A while back, one of our Conflict Resolution Master’s students did a presentation to the class about Captain Jean-Luc Picard (of the Federation starship, Enterprise). The brief was to present on a peace activist, thinker, or organisation.
I experienced the presentation with unbridled joy because I happened to be in the middle of rewatching all seven series of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’d been a fan back in the ’90s but had hardly thought about it since until it appeared on Netflix a few decades later.
And what I was realising during the rewatch was not only that Picard is indeed a prolific conflict resolution practitioner, but that the show is packed with insights on international relations (IR), peace and conflict – all the stuff of my now day job.
So, before I remember all the real work I should be doing, here is how Star Trek: The Next Generation (from here on, just ‘Star Trek’) deals with seven textbook topics related to IR/peace and conflict studies: the international system; realism and its alternatives; comparative politics; colonialism; nationalism; war and conflict; and peace-making.
1 The international system
The Enterprise is the flagship of Starfleet, a kind of military-scientific-exploration force of the United Federation of Planets. This is a peaceful alliance of worlds which share values and levels of development.
In a foundation text of Western IR, Immanuel Kant said that one of the building blocks of ‘perpetual peace’ would be a federation of states, and here it is fully realised – a galactic EU-UN-US. But we also have the paradox, well known in IR, that when you break down borders between states you simply move a hard border to the union’s outer boundary.
So despite all of humanity’s progress in the twenty-fourth century – world government, an alliance with scores of other species, automatic doors everywhere – we still live under what’s known in IR as ‘anarchy’ – a multi-polar world of Great Power rivalry in which there is no overarching sovereign to guarantee peace and stability. Which is a good thing, or Star Trek would be very boring.
2 Realism and its alternatives
How do we respond to this uncertainty embedded in the structure of the international system? Either we suspect everyone and protect ourselves through accumulating power (what’s known as realism), or we try to make treaties, create norms of behaviour, and risk trust.
We see this predicament in repeated conference room discussions between the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ on the senior staff. What does this Romulan warbird, unidentified alien vessel, or floating-blob-of-energy-that-might-be-intelligent want, damnit! Picard will exhaust diplomacy. Worf, the chief of security, will shoot first and not talk later.[1]
The most profound treatment of this dilemma is in an episode tucked away in the final series. The story (and stay with me here) is that Worf’s young son, Alexander, comes back from the future as a forty-something year old man and begins to teach the young Alexander (i.e. himself) to be more warrior-like. Why? Because Alexander grows up to become a namby-pamby diplomat who tries to bring peace to the Klingon empire. His enemies see this as weakness and murder his father (an elderly Worf).[2]
Fascinating – Alexander regrets becoming a peacemaker and goes back in time to change his disposition to that of a ‘realist’. The point of the episode is not to endorse this, but to show the struggle that all of us face – whether we are presidents wondering whether to use military force or academics wondering how much passive aggression to use in an email. How assertive should we be in any situation? When is peace-making appeasement?
3 Comparative politics
The Federation and other friendly species demonstrate the ‘democratic peace thesis’ – that democratic states don’t fight each other. Unfortunately, as we know, democratic states do fight undemocratic states, and so Starfleet manages ongoing tension at its borders with several illiberal empires.
The worst of these recurring villains are the Romulans and Cardassians which are militaristic, surveillance societies. Boo! We are disgusted and amused by the uber-capitalist Ferengi. We are fonder of the Klingons, a clan-based society with a strict honour code and an appetite for destruction and overacting.
But beyond these, the setup of Star Trek – a galaxy filled with an unlimited number of species and societies which we/the Enterprise can visit in each episode – allows the writers to explore all manner of bonkers and intriguing political experiments.
For instance, we have planets where people must kill themselves at age 60 to avoid being a burden on society, where people who deviate from gender and sexual norms are arrested and forcibly ‘fixed’, where idyllic harmony is maintained by executing people for the most minor law-breaking.
We also have patriarchal societies (the Ferengi find it offensive that human women are allowed to wear clothes) and matriarchal societies, where men are subordinate and decorative. And there are the Vulcans, who rule themselves and their society by reason and logic alone.
The Enterprise crew (and we) are learning that our liberal way of life is not the only one possible. And silly as a lot of this is, we’re being led through some serious questions in political philosophy. How much individual freedom can be sacrificed for the sake of the collective good? What would be the implications of certain laws or ways of ordering society?
Or perhaps, the series is holding a mirror up to the some of the darker impulses that exist within liberal society.
4 Colonialism
The Federation and Starfleet are clearly a proxy for the (US-led) Western world. No surprise – the show had to make sense to a US TV audience. But for all the Enterprise crew’s humanity and enlightenment, there is still an unmistakable whiff of colonialism to the starship’s mission: a heavily armed, technologically sophisticated spaceship crusading around the galaxy and usually crossing paths with much less developed species.
But the humans have apparently learned from the colonial sins in their own history. Starfleet is governed by the near sacred ‘Prime Directive’, the principle that they should never interfere in other peoples’ natural political, scientific, and cultural development. This is welcome news, and is good for the drama too, since the Enterprise is often in the position where there is a compelling reason to interfere, such as when lives are under threat. Repeatedly, then, the show explores what we’d call the ethics of intervention.
Plus, the unequal power relations enjoyed by the Enterprise are, on occasion, pointed out as part of the drama. The independence fighter who kidnaps and fancies Dr Crusher educates her about how her beloved Federation is tacitly allied with his oppressor. He says his ‘terrorist’ violence is no different to the liberal military violence on which the peace of the Federation was built: ‘Win and you are called a general, lose and you are called a terrorist,’ he says. He ends up dead, though.
5 Nationalism
We thought nationalism began in Europe after the French Revolution, but it turns out the galaxy has always been teeming with politically mobilised identity groups. Each episode introduces us to one or more new collectives: the Somethingians from the planet Somethingia who have their own beliefs, history, and sensitivities. They are probably mortal enemies of the Othersomethingians.
We see the importance of political and cultural identity up close in the experience of Worf. A Klingon who has been raised among humans, he lives with the pressures of the immigrant, struggling to retain his cherished heritage when everyone around him is so different.
One episode actually shows us a collective nationalist awakening in microcosm. Worf comes across a group of Klingons who, for complicated reasons, have been living in exile, most with no knowledge of their Klingon culture. Worf teaches the young people Klingon games, songs, myths, and rituals, believing that they have a right to know them. Eventually, so inflamed are the young people that they mutiny, demanding to return to the Klingon home world.[3]
In many ways, this is a conservative and ‘primordialist’ view of nationalism, i.e. if you are French or Irish or Klingon, you must know and love everything which is supposedly ‘French’ or ‘Irish’ or ‘Klingon’ and cannot have a different identity. Yet the purpose of the episode is to show the power of nationalist belonging. Whether nationalism is ‘real’ or socially constructed or both, it inspires and motivates, and is the foundation of many people’s sense of meaning and community.
6 War and conflict
From nationalism, it’s a short hop to what is the best political dimension of Star Trek: its treatment of interstate and intrastate war.
Often these disputes are thinly disguised versions of real ones: the hoped-for reunification of Romulus and Vulcan (Korea or Germany); the Bajorans who live in refugee camps and violently resist the Cardassian empire (Palestinians); or the Ansata separatists who are hunted by the Rutian police and ‘accidentally’ kill children in their attacks (the IRA).[4]
There is a slight ambiguity in how Star Trek approaches civil conflicts. On the one hand, the crew of the Enterprise shows a liberal, Western, patronising bemusement at the backward ‘ancient hatreds’ which they encounter. But perhaps that’s fair enough – how petty would the conflicts of our world look when viewed from a spaceship?
On the whole, though, the episodes deal with the psychology and impact of long-running conflict with remarkable sensitivity and seriousness.
In one-episode, Worf (again!) is in a position where donating a chemical in his body could save the life of a captured Romulan. Romulans are the arch enemies of the Klingons; in fact, Worf’s parents were killed in a Romulan attack on civilians.
It’s a terrific dramatic dilemma. Helping this individual Romulan is a moral and political imperative for Worf’s human colleagues, but for him, it’s not only abhorrent, but would mean betraying his people and the memory of his parents.[5]
Elsewhere, in one of the most potent episodes of all, Picard endures prolonged, one-to-one psychological and physical torture at the hands of a Cardassian military commander. During the torture, the Cardassian interacts tenderly with his young daughter. When she asks about the bedraggled, dehumanised human (Picard), her father assures her that ‘human mothers and fathers don’t love their children as we do’.[6]
Here, we have an efficient depiction of both nationalistic indoctrination, and of one of the great conundrums of violent conflict, and of the human condition: that extraordinarily cruel things are done, not by monsters, but by ordinary people.
7 Conflict resolution
With all this conflict, we want peace of course, and Star Trek is full of the language and paraphernalia of peace processes: ‘diplomacy’, ‘peace talks’, ‘treaties’, ‘demilitarisation’, ‘negotiations’, ‘peacekeepers’, ‘neutral zones’, and ‘ceasefires’.
The conflict resolution enterprise is personified by Captain Picard. He is regularly called upon to act as a ‘third-party’ envoy-statesman to chair negotiations or defuse some local or interplanetary dispute. This peace-making mode is part of Picard’s overall, and profoundly good, character.
Again and again, the captain lectures his crew about their duty to truth and to exemplary conduct, and agonises, over Earl Grey tea, about the most ethical course of action. In this way, he is one of those TV/film characters who transcends simple likability and functions as a moral leader and paragon (a President Bartlett in space). Certainly, he’s worthy of a student presentation!
So overall, Star Trek is a pretty decent introduction to IR, peace and conflict. Lots of sci-fi is political of course, including the original 1960s Star Trek. Unfortunately, Star Trek: The Next Generation suffers from what might be called the ‘funny heads problem’: so embarrassingly ludicrous is the depiction of the aliens, usually and mostly, as having a bumpy forehead of some shape, plus other distractions like cringy dialogue and acting and unconvincing sets, that it’s difficult to see the serious ideas behind all this.[7]
But they are there. Would I go so far as to say that you should forget signing up for an expensive and time-consuming Master’s degree in peace and conflict studies and just watch Star Trek?
Of course not! Do both.
[1] Interestingly, a classic article in IR theory by Alexander Wendt actually uses the illustration of encountering aliens to explore the question of how humans would respond to an actor with which we have absolutely no prior interaction and thus no prejudices or expectations to colour our reaction.
[2] ‘Firstborn’.
[3] ‘Birthright Pt II’.
[4] ‘The Higher Ground’. The episode explores the arguments for and against non-state political violence or terrorism. It was originally banned in the UK because it contained Data stating that history showed that terrorism appeared to work and led to the unification of Ireland in 2024!
[5] ‘The Enemy’. The feeling is mutual: ‘I’d rather die than pollute my body with Klingon filth!’ the dying Romulan tells Worf.
[6] ‘Chain of Command Pt II’.
[7] Politics and IR is only one theme in Star Trek. The series explores many philosophical, scientific, and spiritual ideas usually via other characters like Data, the android who wants to be human, or Troi, the telepathic psycho-therapist.
David Mitchell 