflict studies. It’s impossible in the space of 40 minutes to do justice to either contribution so I am going to be very selective in my comments.

Biographical Background

John’s life began in war and ended in war. He was born on March 2 1915 and died in 2010. 1915 is a memorable year for Australians and New Zealanders because, a month later, on the 25th April many Australian, New Zealand and other Imperial troops were slaughtered at the battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. A New Zealand historian, Ormond Burton, (no relation, incidentally, although also a staunch Pacifist as well as a much decorated soldier in the First World War) stated that “New Zealand’s national identity was formed somewhere between the battle of Gallipoli and the Battle of the Somme”. (O. E. Burton, 1935).

I don’t buy the idea that nations are formed out of military battles and defeats -‐ they are much more complex than that -‐ but this is the myth and this is what Australians and New Zealanders commemorate on ANZAC day every year. I often wonder whether these two moments -‐ a military defeat turned into foundational myth and John’s birth in the same year -‐ were relevant to John’s own lifetime preoccupation with identity as a central organising principle in his work.

Burton was the son of a Methodist Minister, which undoubtedly shaped many of his fundamental values. He grew up during the great depression, which fuelled his desire for equality and socialism. And his political inclinations remained on the left all his life even if he often found himself in deep conflict with the Australian Labour Party at different stages of his career. After his Ph.D., he was employed by the Australian Federal Government and experienced rapid promotion. As a very young man, for example, he was at the heart of Australian responses to the Second World War and was on the Australian delegation to the Charter meeting of the United Nations. He could, therefore, and did talk about war and violence from an elite insider’s perspective.

In 1941, he became the Private Secretary to the Australian Foreign Minister, “Doc” Evatt. In this post he was often compelled to articulate where Australian and British interests converged and diverged during the Second World War. This gave John a profound appreciation of the differences between interests and values and a deep ambivalence towards hegemonic power. He was a radical from the beginning and his ideas were often at odds with the Australian Department of Defence as he pushed for greater independence from Britain in combination with more engagement with Asia.

He had numerous stories of how he and Evatt challenged the British High Command about the best strategy for the defence of Australia against Japanese and German threats. In one instance John, in the absence of Evatt, personally ordered a convoy of Australian troops to drop anchor and turn back half way across the Indian Ocean because he and Evatt disagreed with British requests to send Australian troops to North Africa instead of defending Australia against the much more pressing threat from Japan. John was in his late twenties then so this gives you some sense of his precocity and hutzpah!

This wartime experience and his meteoric promotion to Secretary of the Department of External Affairs (at the age of 32) in 1947 gave John a deep appreciation of power and decision-‐making. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament in 1954, which was probably a good thing for John, the Parliament and Peace Research!! It is interesting though that the man who later was so uncomfortable with power politics was deeply imbedded in and profoundly tempted by them at the beginning of his career!

By the late 1950s and after some bruising personal political experiences, (he was charged with being the Australian Labour Party’s “Pink Eminence” in relation to the Petrov spy affair) John developed deep scepticism about government, governance processes and the negative consequences of much national statecraft.

This scepticism emerged also in response to the Korean War and as he tried to make sense of post war developments in Asia and the rest of the world. Having been in San Francisco for the Charter conference of the United Nations, John was appalled at the way in which its idealistic aspirations fell victim to the Cold war. But he was also challenged by the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War and all the regional and global independence struggles of the 1950s and 60s. It was in response to these dynamics that John really started wondering about the motivators of political behaviour and why decision makers lapsed into military responses to political challenge.

This concern fed John’s interest in understanding the relationships between personal behaviour, wider domestic dynamics and national and international conflict. He was particularly interested in how and why elite decision makers were constantly being trapped by top down desires to control and coerce citizens and protagonists. He felt that the dominant political science, power political frames, ignored the significance of emotions, human needs and the multiple diverse domestic processes that drove government decision makers. Having been in a position of power he could see its limitations in terms of representing and doing justice to the interests of multiple individuals and groups and he grew progressively disenchanted at the inability of modern state systems (founded as they were on a monopoly of force) to engage the sources of domestic and global violence creatively and non-‐violently. He saw no future or utility in perpetuating violent and vicious cycles in response to violence so when he was freed of official constraints he developed both a radical critique of realism and embarked on a life long quest to understand the deeper sociobiological sources of violence and how to respond to these effectively and non-‐violently.

For those of you who knew John you will appreciate that his public peaceful and collaborative aspirations were always somewhat problematic at the personal level. He was a very strong, opinionated and conflict creating personality. It took some fortitude to live with John. He was married thrice and had a most astonishing ability to generate conflicts with people who were his natural allies. In fact I sometimes wonder whether it was the force of his personality and prolific writing -‐ rather than his theoretical or analytical depth -‐ that ensured we were all Burtonians while in his presence. In any event, whether John was endeavouring to understand his own complex personality as well as the conflictual world around him, from the 1960s onwards his life was directed towards exploring and identifying the origins of individual and collective unpeacefulness and how best to respond to it.