It is possibly of some significance that I find it easy to accept the idea of there being a psychology of war, but see peace psychology as a slightly eccentric field of study. This is silly of course – they are two sides of the same coin. King's College London has a renowned department of War Studies. Bradford University has a department of Peace Studies. A comparison of their undergraduate prospectuses (see www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/undergraduate/index/name/war‐studies/alpha/W/header_search/ and www.brad.ac.uk/peace/courses/UndergraduateCourses/BAHonsPeaceStudies/) shows a very considerable overlap in academic content. Certainly as far as psychology goes they simply study the same subject from slightly different angles.
On investigation there is quite a substantial peace psychology literature. We must welcome all psychological interest in the real, social, world. Springer, indeed, has published a whole series on the topic – the Peace Psychology Book Series. The most recent that I could find was the Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace (De Riviera, 2008). Psychology Press have naturally published in the field. I noted their Handbook on Peace Education (Salomon and Cairns, 2010), among others. Pride of place among printed works should go to the massive four‐volume The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace (Young, 2010) (RR 2010/313). This is, of course, rather broader in scope but does have a substantial psychological content. (There is also the Encyclopedia of Peace Education (Baja, 2008) (RR 2009/110) although this is more an anthology than a true encyclopaedia.) There are also numerous information sources on the more specialised topic of conflict resolution, such as Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Ramsbotham et al., 2011). However, I should most particularly note Peace, Conflict and Violence: Peace Psychology for the 21st Century, edited by the editor of the encyclopaedia under review (Christie et al., 2001) This was originally published by Prentice Hall but when it went out of print and the copyright reverted to the editors in 2007 they very generously made it available for free to all of us at http://academic.marion.ohio‐state.edu/dchristie/Peace%20Psychology%20Book.html
An awful lot has happened in the way of conflict and war in the past dozen years of course, so this is now getting dated, but is still a useful free resource in the field. I gather that the editors were originally approached to produce an updated version on condition that they removed the free first edition. Rather than do this, they offered to produce a different work, which became this encyclopaedia. We have, therefore, a new printed encyclopaedia (plus an online version which the publishers say they will update annually) set in the context of quite a wide range of other printed resources and a somewhat dated free online handbook.
Aggression seems to be hard‐wired into human beings. It first appears in very young children, round about eight months old in all known human societies, peaking at around two years old, but never disappearing entirely. Humans are one of the very few species in which adults habitually kill other adults of the same species. This brings me to one of my main criticisms of this book: it seems almost entirely concerned with humans. Humans are primates – mammals. It is interesting to note that the “normal” human stance – erect on the hind legs, fingers extended, facing directly towards someone else, mouth slightly open, enough to show the teeth, is the “aggressive” stance in other primates. A lot can be learned by studying the behaviour in the wild of our nearest relatives. I would have expected to see more comparative studies reported here.
There is an entry on evolutionary psychology. It is suggested that most of the human brain evolved to its present state in the Pleistocene period, at a time when humans largely lived in hunter‐gatherer groups of between a couple of dozen and a couple of hundred members. Such evidence as there is does seem to support the theory that there is less aggression within small hunter‐gatherer societies than within larger groups: the Bible got it right – it was the settled agriculturalist Cain that slew the hunter‐gatherer. I would have liked to see much more anthropological material here, reporting on conflict in different human societies.
What we have, then, is a collection of around 300 essays, by an astonishing range of over 250 contributors. (How did the editor manage to get so many psychologists to submit on time? As an occasional editor myself, I am amazed at his powers of persuasiveness.) The essays are arranged in a single alphabetical sequence, from Action Teaching to Xenophobia, and average three to four pages in length. The contributors are mostly American or British academics: I only noticed a few from the rest of the world, and only a small proportion from outside academia. The essays, on a wide variety of more or less relevant psychological topics, are clearly‐written and use relatively little technical terminology: they should be comprehensible by any undergraduate or by any well‐educated general reader with some interest in psychology. There are see also cross‐references at the end of each entry, as well as a list of entries by topic at the beginning of each volume, and separate name and subject indexes in the final volume. Each entry is followed both by a list of the references quoted and, more usefully, by a short list of recommended additional resources, both print and online. The editor and the publisher should be congratulated on the production of a really well organized reference book. When I look at some of the other reference books that come to Reference Reviews, with their double alphabetical sequences, inadequate cross‐referencing, no thought given to a choice of sought terms for headings, no indexes, no mention of useful web resources, etc., I am really impressed with the design of this book.
It remains to be considered, however, which libraries should be putting it on their wish lists. Here I feel less certain. The content seems to me to be geared to an undergraduate level readership. My own institution, for example, runs a Master's degree programme in War and Mental Health. Looking at it from our students' eyes, I can imagine them using this very occasionally as background reading, but expect that for the most part they would want greater depth. Three‐and‐a‐half pages on Post‐Traumatic Stress plus a couple of useful further readings would make an excellent basis for an undergraduate essay, but are inadequate for postgraduate research purposes. Many of the topics discussed here do enter into the standard undergraduate psychology programme, and the entries are ideally suited for undergraduate reading. These same topics are, however, equally discussed in major encyclopaedias of psychology, sociology or behavioural science. We have reviewed a great many of these over the years, so I do not propose to list them again now. Academic libraries that have a couple of general encyclopaedias of that sort plus a few standard textbooks like Blumberg et al. (2006), may feel that they have covered the field adequately. Libraries dealing with more general social topics of peace, war, conflict resolution, etc., may want something broader – The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace if they can afford it. I congratulate the editor and publishers on their work, but suspect that for many libraries this would be a useful back‐up rather than a first choice when it comes to buying reference books.
