The PRIO & ISA Effort to Excommunicate Johan Galtung from Peace Research – And Why It Failed

An academic scandal for all involved parties and why some of us withdraw now.

How Oxford University Press allowed a personality‑driven narrative to masquerade as scholarship.

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Jan Oberg, dr hc,
TFF director

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A Special Issue in a scholarly journal is not an ordinary publication. It is a collective, curated statement about a subject of central importance to a field. When the International Studies Association, ISA, and Oxford University Press, OUP, publish a Special Issue devoted to Johan Galtung’s academic and scholarly contributions, the expectations are correspondingly high. One expects rigorous intellectual history, conceptual analysis, and a sober evaluation of one of the indisputable founders of peace and conflict studies. One expects a focus on ideas, methods, institutional innovations, and intellectual trajectories. One expects scholarship.

The editors are Gerald Schneider, Professor of International Politics at Konstanz University and Executive Editor of “European Union Politics” and Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), who was Galtung’s colleague for more than 50 years.

Tor Egil Førland’s article in the Journal of Global Security Studies – a preview of a forthcoming PRIO biography of Johan Galtung – does not meet these expectations. Read it here:

All Over the Place: The Trajectory of Johan Galtung | Journal of Global Security Studies | Oxford Academic

It is not a scholarly assessment of Galtung’s contributions. It is not an intellectual biography. It is not a disciplinary evaluation. It is, instead, a personality‑driven portrait that belongs in a magazine or a personal blog, not in a peer‑reviewed Special Issue. The article violates genre norms, substitutes personality for scholarship, constructs a preacher‑like narrative of Galtung’s life, mishandles the antisemitism issue, omits major scholarly contributions, and ultimately undermines the integrity of the Special Issue itself.

There is some explaining to be done. I show below that the prestigious Oxford University Press should explain how this article could pass an academic peer review worthy of the house, and that Nils Petter Gleditsch should explain PRIO’s and his own purpose with this special issue, including Førland’s rather special article in it, as well as the role of Førland’s forthcoming “full-scale” PRIO biography of the institute’s founder that the institute proudly announces on its homepage on June 30, 2026.

The first and most fundamental problem is the genre violation.

A Special Issue devoted to this discipline founder must evaluate concepts such as positive peace, structural violence, and cultural violence. It must examine methodological innovations, theoretical contributions, institutional achievements, and intellectual influence. It must situate the founder’s work within the evolution of the field. It must not psychologize, moralise, caricature, or gossip. It must not replace intellectual history with travel anecdotes or substitute scholarly evaluation with insinuation.

Yet this is precisely what Førland’s article does. The Special Issue’s purpose is to assess Galtung’s scholarly legacy. Førland’s article assesses Galtung’s personality. This is a category error, and it undermines the entire project, including his forthcoming book on Galtung’s life work.

The second problem is the extraordinary number of personality descriptors in the article.

The text saturates Galtung with characterisations as smug, vain, self‑aggrandizing, stubborn, arrogant, restless, hyperbolic, self‑righteous, prone to conspiracy theories, and ignorant of nuance. Even positive traits—generous, brilliant, charming, immensely talented—are framed as part of a personality drama rather than as elements of an intellectual biography. Add to that repeated sarcasm and an emphasis on people who did not like Galtung and ridicule.

None of this belongs in a scholarly evaluation of a discipline founder. The question is not whether Galtung was charming or arrogant. The question is what he contributed to peace research. Personality traits are irrelevant to conceptual innovation, methodological development, or disciplinary founding. Their presence in a scholarly article signals that the author has substituted portraiture for scholarship.

The third problem is the construction of a preacher‑like narrative of Galtung’s life.

Førland never uses the word guru, but the rhetorical function is identical. Through a dense network of metaphors—travelling salesman, rolling stone, touring rock star, rollercoaster, crusader, quixotic fighter—Galtung is framed as a wandering, self‑assured figure who preaches from a pulpit rather than works as a scholar. The narrative is one of movement, spectacle, improvisation, and self‑display. What is missing is the central scholarly question: What made Galtung start peace research, and why did he choose the topics he did?

Førland does not ask himself why Galtung wrote about the United States, why he analysed imperial decline, why he focused on Korea, China, or the Middle East, or why he developed socio-cultural cosmology. Instead, he writes that Galtung became more and more anti‑American. This is not analysis; it is a psychological label. The real question is whether Galtung was among the first to analyse the decline of the U.S. empire. He was. And that is what a Special Issue should discuss.

The fourth problem is the mishandling of the antisemitism/conspiracy issue.

Førland repeatedly invokes the word without definition or providing evidence, context, analysis, or engagement with Galtung’s actual record. He mentions preposterous claims, overblown statements, charges of antisemitism, and even reports that someone asked him whether Galtung was a rabid antisemite. But he provides no documentation or probability. He does not mention Galtung’s 1971/73 Middle East peace plan, his professorship in Cairo, his work with Boutros Boutros‑Ghali, his extensive visits to Israel, his lecture for Jewish Voice for a Just Peace, his respectful public discourse, or his Jewish friends and collaborators.

At a conference in 2010 in Berlin, I heard Galtung answer a student’s question about whether he had ever visited Israel “About a hundred times.” Even if not numerically exact, it is unusual for an antisemitic person.

These and other omissions are not accidental; they are methodological and intentional. A scholarly article cannot invoke a slur without evidence, context, or engagement with the subject’s actual record. In my view, it is fair to say that Galtung was careless about the roots of one or two references he made and should have admitted it. His motive was to point out that certain circumstances could be used as a pretext for persecution of Jews in the future – i.e. the opposite of what the media slander maintained (and less courageous peace researchers carelessly repeated). I witnessed, and was partly involved in, how the liberal Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Sydsvenska Dagbladet treated Galtung’s response to the accusation in the most political way, never listening to all sides and arguments. They labelled him without seeking his explanation.

In the introduction to the Special Issue, the editors Gerald Schneider and Nils Petter Gleditsch devote nearly as much space to Galtung’s alleged antisemitism as they do to “Discussion of some of Galtung’s main concepts” and state that “It will be one of the challenges of Førland’s planned biography whether such troubling statements (Galtung’s on the issue, JO) reflected a deep-seated antisemitism or, alternatively, stubbornness combined with a need of an inflated ego to provoke his audience through hyperbolic speculation.”

In their introduction, they also state that “Galtung’s gradual move away from an academic mode of knowledge production led to an increasing isolation from scientific discourse.” The word “isolation” – increasing, too – of course begs the question: Did some colleagues and institutions see it fit to isolate him or was it exclusively self-isolation?

Schneider and Gleditsch end with this: “Hopefully, this special issue will stimulate readers to critically examine Galtung’s contributions in such areas as well, and also to rethink to what extent his legacy was tarnished by his arrogance and increased flirtation with conspiracy theory at his later years.”

But “to what extent” implies no study of whether Galtung was or wasn’t arrogant and conspiracy-driven, only an assessment of the degree to which the manifest arrogance and use of conspiracy can be documented. A single disputed case/episode of alleged conspiracy theory over a lifetime is rhetorically transformed into an ‘increased flirtation,’ without evidence, sourcing, or conceptual definition. The authors do not promote a fair trial. Galtung is already judged because of his personality, his increasing use of antisemitic conspiracy theories, or both.

It is logically possible to argue that Galtung developed problematic views late in life. However, this hypothesis collapses against the historical record. Nils Petter Gleditsch entered PRIO in the early 1970s, served twice as its director, and has known Galtung professionally for decades — not as a distant observer but as a colleague who even compiled a full bibliographic study of Galtung’s work. If Galtung had “turned antisemitic” in any meaningful or sustained way, such a shift would have been visible to colleagues with long-term proximity. Yet no such concerns were ever raised before 2011–12. The Special Issue editors do not adopt the ‘late turn’ hypothesis; instead, they hypothesise a deep-seated, lifelong trait, or personality deficiency (arrogance and more), retroactively, that neither decades of scholarship nor Galtung’s closest professional peers identified earlier.

It should be noted that Galtung’s own defence in several articles against the antisemitism accusation and his stated purpose are not mentioned in either the introduction or in Førland’s article. Neither is the background and alternative interpretations I conveyed to Førland when he did a long interview with me (see later).

A conspiracy can be defined as a secret, intentional coordination between multiple actors for a harmful or deceptive purpose.

A notable feature of Førland’s and Gleditsch’s framing is how they fuse the accusation of antisemitism with the label “conspiracy theory” – and Galtung’s increasing flirtation with it – as if the former automatically implied the latter. This is a rhetorical shortcut, not an analytical argument: antisemitism is a prejudice, not a conspiratorial worldview, and they provide no evidence of hidden‑agent reasoning in Galtung’s texts over time.

The fusion works because “conspiracy theory” has been a delegitimising term since the 1967 CIA memo (Dispatch 1035‑960) explicitly recommended using the label to discredit political dissent. By importing this stigma, Førland and Gleditsch can dismiss Galtung’s later work without demonstrating either antisemitic or conspiratorial trends and motives. This rests more on insinuation than scholarship. Perhaps, instead, the authors’ conscious or less conscious psycho- and pseudo-academic projection fits well with their attempt to excommunicate Galtung from peace research.

Finally, on this point, the term ‘antisemitism’ has undergone such political inflation and weaponisation since 2011–12 that its casual or insinuating use in a scholarly context like this journal today is ethically indefensible. In 2011–12, the accusation against Galtung was already weak and contextually distorted. But in 2026, the term has become a blunt political instrument, often used to silence criticism of state policy, to delegitimise dissent, and to intimidate institutions. That makes Førland’s usage — without evidence, without context, without engagement with Galtung’s actual record — not merely sloppy but professionally reckless. It cannot be excused with reference to his article being merely a ‘preview’ of his forthcoming PRIO biography.

A fifth and closely related problem is the omission of Galtung’s Middle East peace plan.

In light of the preceding point, this is an extremely serious and intentional scholarly omission. Galtung’s plan, published in the Journal of Peace Research more than 50 years ago, remains pathbreakingly innovative and comprehensive, and it employed ideas such as cantonisation, confederal structures, demilitarisation, regional cooperative economies and more. It was widely read and discussed. It remains one of his most comprehensive regional analyses and conflict-resolution proposals. Førland does not mention it (although I alerted him to it). This omission distorts the intellectual record and erases one of Galtung’s most important scholarly contributions to real-world scholarship. This undermines the credibility of the article and the Special Issue.

A sixth problem is the absence of any attempt to understand Galtung’s motivations.

The article treats Galtung’s intellectual trajectory as a personal journey rather than a scholarly one. It never asks why he moved from negative to positive peace, why he developed cosmology, why he engaged with Buddhism, or why he ventured into both social science theory and methodology, future studies and macrohistory.

It never asks whether his choices were driven by world events and trends, perceived social injustice and caused by Galtung’s unique creativity and knowledge. Førland does not ask whether Galtung’s analysis of U.S. imperial decline was prescient. He does not ask whether Galtung’s critique of structural violence was relevant to global inequalities. He does not ask whether Galtung’s cosmology work was an attempt to understand deep cultural patterns in world politics, the West and the Rest.

The article is not interested in the real world at the time – a peculiar omission by a historian. It focuses only on Galtung’s personality, which leads us to the next of these few selected problems.

A seventh problem is the tone.

The article contains metaphors, ridicule, sensationalism, and polemical comparisons that violate scholarly methods and ethics. The most egregious example is the comparison of Galtung’s alleged self‑aggrandizement to that of President Trump. This comparison alone should have disqualified the article from publication. It is polemical, humiliating, irrelevant, unprofessional, and contemptuous.

Oxford University Press should never have allowed it through peer review. The tone is not incidental; it is structural. It signals that the article is not a scholarly evaluation but a personal essay masquerading as scholarship. Here is another typical illustration of the tone:

“He did not, other than in exceptional instances, revise earlier work. Instead he wrote another, incorporating (often without strict citation) what he had written before, and adding new insights as they came to him, which they did at an amazing speed: sometimes perhaps too fast for his own good, since if he had thought twice, he might have discarded some of his more speculative notions. His lack of pedantry contributed to his tremendous prolificacy. It also eased his way into new fields by making him more fearless and less sensitive to nuances and details, his ignorance of (and lack of interest in) which frustrated scholars who had been tilling the fields for decades before Galtung rode in on his tractor. Galtung could not care less. He plowed an arrow or reaped the fruits he found on his way, happily and arrogantly blazing on to the next field and the next university in the next country, picking up new followers (and new detractors), new languages, new knowledge, and new ideas along the way.

Galtung’s restlessness was visible early on, and along many dimensions. Næss wanted to write another book on Gandhi, in English, but his co-author had moved on: to his sociology thesis on the prison society, and eventually to Columbia. He came home to establish the Section for Research on Conflict and Peace at ISF, only to go off for a year to teach at FLACSO when the Section was still a toddler. Having been appointed Professor of Conflict and Peace Research in Oslo in 1969, he was drifting away from peace research intellectually, in the direction of futures studies and development studies.”

My italics indicate content within tone, and note that Galtung is said to have drifted away from peace research about 60 years ago. Again, it is empirically wrong and does not rest on any given definition of peace and conflict research, but it does serve the forthcoming biography’s excommunication attempt.

An eighth problem—one of the most revealing—is Førland’s complete misconstruction of the Basel episode.

I know a bit about it because I was a lecturer there too and knew well all the involved personalities and what happened there, then and afterwards.

The conflict surrounding Johan Galtung at the World Peace Academy (WPA) in Basel in 2012–2013 is one of the clearest examples of how Galtung was institutionally marginalised through fear and external pressure rather than through any substantiated finding of antisemitism. On such pressure was anonymous letters threatening to get the WPA closed if Galtung was not thrown out.

Basel is a city with a uniquely charged historical memory: it hosted the First Zionist Congress in 1897, where Theodor Herzl outlined the political vision for a future Jewish state. In this context, accusations of antisemitism carry exceptional symbolic weight, and even perceived criticism of Israel can trigger strong reactions in the public sphere.

After a media controversy in Norway and later in Sweden (not mentioned by Førland), pressure quickly reached the WPA leadership. According to both eyewitnesses and published statements, including those by research director Dietrich Fischer, the Academy’s founders panicked. They did not investigate the claims, did not defend academic freedom, and did not consult their own faculty. Instead, they removed Galtung from the programme.

Galtung immediately offered to participate in a public debate with anyone at the University of Basel; cowardly, one must say, no one responded. Basel newspapers reported on the institutional pressure, Fischer’s resignation, student boycotts, and the withdrawal of three guest lecturers. The Academy never recovered. This episode marked the beginning of the WPA’s decline. TRANSCEND later published letters from Galtung and Fischer documenting the events. None of this appears in Førland’s portrayal.

Instead he reduces the Basel crisis to a simple claim a la Galtung was “thrown out because of antisemitism,” omitting the context, the institutional panic, the public controversy, and the collapse of the WPA itself. The omission is not merely selective; it is structurally necessary for the narrative he wishes to construct.

A good scholar would ask: Who made the accusations, what purposes did they serve and also what, in a larger, more fair, lifelong perspective, could speak against that Galtung was antisemitic? Førland does not; he does biased reporting (and omits everything I told him about this piece of history that I was probably his closest witness to).

Førland also hints that Galtung was thrown of the European Peace University, EPU, in Stadtschlaining, Austria. The fact is that it changed away from peace research, later lost its national accreditation as private university in 2013 and closed down. Many of us who taught there had left before, and one of my former EPU students had co-founded, with her husband, the above-mentioned World Peace Academy in Basel already in 2009. So that piece of history about Galtung’s antisemitism in Austria is also empirically wrong.

A ninth problem is whether Førland knew Galtung enough to conduct his character assassination and why he writes on his Oslo University page that he is returning to his “peace research roots” after twelve years as head of the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History.

Førland himself has told me that he knew Galtung rather superficially, which is why he conducted interviews with lots of people who knew Galtung well, as I did. In the late 1980s, Førland was a junior scholar at PRIO – way after Galtung had left. Førland’s subsequent career contains few, if any, contributions to peace research in any meaningful sense; his work belongs to Cold War security studies and positivist historiography, not to the tradition of structural, normative, or emancipatory peace research. So what roots are there to return to?

Yet he now returns to PRIO—an institute that has long distanced itself from Galtung’s intellectual legacy—and describes, as mentioned, this as “returning to my peace research roots.” One can only speculate, since no definition of peace research is offered, that this must imply that today’s PRIO, not Galtung’s life’s work, is peace research. Førland’s and PRIO’s forthcoming “full-scale” book project about Galtung, by contrast, creates the impression that PRIO has enlisted a respected historian to symbolically close the chapter on its founder and legitimise its contemporary mainstreamed international affairs orientation. Whether Galtung or PRIO drifted away from peace research merits serious intellectual investigation and dialogue.

Against this background, the strong personality dimension of Førland’s article becomes particularly problematic.

A biographical personality analysis requires long-term proximity, extensive observation, triangulation through interviews, and engagement with personal archives. Førland has none of these. His limited and decades‑old knowledge of Galtung is not a sufficient evidential basis for the sweeping, entirely negative personality characterisations he presents. The absence of positive traits, the lack of biographical sourcing, and the psychologisation of theoretical disagreement all indicate that the personality framing is not grounded in empirical biographical method but in Førland’s own traditional Cold War paradigm and his and PRIO’s ‘mission’ with this book. It is as if he has interacted too much with lesser minds who couldn’t stand Galtung’s worldwide engagement, numerous honorary degrees for peace research up to 2017, dozens of prizes and mediation efforts, 150+ books – not to mention admiration both inside and outside academic circles. In this light, the portrayal appears not only methodologically and academically untenable but also institutionally convenient.

I knew Galtung and worked with him on various projects from 1974 when he was the director of the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, where I got part of my education. That he was indeed a special character, self-confident and impatient and that he could be arrogant – no doubt. We had our quarrels too. But one must thoroughly regret that Førland has had neither the wish nor the capacity to repeatedly use anything but negative personality characteristics (see above) – that is, if personality were indeed at all relevant in such a journal.

Neither I nor others I know who have known and interacted with Galtung for equally long have ever heard him express any antisemitic sentiment.

Galtung cared about students like few others; he generously helped thousands to expand their horizons and improve their texts. In the articles he published, he thanked people who had helped him; he was amazing at keeping in touch with people, even on personal matters. He was very generous, had a good sense of humour, and was a cherished lecturer for many and diverse audiences. He worked more than most, was a multi-tasker – and loved what he did.

Above all and contrary to many these days, he always kept independent and practised a never-failing commitment to the Gandhian principle of nonviolence and the UN Charter norm that peace shall be established by peaceful means – for which he paid a price, also in NATO member Norway. Førland mentions none of it.

The tenth and most serious problem is the disciplinary killing of Galtung as a scholar.

This is the structural move that underlies the entire article. By portraying Galtung as someone who abandoned scholarly standards, left academia, and spent the second half of his life preaching from a pulpit, Førland performs the symbolic act of declaring that the founder of peace research was, for decades, not part of the field he contributed uniquely much to create. This is boundary‑policing in its purest and most extreme form. It is the academic equivalent of saying: “We are the real heirs. He is not.” It claims ownership of the discipline by disowning its founder.

This is not scholarship. It is institutional self‑assertion. And Førland’s is the most lethal accusation one can make in academic culture. And it is also false. Galtung continued publishing, teaching, conceptualising, mediating, and doing theoretical development decades after leaving Oslo. He did not leave academia. He expanded it and he found it essential to bring his knowledge to more people than those in the ivory tower and see whether his theories and concepts were relevant outside it in the real world – like a good doctor doing diagnosis, prognosis and treatment/surgery. The article’s attempt to kill and ridicule him as a scholar is both historically incorrect, deliberately negative and ethically troubling.

Eleventh – three colleagues and I withdraw from this project.

Førland interviewed me for hours for his forthcoming “full-scale” PRIO biography of Johan Galtung that his article here offers a preview of. Based on this article, I have no confidence that my testimony will be used fairly, contextually, or even at all in that forthcoming biography.

He omits my arguments about Basel, the context I gave him for the antisemitism accusation, my first‑hand knowledge of Galtung’s generosity, the Middle East peace plan I told him about, Galtung’s actual public discourse, and the structural content of his scholarship. Most troubling is the boundary‑policing move—the implication that Galtung left academia or stopped doing peace research and became a rockstar/salesman preaching from his pulpit.’

This is not scholarship; it is symbolic excommunication through charater assassination by a scholar who said he did not know Galtung in any deeper or longer sense.

I cannot in good conscience allow my name, my words, or my experience to be associated with such a project. To remain a participant would imply an implicit endorsement of a portrayal I find deeply flawed, ethically troubling, and unworthy of the subject.

Therefore, I withdraw from Førland’s biography project by publishing this criticism, and none of what I said during his interview can be used in his book. But he is welcome to refer to this article on why I withdrew from it.

The Special Issue on Galtung should have been a celebration of an extraordinary intellectual achievement and a sober assessment of scholarly legacy. Instead, it contains one article and an introduction that violate genre norms, misrepresent the subject, omit major contributions, mishandle serious and politicised accusations and are flooded with ad hominem and slander that cannot but undermine the integrity of the field, the Galtung-founded PRIO and its publisher, Oxford University Press.

Peace research deserves better. Johan Galtung deserves better. And scholarly publishing deserves better.

Postscript

Erni and Ola Friholt, the Peace Movement at Orust, Sweden, whom Førland interviewed at length about their 50+ years’ friendship and cooperation with Galtung, have also decided to withdraw their interview and cannot be quoted or mentioned in his forthcoming PRIO biography. They add: “We received Førland and opened our hearts as loving friends of Johan Galtung who inspired us with his tremendous knowledge and helped us disseminate the message of various possible peace formulas. We never suspected that we might become actors in smearing the memory of Johan Galtung. And we won’t.”

Dag Viljen Poleszynski, economist (MS/MBA), nutritionist (MS) and PhD met Galtung in 1974, worked at PRIO with him on several projects from 1975 and followed him as a friend until Galtung’s death. Among other things, they worked together on the UN University project Goals, Processes and Indicators of Development (GPID), from 1978 to 1980, when Galtung withdrew from the UNU project, while Poleszynski continued until 1982. Poleszynski fully endorses the content of this article and states that Førland’s article is a surprising and unscientific attack on Galtung´s legacy as an international pioneer in methodology, research on human development and structural impediments to a peaceful world.

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