Irredeemably connected by the proximity of their research objects, Security Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies were constituted and developed throughout the Cold War as antagonistic disciplines. This was a division mostly operated in Europe, where Galtung and his disciples directed the study of peace and war to a clearly normative and critical agenda, while the study of security remained mostly policy oriented. As argued in this article, there was, by the end of the bipolar conflict, a role inversion, with Peace and Conflict Studies accommodated to an empiricism void of any explicit normativity, whilst Security Studies, at least in Europe, opened up to new approaches of a more critical stance. It is here suggested that such inversion should provide important lessons for Peace and Conflict Studies, namely on the centrality of theory for the definition of a new critical agenda that could also contribute to bring both disciplines closer to each other
