Jan Oberg TFF director October 28, 2026 Exactly one month has now passed since I published my criticism of the introduction to the special issue on Johan Galtung published by the Journal of Global Security Studies, JoGSS, and of Tor Egil Førland’s chapter about Galtung which serves as a preview to his forthcoming biography of Galtung to be published by PRIO. See the original on The Transnational here and the same article on TFF Substack with many general and critical comments and, in particular, the people who decided to withdraw from the biography project in protest. The special issue itself was extraordinary. It was devoted to the intellectual legacy of one of the founders of peace research and contained a number of strong assessments of his personality, scholarship, intellectual trajectory, and public role. Such assessments are, of course, entirely legitimate. No scholar is beyond criticism, and neither was Johan Galtung....
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Great intellectual conversation. I Especially found two points interesting. First Jan’s perspective about how the West only have one solution on everything, and dont think in multiple, different solutions. I agree. That seems to be a cultural thing in western thinking. That leads to narrow thinking. Second, Jeff’s points about academic institutions and experts very interesting. I would like to read more about cases, where people got fired in the academic world and in the media because they had a wrong opinion. Jeff was an interesting acquaintance and seems like a hard working man, at the end of interview 🙂 “Everyday I wake up and go, I gotta get back out there and keep writing and keep reporting no matter how depressing it gets”