Jan Oberg

November 28, 2025

It is hardly of any importance to the world, but it is to me as a peace scholar, TFF co-founder and director: On September 1, 2025, it was 50 years since I got my first article published in what was the flagship of peace and conflict research, The Journal of Peace Research, JPR, published out PRIO, Peace Research Institute Oslo – both founded by one of my mentors, Johan Galtung (1930-2024).

See it here and here.

I was 24 at the time, and it meant everything to me to achieve the honour and recognition of being published in that distinguished journal. While I had begun to follow peace studies at Lund University, courses directed by my other mentor, Håkan Wiberg (1942-2010), in 1972 – I had not dared call myself a peace scholar. I was working towards my PhD in sociology, and sociology was still my primary focus.

In 1974, Wiberg suggested I take some courses at the IUC – Inter-University Centre – in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, whose director at the time was Johan Galtung. I think that settled my fate and “career” choice. Since the publication of this article, I have seen myself as a peace and conflict researcher or a peace and future researcher. After my PhD in 1983, I also became a docent in peace research, i.e. wrote a second PhD-size book.

Håkan , more than anyone, assisted me in writing this arms trade article, but I vividly remember the very important contributions to it also made by Johan, Ulrich Albrecht, and Raimo Väyrynen.

I’ve asked AI CoPilot what it could say about this article now 50 years later. What I got was this:

“Øberg’s framing of the arms trade as a “feudal pattern” of dependency was cited in later works examining how a few supplier states (US, USSR, UK, France) dominated weapons flows to the Global South.
His work was often referenced alongside SIPRI’s 1975 study The Arms Trade with the Third World, which provided empirical data while Øberg offered a more theoretical critique of imperialism.
Scholars in peace research and international relations used Øberg’s article to highlight the structural inequalities embedded in arms transfers, linking them to broader debates on dependency theory and imperialism.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, peace researchers and political economists cited Øberg when discussing: Militarization of the Third World and its impact on development. The political economy of arms trade, especially in relation to dependency and imperialism. Comparative studies of US vs. Soviet arms exports. His article was part of a wave of critical scholarship that treated arms trade not just as a technical issue, but as a structural instrument of global dominance. It helped establish a critical tradition in peace research that continues to inform debates on arms control, disarmament, and the ethics of weapons exports.”

Quite nice to read!

I shall abstain here from reflecting on the world’s arms trade today and the global militarism that has become rampant in all four corners of the world, but predominantly in the Western-NATO minority world. It is tragic beyond words that those of us who tried to warn the world about the trends that lead to violence and war have either not been good or numerous enough or not been listened to, or both.

I shall also refrain from comments on what happened to academic peace research in the Nordic countries – where it had one of it centres worldwide – and how most of it has either been closed down or transformed into security and geopolitical military research. That is what happened also to SIPRI, as I have written in a couple of articles.

I spent a lot of time in SIPRI’s arms trade data collection department to be able to write the mentioned article. Those were the days when SIPRI did peace research, and I had the honour of meeting both its then-director Frank Barnaby and its founding mother, Alva Myrdal. They would rotate in their graves if they knew that today’s SIPRI is financed mainly by NATO countries and, on top of all its publications, calls itself The source on global security where it used to say peace.

Many peace people have been killed because they were for peace and challenged every aspect of militarism. So too organisations and virtually all centres for true peace research – which is an academic endeavour to reduce all types of violence and to suggest ways to channel the saved human and other resources into a more peaceful world for all. Simple – and dangerous – as that!

  Jan Oberg 50 years in peace research, Oberg’s 50 year old article about world arms trade