A written interview with China Social Science Today, which is published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Here is the Chinese version of May 29, 2026.
June 16/24, 2026
Subject: An interview on the topic of “research productivity” from Chinese Social Sciences Today
Dear Professor Jan Oberg:
Last time I interviewed you about the topic of peace studies and the future of humankind. Thank you again for your nice cooperation!
I’m currently conducting an interview about the topic “research productivity,” and I think of you again, and I guess you are the suitable person for this interview. Please check the following interview-questions, and see if you would like to accept this interview. If so, please send me back the answers by email. I believe you will offer insightful ideas.
INTRODUCTION
I served as the director of the Lund University Peace Research Institute, LUPRI, from 1983 to 1989. Then the social science faculty decided to close it down, together with a series of other studies, including environmental studies and human rights studies. The astonishing reason was that the university did not want interdisciplinary studies, and peace research, for instance, was squeezed into the Department of Sociology and later into Political Science. That was when I left the university for good.
Since then, I have been the co-founder and director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, and served as visiting professor in peace and conflict research in several countries such as Japan (four universities), Yugoslavia, Italy, Austria, Burundi, and numerous guest lectures elsewhere.
As part of TFF’s activity, I have been doing on-the-ground conflict analyses and peace training in a series of war zones. Thus, I am not a typical university professor, but may have developed views which have been shaped by my work on-the-ground, the academic teaching and my consistent writing and speaking, also for non-academic audiences.
1. In your opinion, how should we define high-quality, superior research productivity? What should be the correct criteria for this?
ANSWER
Scholarship needs productivity — without steady writing, reading, and thinking, nothing accumulates. But when productivity becomes the measure rather than the by-product, it turns into a toxin.
High-quality scholarship requires long, uninterrupted cognitive stretches; industrial productivity models fragment attention and tend to reduce depth. Many breakthroughs have come from slow trial and error, not rapid output; quantified productivity undermines the very slowness that can produce originality.
When scholars are judged by output volume, they avoid risky, longterm projects and exploration into the unknown. The system instead rewards “safe” incrementalism.
Scholarship is an art or a craft, not a factory assembly line. Craftsmanship requires revision, reflection, and rethinking, all of which may look like “low productivity” from the outside.
Hence, every science-producing institution must be very cautious not to mix mindful intrinsic motivation and the search for truths with external quantification. Quantified productivity often prioritises extrinsic motivators such as points, rankings, counts, citation indexes, grantdefined agendas and publication quotas.
In my own experience these extrinsic factors get stronger when bureaucrats and ‘managers’ take over research institutions and external utility, such as needs of a political and/or economic market, become domineering.
All that said, I tend to believe that productivity is largely a product of the researcher’s personality. We know that there are brilliant scholars who wrote rather little over their lifetime but are revered as trend-setting and as having written “classical” works that have stood the test of time. And there are scholars who – like, say, peace and future researcher Johan Galtung – wrote 160 books and thousands of articles, lectured all over the world, started institutes and journals that left an everlasting impression on social science in general and peace and conflict studies in particular.
The same type of low- and high-productivity personalities can be found in the arts and in politics. The interaction between high and low productivity and high/low quality makes a four-fold table. Where individual scholars fit will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis.