Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung is a Norwegian sociologist and one of the founders of the field of peace and conflict studies. In 1965 he was working at FLACSO (the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santiago, Chile, under UNESCO funding when he received a formal recruitment letter from Rex Hopper, project director of Project Camelot, inviting him to participate in the Army-funded research initiative.¹

Exposure of Project Camelot

On April 22, 1965, Galtung replied to Hopper formally declining the invitation and characterizing the project's features as "imperialist" in his written response. He then shared the SORO invitation letter with Chilean academic colleagues, including Alvaro Bunster of the University of Chile and others at FLACSO. This act of disclosure initiated the chain of events leading to the project's public exposure.¹

The distribution of Galtung's correspondence, combined with the simultaneous activities of Hugo Nutini (an American anthropologist who was approaching Chilean scholars with false claims that the project was funded by the National Science Foundation), produced immediate alarm in Chilean academic and political circles. The communist newspaper El Siglo broke the story publicly. The Chilean Senate convened a special session. President Eduardo Frei Montalva lodged a formal diplomatic protest with the United States, and Chile banned Nutini from returning to the country.¹

The Department of Defense's internal response to the controversy misdescribed Galtung in a June 24, 1965 memorandum from Joseph Califano to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that defended the project by arguing that the only known foreign contact was "a letter written by a U.S. scientist to a Swedish social scientist presently resident in Chile." Galtung is Norwegian.²

Galtung contributed an essay, "After Camelot," to the Irving Louis Horowitz edited volume The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics (MIT Press, 1967), the definitive scholarly compilation of responses to the episode. His essay analyzed the structural conditions that made such projects possible and assessed what an ethical framework for international social science research would require.¹

Peace Research

Galtung founded the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research in 1964, making him one of the principal institutional architects of peace and conflict studies as a distinct academic field. His best-known theoretical contribution is the concept of "structural violence," introduced in a 1969 article in the Journal of Peace Research, which distinguished between direct physical violence and the violence embedded in social structures that systematically harm people through inequality, poverty, and exclusion.¹