It is a great honour to be invited to give this annual lecture in memory of Martin Wight, especially for one who never knew him, and is not a member of the academic community concerned with International Relations, of which he was so distinguished a figure. I have to admit that, when I was invited to give this lecture, I had heard of and knew nothing about him. That is, perhaps, not surprising, as very little of his work was published in his lifetime, and I did not move in the academic circles in which it was well known.

The purpose of this article is to compare three approaches to conflict, those of the ‘strategist’, the ‘conflict researcher’ and the ‘peace researcher’. Strategic studies, our starting point, are usually seen exclusively within the framework of power politics and the manipulation of threat systems. This approach to conflict is clearly of great importance, especially as it is the one most frequently adopted by decision-makers. It is not, however, the only possible approach, and the lineage of each of the three approaches can be traced back to antiquity.

News media are primary sources of information about international affairs. The rise of the mass circulation press and the expansion of foreign news coverage have brought the public at home and abroad closer to international affairs. The British Empire and two world wars strengthened the British citizen's interest and concern regarding foreign policy. The growth of radio and television added to this proximity. Portable electronic cameras and satellites enable the television viewer to become a participant in an event as he or she watches it unfold. Within the foreign policy-making process the media are sources of information to ministers and officials, contribute to the formation of public attitudes, are channels through which governments signal to, and manoeuvre, one another, and are key means for generating public support for foreign policy at home and abroad.

The whole field of Strategic Studies bears the crippling legacy of having abstracted question of war and peace from their embeddedness in historically produced relations of social movements, political economy and culture. The very objects of strategic analysis—states and their mutual security alliances—are presumed to have been there from the start. And the principles underpinning their interactions are likewise construed as consistent with the rules governing a state system first made evident in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

The Economic and Social Research Council recently published a Report commissioned from a committee chaired by Professor Edwards, a psychiatrist, so that the Council, and the social science community in general, might know what was good and bad in British social sciences, and where the promising future research opportunities lie over the next decade. Boldly called ‘Horizons and Opportunities in the Social Sciences’, the Report condensed the wisdom of social scientists, both British and foreign, and concludes with a broadly but not uncritically favourable picture of the British scene.

Publishers' lists and new acquisition shelves reveal a profligacy of writing on strategy. Moreover, this vast quantity covers a rich variety of approaches to the subject, such as case studies, policy oriented studies, narrative histories, behavioural analyses, thinking on the 'big' questions of war, peace and security, and thinking about thinkers. This article reviews books covering three very different approaches to strategy, two traditional and one highly original. Of the three only the last explicitly considers method, yet the three reveal very different methodological concerns which have perhaps received too little attention in the study of strategy.