Different Methods for Analyzing Varieties of Peace

Peace can take many different forms and be expressed in a myriad of different ways that go well-beyond “peace as the absence of war”. Though recent scholarly contributions within this vein of research acknowledge the empirical reality of a variety of “peaces”, we are yet to understand how – methodologically – researchers can go about the endeavor of developing tools that allow us to describe and classify varieties of peace. Our effort in this paper addresses this knowledge gap. We bring attention to different methods for empirically capturing varieties of peace when peace is approached as a situation, as a relationship or as an idea. Though our purpose is to illustrate a “smorgasbord of methods” for analyzing varieties of peace, we also argue that any effort to approach such an analysis ought to be based on theoretically coherent sets of types. This is so because it will allow the researcher to provide a more nuanced picture of different varieties of peace.