This essay reflects my ongoing personal exercise of coming to grips with the ambitious overall topic ‘Language and peace: Language policy as a means of peace building and conflict management’. Starting off from accumulated ‘wisdom’ rather than from focused research, the idea is to identify, in a global perspective, certain recurrent features which would ultimately allow me to come up with elements of a typology as well as of a theory on the conflict management potential of language policies. Such a typology would need to be based on case studies of successful and unsuccessful conflict management by means of language policy, from which theoretically relevant features could be generalised by inductive procedures. I trust that such case studies can and will be provided by experts who are familiar with individual ‘cases’. With regard to building up theory, one could also start by tentatively assuming common a priori ‘dimensions’ of the topic which would constitute a starting point of sorts in order to monitor the potential of these dimensions to ‘explain’ certain illustrative cases and thereby allow for theoretical generalisations in a deductive manner. In this paper, which reflects a somewhat preliminary approach to the topic, both deductive and inductive approaches will be implicitly referred to in a parallel manner.

Among the potentially common dimensions, I will examine what I presently conceive of as (1) the political, (2) the ideological, (3) the sociolinguistic, and (4) the historico-geographic dimensions (this list of ‘dimensions’ is not assumed to be complete). I will introduce these dimensions by way of four hypotheses. The hypotheses are tentative at this stage and, partly at least, come close to being ‘trivial’. Reference will be made, however, to illustrative ‘cases’ in point under both a ‘world region’ and ‘national’ approach. The idea is to ignite and fuel our discussions, in a rather general way, towards generating an empirically based typology and to provide the first steps towards a theory of conflict management by means of language policy.

The political dimension: Power and control