Dr. Peter van den Dungen

Peter strongly believes in the important role that Peace Museums play in the peace movement.

‘War is a special kind of conflict, and we have war because we have institutionalised it – we have a whole profession which is trained to kill and murder. This country’s most profitable industry is arms export. There are almost no exhibitions about how we can move towards a world without organised violence’.

‘Imagine – a peace museum in London! If you want to see peace, support The Peace Building.’

Dr Peter van den Dungen is a distinguished Peace Historian. He has energetically promoted peace museums for over 30 years. He strongly believes that they are an ideal way of educating people about peace and nonviolence in a world threatened by nuclear annihilation and militarisation. In 1992 he organised the first international conference of peace museums at the University of Bradford in the north of England, and this led to the establishment of the wonderful Peace Museum in Bradford.

Peter was a lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies of the University of Bradford for forty years. His PhD thesis (University of London King’s College, Department of War Studies, 1975) was on ‘Industrial society and the end of war: The history of an idea’.

The major topics of some of his published works include:

• Erasmus as the pioneer of the modern critique of war and concept of peace.
• The classical peace plans of the past four hundred years of – Emeric Crucé, William Penn, John Bellers, Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Immanuel Kant.
• Leading figures of the pre-first world war, international peace movement  – Jan Bloch, Henry Dunant, Alfred H. Fried and Bertha von Suttner.

He has been an active member of the Peace History Society (US)  and was much involved in the annual conferences on peace history organised by the Movement for the Abolition of War in the UK.

His teaching, research and publications have included such subjects as the Nobel Peace Prize, peace heroes, the heritage of peace, peace monuments, peace trails, peace cities, peace tourism and peace philanthropy.