PEACE AND ARMED CONFLICT STUDIES

Polemology and irenology that have been evolving since the Second World War are relatively unknown. There is much misunderstanding about polemology and irenology and what can be done with research results. The methodological competition between polemology and irenology indicates their differences due to the opposite research subject (war-peace), the system of concepts, and the usefulness of research results. The aim of the article is to present the basic assumptions of irenological and polemological research and to propose a common area of research on peace and armed conflicts. The article presents a thesis about the need to integrate polemological and irenological research. Due to the research problem and the subject of research, a qualitative strategy and appropriate research methods were used in the research process. The obtained research result indicates that it is not justified to conduct research on peace and armed conflicts separately, but as a whole as a study of peace and armed conflicts. The conclusions from the research indicate that the genesis, diagnosis and prognosis of peace and conflict-related processes is justified in the range of long cycles from minus 50 to plus 50 years in relation to the started research process.


Introduction
Peace and war as concepts are antonyms that define opposite social phenomena that are the research subject in irenology and polemology as well as many other disciplines and scientific specialties (Grotius, 1957;Galtung, 1985;Gałganek, 1992;Buzan, Little, 2000;Röling, 2007;Żuradzki, Kuniński, 2009;Chehabeddine, Tvaronavičienė, 2020). The discourse on the superiority of irenology over polemology, or vice versa, is pointless as the generalised effect of research aims to know the conditions of shaping peace. Despite epistemological and ontological differences, it is not justified to separate the interconnected cognitive areas of peace and war, because the research results serve to improve the quality of social life in terms of humanitarianism and counteracting threats. War and peace as a general subject of research in a polemological and irenological perspective are perceived as conceptual metaphors. The latter are considered as a semantic representation of social phenomena and processes that, in their essence, do not have physical attributes, except symbolic ones. Besides, they belong to abstract phenomena that cannot be parameterised according to the world-accepted measurement system. Conceptual metaphors are understood as a way of perceiving social reality and thinking about it (Fabiszak, 2005;Lakoff, Johnson, 2008).
The research methodology in polemology (Czupryński, 2012;Krupa, 2013) and irenology (Joxe, 1981) is based on qualitative and quantitative strategies, and most often on quality -quantity ones, which complement each When referring to polemology and irenology, a question should be asked to what extent can learning through getting to know them affect the reality and the nearest future? The answer seems evident that by learning the conditions of the coexistence of political and social beings and problems that cannot be solved peacefully, one can not only build a range of theories causing mental changes but also develop assumptions on how to maintain peaceful coexistence and prevent armed conflicts. Even though it is possible to delineate a dividing line between peace and war as a research subject and a social phenomenon, both cognitive domains are interconnected. By knowing the combined conditions of peaceful coexistence and its threats, as well as the aetiology and prospects of armed conflicts and their real effects, one can undertake activities for peace and armed conflict prevention and influence social reality in terms of strengthening and developing the coexistence of states and societies. Is it a utopia or maybe it should be the reality to create life in coexistence?

Cognitive scope of polemology
Polemology deals with the study of conflicts for the purposes of peace (Bauman, 2004;Drabik, 2009;Palczewska, 2015) and, therefore, it is the goal of cognition of a significant social value (Czupryński, 2010). The thoughts expressed by many scientists indicate that people must be persuaded, and not forced to live in an orderly society (Fukuyama, 2002;Bauman, 2004;Foucaul, 2004;Beck, 2007;Huntington, 2011).
It means that it is not reasonable to influence societies with instruments of armed violence; hence the causes of conflicts should be investigated so that they can be virtually eliminated from social life. Understanding the sources, causes, and pretexts of armed conflicts allows us to conclude (Jarecka, 2010;Cieślarczyk, 2014;Czupryński, 2014;Panfil, 2014;Czupryński, 2019a;Czupryński, 2019b;Palczewska, 2017) about their forecast, expressed in the form of polemological barometers.
As a science, polemology owes its cognitive sources to many researchers; however, it was Q. Wright and G. Bouthoul that gave it its present shape. In the years 1925-1941, Q. Wright implemented the project "The Causes of War", and in the years 1935-1939 G. Bouthoul researched the demographic premises of war in the sociological perspective. G. Bouthoul named the area of knowledge created in 1942 as polemology so that it could be uniquely identified and distinguished from the science of war, the art of war, strategy, and law and phi-losophy. It should be emphasized that the problems of war and peace were dealt with in various terms before; nonetheless, the approach indicating that the purpose of understanding war is living in peace was innovative, especially after the adverse effects of World War II, Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weapons.
G. Bouthoul's intention was that the polemology should not take any side of the analysed conflict and would not evaluate the participants' mutual responsibility for causing it. What is more, it would trigger an afterthought on the forms, causes, periodicity and functions of wars, rejecting intentional pacifism in favour of scientific pacifism, which will provide arguments arising from scientific cognition (Bouthoul, 1970;Coste, 2002;Molina, 2007). Not only did G. Bouthoul study the causes and structure of war but also the social structures in which the premises for the development of collective aggression arose, which Q. Wright called social conditions favourable to war.
G. Bouthoul put forward the thesis that polemology should be a part of sociology, but cannot be limited to one discipline, because its subject of study is trans-disciplinary. The above results from the complexity of the war phenomenon, as was similarly emphasized by Q. Wright (Coste, 2002). G. Bouthoul assumed that one must be at the end of the war process and know its effects to identify all or the main, causes of it. In the process of research methodology, G. Bouthoul and Q. Wright noticed the need and necessity to combine the results of qualitative and quantitative research to provide data for the comparison of the studied indicators, which was also to prove the difference between functional (intentional) and scientific pacifism.
G. Bouthoul promoted the thesis that war is a product of social premises based on demographic conditions, while Q. Wright, in his research, emphasized the political causes of war, which do not negate demographic and social conditions but are more justified. Polemology presumed that the militant nature of nations and the rhythmic nature of conflicts were to be studied, which then had its deep justification probably related to the changes in the civilization that caused significant armed conflicts. Such justification was later developed by G. Modelski (Gałganek, 2006) in the aspect of hegemony and long cycles. Nonetheless, since the end of World War II, the importance of long cycles belligerence and rhythmic conflicts has not been of such importance.
Polemology has some features of positivist science because it assumes that understanding the origins and causes of war will avoid it in the future. If polemology intends to show the features of useful science, then in addition to developing a program for counteracting war, it is expected to provide education that illustrates the causes and effects of armed conflict.
According to G. Bouthoul, war is perceived as an armed and bloody fight between organized groups (Bouthoul 1970), but it does not bring new aspects to its definition. H. Grotius (Grotius, 2001), H. Jomini (Jomini, 2008), C. Clausewitz (Clausewitz, 2016) and many others defined war referring to historical reflection, however, despite a similar definition, G. Bouthoul perceives its causes differently, linking it mainly to the foundations of social conflicts. The foundations of the theory of polemology have connections with social development, but G. Bouthoul also refers them to phenomena from the natural world. It seems to be unjustified as wars are political, not biological, but it can be assumed that the reference to the natural world testified to the inevitability of conflict (Bouthoul, 1970) and indicated that it was a resource struggle to which H. Grotius had referred earlier.
Even though organizing and waging wars was justified for the religious, philosophical, and political reasons, in many cases under the political and economic conditions of a given civilization (Ferguson, 2012).
The subject of polemological research is complex because one cannot perceive the sources, causes, and pretexts of armed conflicts in terms of mono-causalism (Ryszka, 1975;Walzer, 2006;Howard, 2009;Żuradzki, Kuniński, 2009;Nye 2009;Chmielarz, 2010;Łoś, Reginia-Zacharski, 2010;Matuszek, 2010;Gottfried, 2013;Reginia-Zacharski, 2014;Czupryński, Stolarski, 2019;Kalita, Topolewski, 2019). Each conflict, due to the adopted political assumptions, is justified differently and the public opinion often does not find out about their real causes, which makes it easier to instrumentally shape a cultural lie against one's nation and world opinion. Contrary to cultural lies, science is tasked to identify the right sources and causes of armed conflicts.
It should be emphasized that great importance in polemological research was attached to demography, which can be compared to Thomas Robert Malthus's assumptions of the demographic-economic conflict (Malthus, 2007). They are not new as Plato (427-347 BC) pointed out that the excessive birth rate while not keeping pace with the production of consumer goods leads to a war of annexation (Wyszczelski, 2009). However, neither Plato nor Malthus or Bouthoul advocated waging war with such an intention; they merely pointed to its demographic and economic cause and effects. G. Bouthoul considered the problems of demography as a socioeconomic cause; however, he did not put forward the thesis that wars were used to maintain the demographic balance but only indicated that the function of war was to manage the demographic surplus (Bouthoul, 1970). Malthus (Malthus, 2007) was also in favour of that. However, at present, it does not seem reasonable. An arbitrary social group by Sorokin (Sorokin, 1927) and economic surplus by Bouthoul were susceptible to populist manipulation (Dahrendorf, 1959); nonetheless, it required their prior indoctrination training and armament, which was associated with a political and economic, not biological, intention. Accepting G. Bouthoul's thesis that the conflict breaks out due to a massive economic surplus, taking into regard the high unemployment rates, the world should be in permanent armed conflict. Also, following Jan G. Bloch's earlier thesis, another war will outbreak due to a sizeable technological development of combat means (Bloch, 1914) and the threat from the use of weapons of mass destruction by many countries (Kamieński, 2009). It proves that these and many other assumptions have not been confirmed fully (Kagan, 2009) as the conflict is not determined by the device, geographic, or biological environment, but by political entities and the political and economic environment.
Given G. Bouthoul assumptions, economic factors are not the root cause of conflicts, but rather their consequences leading to the flow of resources. However, even a winning war for one side means only an apparent increase in resources. The thesis that armed conflict is a response to resource scarcity is also questioned. G. Bouthoul argued that war preparation requires large expenditures; hence war is initiated by a wealthy political existence, but the problem of the scarcity of resources does not appear until the course of the war and after its end (Coste, 2002).
The outbreak of an armed conflict is not attested by one premise, but by many negatively strengthening, which may lead to a conflict, if there is a political will to transform the "explosive mixture" into "warlike impulse" (Bouthoul, 1970;Coste, 2002). Societies experience the phenomenon of "mental contagion", which allows them to be plunged into the nonsense of war (Bon, 1895), which, among other things, was justified by Sorokin's social mobility (Sorokin, 1927). In the assumptions of research polemology, certain structuralism of social research is noticed, which results from the periodicity, frequency, and correlation of acts of collective violence, however, G. Bouthoul does not stand for an orthodox and unchanging research approach, because he assumes that polemological research is interdisciplinary.
In polemology, war is treated as a social fact that can be investigated as much as other facts from social life. According to G. Bouthoul, polemology is defined as an objective and scientific study of wars for the sake of peace and should considered a new chapter in sociology. Despite noble assumptions, polemology is still only a niche area of knowledge available to researchers who do not translate their research results into social reality, which may have been related to the negation or underestimation of factors other than sociological.
Problems related to learning about war and living in peace were raised, but their formal importance grew with the establishment of polemological and irenological institutes in many countries and the commencement of the functioning of the United Nations. Many polemologists put forward the thesis that the anarchist structure of political entities in the international arena (currently 193 sovereign states) is the basis for the development of armed conflicts (Röling, 2007). Non-compliance with international law and room left for different interpretations (Montbrial, 2002) cause the UN Member States to violate the provisions of the United Nations Charter (e.g., the war in Iraq in 2003, the war in Georgia 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, etc.). In some cases, violations of the United Nations Charter are not resolved due to the lack of determination of the political interest by the permanent members of the Security Council, which results from maintaining the decision-making system on the conditions of ending the Second World War.

Cognitive scope of ireneology
In semantic terms, ireneology (Galtung, 1985;Röling, 2007:1-18;Gleditsch, Nordkvelle, Strand, 2014) comes from the ancient Greek ειρήνη, eirenē meaning peace. The concept of peace is interpret-ed in all languages, civilizations, and cultures, and has the same general connotation -living in harmony with the environment. Peace is a state of social and political harmony that manifests itself in the absence of sharp conflicts. Peace is characterized by solving social problems in the idea of humanitarianism through conciliation, negotiation, and compromise (Borgosz, 1989). Peace also means the certainty of observing the established law within states as well as on the international arena.
When referring to peace as a research subject, it is reasonable to assume that the term "peace" is used about social goals that many people have agreed to, social goals may be complex and challenging to achieve, and the term "peace" means non-violence (Galtung, 1969). It should be emphasized that conflicts are an integral part of social life and they cannot be eliminated, but it is possible to reduce their adverse effects and strive for peaceful and humanitarian dispute resolution.
The cognitive scope of irenology concerns structural violence, which is related to the violation of human rights, improper organization of social life, authoritarian or hybrid systems, flawed democratic system, social exploitation, civilization backwardness, and other reasons. Johan Galtung distinguishes between "personal" violence resulting from the armed struggle waged by the parties to the dispute and "structural" violence resulting from the way the state is organized and its political and legal system. Violence is generally viewed as evil and something to be rejected (Galtung, 1981). Hence the difficulty in defining it, because it requires answering the question: What is the cause of the violence? The condition for the perception of violence is the possibility of avoiding it, but it was not avoided for various reasons. J. Galtung presumes that the unmet needs correspond to the following types of violence: classical, poverty, repression, and alienation (Galtung, 1981). According to J. Galtung, unmet needs and types of violence are like A. Maslow's system of needs, where the system of needs determines an individual system of values, perceived as a feature of what is suitable for the security subject in some respect. When comparing the psychological and irenological assumptions, some similarities can be noticed between: -the physiological need and classical violence and poverty; -the need for security and classical violence and repression; -the need for belonging, recognition, and self-realization and the violence of alienation (Wadeley, Brich, Malim, 1997;Galtung, 1981).
Objective violence can be talked about if it is impossible to avoid. The idea of peace includes mainly structural violence, which results from social and political systems and human stratification in society (Sorokin, 1927;Dahrendorf, 1959;Galtung, 1981;Senghaas, 1992), while physical violence results from deliberate and purposeful aggression. The subject of cognitive interest in irenology is peace as a condition of non-violence and achieving social goals for the harmonious coexistence of societies, and structural violence resulting from social injustice. The basic thesis of irenologists is that violence breeds more violence (Galtung, 1969); thereby, social problems should not be solved even with the so-called justified means of violence. Although the world is not possible without violence, which is its intrinsic feature, the point is to lower its social impact in relations of structural, physical, and personal violence (Galtung, 1969). Hence, it is not legitimate to address one type of violence from a research point of view since they are conditioned and require to be viewed and studied holistically. Hence, it seems reasonable to combine the cognitive scope over structural and physical violence.
When analysing the research subject in irenology according to D. Senghaas, A. Gałganek lists four categories of problems that are in its interest, in which there is distinguished direct violence from structural violence, internal from international one and cognitive areas corresponding to them: manifestations of direct violence at the international level, manifestations of internal violence, conditions of structural violence in international relations, and conditions of internal structural violence, (Sengha, 1981;Gałganek, 1985;Solarz, 2009). "Real peace is possible only in a world in which all states would be satisfied with the existing state of affairs" (Aron, 1962). To what extent is such a situation possible? If we assume that in the era of globalization (Rzepka 2013), the free movement of goods, ideas, and capital is the basis of peaceful coexistence, then true peace is achievable from openness, tolerance, cooperation, and coexistence. That would mean that war becomes a historical category and should not be used as a method for dispute resolution (Toffler, 1993). Hence, bearing in mind the pursuit of peaceful existence, survival, and development, the conditions of peaceful coexistence should be studied. Besides, irenology studies the conditions of conflict, assuming that rivalry between states may continue but in a mild form (Kagan, 2009). It means that the source of counteracting war threats is the development of cooperation in all possible areas because cooperating states will not undertake military actions against each other if they can achieve the desired goods through cooperation and not through conflict and violence.
The principles of perpetual peace, which in modern interpretation can be seen as archaic (Kant, 2007;Nawroczyński, 1971;Marulewska, 2005;Beck, 2007) still constitute the foundation of the search for a path to peaceful coexistence. It means that the idea of perpetual peace falls within the scope of polemology and irenology, regardless of their specific subject of study. The traditional irenological approach assumed prevention in the resolution of international armed conflicts and was instead directed at the possibility of adapting various political entities to coexistence. The subject of cognitive interest were also the conditions of direct violence and the guarantee of peace. Galtung points out that violence should be avoided in dispute resolution as it inhibits the development of civilization and triggers violence in political, social, and psychological terms (Gałganek, 1985).
Structural violence currently poses a more significant threat than personal violence, because in states with authoritarian and hybrid systems, and even in defective democracies, citizens do not have institutions to defend them. Structural violence results from social injustice, which creates the premises for various conflicts to break out.
According to polemology, lasting peace requires some form of (federal, functional) world unity, but such world unity is currently impossible (Röling, 2007). In today's world, is it about achieving unity, or is it about developing mechanisms for accepting diversity in the name of coexistence and humanitarianism? It should be emphasized that the conditions for the functioning of political beings in peaceful coexistence are complex. As for peaceful coexistence and armed conflicts, there is no single cause, but many reasons leading political and social entities to different solutions.
On the one hand, in irenology, one can focus on facts by examining past conflicts or conduct research into reality while being a participant in it and reduce the level of structural violence by learning about them. While armed conflicts, their causes, and adverse effects are past facts, the peace under study and its conditions are rather based on direct participation in the observation of violence or immediately after its occurrence. The polemologists thesis that research irenologists base their research on hypotheses and not facts is exaggerated to search for artificial differences (Röling, 2007). The cognitive scope of irenology concerns not only structural conflicts or the lack of war but above all, the peace in which states and societies coexist. Negative peace means no armed conflict, whereas positive peace means no structural conflicts, or rather their occurrence at a socially acceptable level of problem-solving. The accepted level of structural violence means that the main postulates of social justice as perceived by society are met, or their mental level accepts a specific state of affairs, even when it means giving up some of their rights. If the level of rights is not realized in society, they do not even perceive that they are deprived of them. A structural conflict usually occurs as soon as society becomes aware of the above.
It can be argued that research on peace has always had a political context, but the first two decades of the 21st century indicate that it has acquired an outstanding political commitment, which polemologists treat as a plea and a lack of objectivity. At the beginning of the 1980 D. Sengha forecasted the directions of research on peace, which after almost forty years (2020) can be verified and their legitimacy assessed (Sengha, 1981). It should be stressed that the then imminent, yet unidentified, end of the Cold War would liberate many unpredictable areas of structural and direct violence. Nobody anticipated the collapse of the bipolar system, genocide in the Balkans, escalation of direct and structural violence resulting from social changes in Europe and the MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) region, or such an evolution of terrorism. Despite the research carried out at that time, a cognitive gap that was broader than assumed was revealed due to the unforeseen process of social-political-economic changes. One of the currents of irenological research is pacifism, which Alfred Fried de-fined in 1918 as the establishment of "new" world order. Its basic thesis indicated that if one wanted to remove the effect, they had first to remove the cause (Senghaas, 2004); the reception of this the idea did not earn social recognition and was criticized by polemologists as idealistic. The necessary conditions for a peaceful resolution of unavoidable structural conflicts within the state include: -a legitimate monopoly on the use of force only by the state to protect a community based on the rule of law and humanitarianism, and widespread disarmament of citizens to induce them to resolve conflicts over identity and interests through arguments rather than violence; -the legal monopoly of state power requires transparent institutional and parliamentary and social scrutiny by independent organizations; -self-control and mutual control of the affective behaviour of the parties to the conflict in resolving them so as not to cause their escalation; -democratization of the legal development of societies in solving structural conflicts; -striving to counteract excessive social inequality and social injustice; -striving for a constructive resolution of social conflicts by the state and the parties to the dispute (Sorokin, 1927;Dahrendorf, 1959;Senghaas, 2004).
Generalising the proposed, analysed model of conflict management (Senghaas, 2004), if it is based on striving for a compromise, conditions for peaceful settlement of structural disputes, and constructive resolution of them, may reduce social tensions and eliminate them in any country that meets such conditions for resolving them. From the point of irenology, research is being carried out on causes of tensions and on the ways of reducing them and monitoring them so that they do not repeat themselves in the future. Thus, irenology, when researching peace, no matter what we call it, mainly aims to build the foundations of positive peace.

Research assumptions
According to Gaston Bouthoul, the polemology refers to the scientific research on war and peace as sociology, aetiology, and prospects of war, while in Quincy Wright's approach, the military and diplomatic causes of war and the social conditions favourable to it are investigated. Hence, polemology combines the problems of war and peace (Bouthoul, 1970;Bouthoul, 1973;Wright, 1983). The mission of polemology is to build the area of knowledge how to counteract war, precisely, how to change the way people think about war and the mentality of individuals and societies so that war is perceived as a social disease. Irenology studies the conflict as well as the phenomena and conditions of peace. Therefore, it refers to the conditions of humanitarianism, cooperation, and coexistence of states, nations, and societies. Irenology by changing the thinking about peace and conflict resolution should create an area of knowledge indicating that any conflict can be solved without escalating its adverse effects. Hence, polemologists accused irenology that its assumptions are aimed at utopia and intentional pacifism and not at social reality, which seems unfounded. It was argued in polemology that by gaining knowledge about peace, one could not infer about armed conflict, but by learning about the war, one can infer about peace. Such perception of polemology sustained its separation from irenology, which seems unjustified, because structural violence may cause personal violence, and in the course of violence resulting from armed conflict or after its end, structural violence may occur (Röling, 2007).

, the research problem was formulated in the form of an open question: To what extent are the cognitive assumptions of polemology and irenology possible to combine to obtain a full range of knowledge on the conditions of coexistence and efficient opposition to structural violence and armed conflicts?
A research hypothesis was adopted in the research process the qualitative research strategy was used to verify it. The subjects of interest in polemology and irenology are war and peace, respectively, which are opposite to each other. As concepts, they are antonyms, which allows the conclusion that as social phenomena and cognitive metaphors they cannot exist without each other and getting to know one of them complements the knowledge about the other. The cognitive scope of polemology is to learn the sources, causes, and pretexts of armed conflicts to prevent their occurrence in the future, while irenology aims to recognise the conditions of peace to maintain and develop the peaceful coexistence of states and societies, and counter threats to their existence. Despite the differences in the formulation of the objectives of polemology and irenology, their essence boils down to creating conditions for the peaceful coexistence of states and societies and resisting the escalation of conflicts to a level that makes it impossible to resolve them with humanitarian and peaceful methods. In the process of researching the problems of polemology and irenology, the following strategies are used: qualitative, quantitative and qualitative-quantitative. The effects of the results of polemology and irenology research are used to describe, explain, diagnose, and forecast threats to the peaceful coexistence of states and nations and the aetiology of armed conflicts. Their usefulness comes down to securing peace and preventing armed conflicts in order to guarantee the duration, survival, and development of states and societies in peaceful coexistence.
The qualitative research strategy was applied in the adopted research process. It was assumed that the qualitative research is defined primarily by a series of tensions, contradictions, and fluctuations (Denzin, Lincoln, 2005) while focusing on explaining the essence of the problem by identifying common areas of cognitive polemology and irenology in terms of the area, object and subject of research; purpose, effect and utility of research results; functions in science and applied research strategies. The comparison of the specified polemological and irenological categories allowed for the development of their generalised assumptions. Critical thinking about the specified research categories was used, assuming that it is necessary to: -strive for the critical perception of descriptions of methodological assumptions contained in the subject literature; -use comparisons of similar categories in the research process, and formulate generalised conclusions based on the obtained differences and similarities; -carry out a multilateral analysis of data contained in the subject literature; -make analyses and comparisons of cases of deviation from commonly perceived research assumptions (Rainko, 1971;Silverman, 2001;Denzin, Lincoln, 2005;Silverman, 2005;Flick, 2007;Stasik, Gendźwiłł, 2012).
In the research process, the method of researching the content of selected subject literature was used, consisting in the coherent application of reasoning operations (analysis, synthesis, comparison, abstraction, generalisation, deductive reasoning) and the strategies of reducing, taxonomic, heuristic, and constructive thinking (Peräkylä, 2005;Czupryński, 2020).

Holistic scope of on studies on peace and armed conflicts
Polemology and irenology as applied sciences are useful since through re-search results and the formation of theories about the sources and causes of armed conflicts as well as the conditions of peace and its threats, they can influence the mentality of societies in terms of peaceful coexistence. It should be emphasized that in peace and armed conflict studies, it is not possible to separate cognition from the evaluation. Hence political and cultural ideas would always have an impact on different contexts of perceiving reality.
War as real social phenomena occurs less and less and becomes more and more difficult to identify (Gleditsch, Metternich, Ruggeri, 2014), due to its political, military, social, and cultural evolution. However, the use of violence remains unchanged while using increasingly perfect tools that act destructively on humans and their environment (Kamieński, 2009). Due to the identified changes, the war lost its original recognition (Aron, 1962;Kohn, 2000:5;Clausewitz, 2016;Jomini, 2018) except for violence. Nonetheless, as H. Grotius (Grotius, 2001;Zwoleński, 2003) pointed out, war cannot be interpreted only through violence because it is a legal state between political entities. One should not define war statistically since the number of casualties can-not attest that something socially is or is not war. Therefore, to reflect the essence of the phenomenon of disturbance of peace, it is legitimate to study a broader range of armed conflicts (e.g., unilateral actions in an international armed conflict, international armed conflict, non-international armed conflict, internationalized internal armed conflict) and not only wars and structural conflicts. That stems from the fact that a structural conflict may provoke armed conflict, and the effect of a completed armed conflict may be a structural conflict due to the deterioration of social conditions or the conclusion of an arbitrary peace.
After considering the gained research experience of polemology and irenology and comparing them in selected research categories (Table 1), it has been concluded that holistic research on peace and armed conflicts should be conducted. All this because the compared categories can be combined, and the acquired and interpreted data and facts in the research process concern both irenological and polemological studies to the same extent. In the research process, the researcher examines the research subject, which is a metaphor in irenological and polemological studies, because peace and armed conflict occur as social phenomena, perceived depending on the subject of perception. Peace and conflicts cannot be considered in isolation from the closer (research object) and further (research area) environment; however, they are not subject to the detailed research process, but only in terms of interactions between them and the research subject (Fig. 1). It can be argued that no social or armed conflict breaks out without connection to the relationships with the closer (research object) and further (research area) environment. It is a systemic perception of the subject of research, which is or may be a subsystem or element of the system. Hence, the studied issue is strongly influenced by the relationships between the research area, subject, and object.
It should be emphasized that the social, political, civilization and humanitarian conditions for maintaining and threatening peace as well as the aetiology of armed conflict in the context of the duration, survival, and development of the state and societies are inferred based on the same facts and premises. One cannot study the causes of armed conflicts without identifying the process of changes in the period of peace in the studied subject and its immediate and further sur-roundings, because their consequences bring us closer to the escalation of a conflict or living in coexistence.
The separation of the cognitive goal, maintained by polemologists and irenologists, is not justified. By gaining knowledge about the conditions of coexistence and its threats, one comes closer to the premises of conflicts that may escalate into an armed conflict, or by learning the causes of completed conflicts, one can take action on their premises to eliminate or reduce them or their driving force. Getting to know the conditions of life in the coexistence or aetiology of armed conflicts provides conclusions for reducing the scale of social and political tensions or their conscious escalation by those in power. Structural or armed conflict does not break out without causes; it has its primary and further sources and reasons, which are de-escalated or escalated by those in power depending on the purpose of the political power in the state. One can argue that structural and armed conflicts occur when humanitarian and diplomatic instruments of creating reality following the principles of humanitarianism and respect for international law fail.
From the scientific point of view, one expects the research process to deliver a description, explaining, diagnosis, and prognosis of threats to the peaceful coexistence of states and nations, and the aetiology of armed conflicts. Thus, the effect of the research comes down to the scientific explanation of the sources, causes, and pretexts of the situation, the elaboration of knowledge about them, and conclusions for peaceful coexistence. Under the concept of pretexts of the existing situation, it is reasonable to perceive "cultural lies", directed mainly by the authorities to one's society to direct their imagination to the expected reactions. Conducting studies on peace and armed conflicts is justified in the form of a case study because each structural or armed conflict is a specific case for each political entity and society. Despite general convergent premises for the outbreak of structural or armed conflicts in a specific social and political space, the determinants of this space (political, social, and their political beings) deter-mine the de-escalation or escalation of the premises of structural or armed conflict. Thus, the disturbance of peace depends on the subjective perception of reality from a humanitarian, social, political, cultural, and economic perspective.
The utility of research outcomes comes down to making the decision-makers and society aware of the scale of disturbances in peaceful coexistence in the result of a structural or armed conflict and the reasons for their escalation. Every armed conflict causes losses despite the apparent belief in profit. In the effect of structural conflict, social reality may improve or deteriorate, and this depends on the conscious action of decision-makers and the acceptance or rejection of cultural lies by society.
The adopted functions of science (descriptive, explanatory, diagnostic, prognostic, methodological, systematising (Ratajewski, 1993) are universal because in their approach one can classify any discipline and scope of knowledge. As for the development of a given science, it is essential that it has its research methodology, and therefore the study of peace and armed conflicts should have its system of concepts and research methodologies. The conditions of peace and armed conflicts may differ in each country; thereby, it is recommended to conduct a case study in which one refers to comparable facts in terms of forecast, but the conditions are always specific for structural and armed conflicts in terms of description, explaining, and diagnosis. Structural conflict may be the pursuit of revolutionary changes. Structural conflict may evolve into armed conflict, and be the result of armed conflict, in consequence of which the social life of citizens deteriorated.

Conclusions
Separating irenological research from polemological research is unjustified. Both these areas of knowledge complement each other to holistically perceive the problems of civilizational, cultural, political, economic, social, and ideological coexistence of political entities and societies. Peace and armed conflict studies examine peace in terms of humanitarianism and its threats and the aetiology of armed conflicts, as well as civilization, cultural, political, social and economic processes influencing the shaping of changes from peace to conflict. Peace and armed conflict studies aim to identify opportunities, challenges, and threats to peace and the causes of armed conflicts to propose a process of changes targeted at the coexistence of political entities and societies in the contemporary world based on generalized conclusions. Studies on peace and armed conflicts should include conflicts which ended in the recent past (Nowaczyk, 2011) and peace pro-cesses having an enormous impact on the processes of coexistence in the contemporary world (Fig. 2). In science, the modern concept does not have an unambiguous connotation and precision as to the time in which the studied problem is situated. However, it can be presumed that this is a period corresponding to G. Modelski's long cycles spanning one hundred years, but without referring to its stages and under the assumption that events from the fifty years may have an impact on events in the next fifty years. For peace and armed conflicts studies, it is hardly justified to examine the influence the events of the past centuries have on the present functioning in peace or on the development of conflicts, because they have little relation to the present day. Generally, it is legitimate to study peace coexistence and armed conflicts from a period that has an impact on today and tomorrow defined as a fifty-year perspective. Earlier events are legitimate to hand over to historians so that they create knowledge about the past because it does not have much connection with the present and the immediate future. The thesis should be approached with caution as it can be proved that the civilization development from several thousand years ago impacts the present shape of social reality. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that it is events and people here and now that create the reality in the context of constant civilization changes. Reality has links to the deep past but is created based on conclusions from the present and near past. If the results of peace and armed conflicts studies are to influence reality as applied science, the deep past should be given to historians and anthropologists of culture, and contemporary conflicts and crises to peace and armed conflicts studies.