Sometimes it is difficult to separate social movements
and ideas from the individuals who participate in them. Such is the case in
reference to Clint Fink, whose recent death leads to reflection on his
connection to the development of Peace Studies over the last sixty years.
As Clint so well documented in monumental archival
research, modern movements for, and education about, peace can be traced back at
least to the early nineteenth century. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
groups of people, often affiliated with religious denominations, took up the
cause of trying to end forever the bloody wars that had spread across the
European continent. While success was obviously limited, concerned theologians,
scholars, and activists were able to construct networks of relationships to
continue the peace-building process. Peace Societies were formed in the
nineteenth century in the United States and a Peace Congress was held in the
middle of the century in London.
Fink’s research uncovered data on a profusion of
lobbying and education mobilizations around peace that pressured for the
emergence of new international organizations to address the issue. The Hague
Conferences of 1899 and 1907, leading to the construction of laws of war, were
modest outcomes derived from the growing worldwide advocacy of alternatives to
war. Of course, the establishment of the League of Nations after World War l
and later the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928 outlawing war represented the most
serious byproducts of the growing mobilization to reduce or end war. Much of what
we know about two hundred years of grassroots anti-war activities comes from
the meticulous scholarship of Clint Fink.
As a young student at Swarthmore College in the early
1950s when the threat of World War III seemed real, Fink became motivated to commit
his life to peace research, peace education, and peace activism. He began to
gravitate toward an emerging interdisciplinary scholarly community that
identified its task as building a new discipline of Peace Research. Fink
pursued a Ph.D in Psychology at the University of Michigan and became an active
participant in the late 1950s in that university’s new Center for the Study of
Conflict Resolution. He became an editor of its new journal, The Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Although Fink was convinced that peace scholars could make
a contribution to peace-building through their scientific expertise, he always
asked questions about how that scholarship could be effectively translated into
peace action. He became the conscience of peace research, raising concrete
questions about linking scholarship, education, and activism in the 1972
special issue of JCR called “Peace
Research in Transition: A Symposium” and his 1980 article in Peace
and Change, “Peace Education and the Peace Movement Since 1815.” In the
latter article he summarized some of the research he had conducted concerning
early peace education activities, not only to recover a usable past but to gain
ideas about historic efforts to link theory and education to practice.
Since the 1980s Fink (and his partner Berenice
Carroll) continued to do research focused on peace theory and peace action
drawing connections between movements for peace and movements for justice
(including justice for women, people of color, and workers). They both became
chairs of COPRED (the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development--currently
the Peace and Justice Studies Association) and were active participants in the
International Peace Research Association. For a time they edited Peace and Change. In their most recent,
and perhaps most significant scholarly work (2007), they edited and wrote
an introduction to Jane Addams’ classic
essay, Newer Ideals of Peace.
In the extensive introduction Carroll and Fink link
Addams’ theoretical and practical work to the core concepts of modern peace
studies, addressing both direct and structural violence. They point out that
Addams is a significant precursor to modern peace studies in that she theorizes
and advocates for linking peace to social justice and scholarship to action. In
a sense Fink’s earlier historical explorations were applied to this renewed
recognition of Addams’ work as a guide for use in the twenty-first century.
Clint Fink was an exemplar of the Addams prescription,
linking peace to social justice and theory to practice. Along with multiple
writing contributions in the Champaign/Urbana community, Fink organized an
editorial team to produce an alternative newspaper in the Greater Lafayette,
Indiana community. Community Times, a
monthly free distribution newspaper had a ten-year run. It produced news and
commentaries on issues of war and peace, racism, sexism, the environment, and
an occasional humor piece. Three thousand copies were distributed to about 20
commercial and campus locations. The newspaper reflected Clint’s meticulous
editing of text and layout, with appropriate images and photos. And the
polished news product was produced before the rise of the internet as a source
of information and photo copy.
Finally, Clint as a theorist and practitioner, was a
lover of music. One of his heroes was Paul Robeson who proclaimed in 1937 that
the artist must take a stand against injustice and for the dispossessed. Fink
loved singing Robeson’s classic song “Old Man River” with the defiant lyric
that Robeson used instead of the defeatist language of the original lyric. Fink
performed in plays, sang with feminist folk singer Kristin Lems, and used his
love of music, drama, and poetry to advance the cause of economic and social
justice and peace. As an aside, Fink took advantage of another cultural skill. He
was a punster, who loved the four-line poems of his poetic mentor Ogden Nash.
In sum, Clint Fink lived through a time of war, racial
violence, and virulent patriarchy. He played a significant role, through
scholarship, education, and action, in the struggles against them, rigorously
researching, educating, and acting to create a better world. We have lost a
piece of history with Clint’s passing.
