Ralph Johnson Bunche: Public Intellectual and Nobel Peace Laureate (review)

This symposium, less biographical than analytical, sets out to examine the life, contribution, and legacy of Ralph Bunche in three specific domains. The first section considers Bunche's work in the discipline of political science; the second analyzes his vision as an educator and the role of education in bettering society; and the final section explains his pathbreaking work as a diplomat both with the U.S. State Department and with the United Nations.

There is no doubt that Bunche was an educator, a political scientist, and a diplomat. But whether he was a force to be reckoned with and a major contributor in all three venues should be up for debate. But here it is not. The result is that this edited volume is considerably less than its individual parts. Although the names of the various contributors read like a who's who, their intellectual vigor is constrained by the straitjacket imposed on this book to make Bunche relevant—to find in his life and exploits a usable past. As a result, at the end of an otherwise engaging chapter there is usually some throwaway sentence or paragraph about how Bunche's decisions and efforts could prove instructive in solving today's problems.

Frankly, Bunche and the scholars deserve better. For example, although he did not leave behind a significant body of scholarship, those tasked with explaining his contribution to intellectual discourses on race and colonialism are compelled to draw from Bunche's speeches; his consulting work on An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy by Gunnar Myrdal, Richard Mauritz Edvard Sterner, and Rose Marshall Arnold (Harper, 1944); and his meager publication record. To be clear, Hanes Walton Jr. and Jonathan Holloway have almost turned water into wine with what they have been able to decipher and deduce from that small body of work. But in the end, while Walton laments that the discipline of political science did not follow Bunche's experiential prescription for the field, perhaps the question becomes, how could it have done so?

Beverly Lindsay, who focuses on Bunche's contribution to education and his clarion call for service-based learning, has the most difficult job of all. After three separate chapters laying out the current state of practice in higher education, she has to admit that many of today's leading practitioners, whom she interviewed, never even knew that Bunche advocated the type of education they are promoting. Thus, what was to be a strong link turns out, instead, to be a broken intellectual chain.

By contrast, in the domain in which he earned the Nobel Peace Prize, Bunche comes fully alive and his contribution is much more convincing. Edwin Smith's and Princeton Lymon's chapters detail the challenges Bunche faced and the pathbreaking work he did at the United Nations—helping to form and direct the anticolonial wing, negotiating to resolve conflicts between the Arabs and Israelis after the 1948 war, and dealing with the failure in the Congo. The scholars explore cogently and persuasively the difficulty of that work, the lack of precedent, the legal netherland of the U.N., and (in the case of the Arab–Israeli conflict) the ultimate limits of the cease-fire. Most important, it becomes evident that Bunche recognized that, despite the Nobel Peace Prize, he had not brought about real peace in the Middle East, but had only negotiated an armistice, because the issues of the Palestinians and land had not been addressed. Now that is significant! Bunche, in short, needs no contrived attempt to be relevant. In this volume, he needed, instead, to have been taken on his own terms.