John Gittings

Peace in History
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PEACE IN HISTORY

[The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace.(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). pp 21-31]

A war historian studies the history of war: no one will quibble with that definition. To say that a peace historian studies the history of peace raises more difficult questions. We may disregard the objection of those who believe that peace is merely the absence of war and that consequently the peace historian has very little to work on. All the contributors to this volume, at least, believe that peace is a rich and varied subject and that whole tracts of the subject have yet to be fully explored. We may also resist the criticism that peace historians risk compromising their integrity by becoming advocates of peace. As a generalization, this is no more true than to say that war historians are all advocates of war. Yet the real question for peace historians, and one which complicates the definition of ‘peace history’, is this: to what extent should peace historians confine themselves to the study of peace advocacy and argument in history, and how far should they engage directly with the dominant (and peace-averse) historical narrative of war? Indeed, the subject has been defined in both of these ways. The first task is vast in itself, given the lack of coverage and low visibility of peace advocacy and peace thinking in most orthodox histories. The efforts of the peace societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, still do not feature as prominently as they should in most diplomatic histories of the run-up to the First World War – and are sometimes ignored altogether. The same is equally or even more true of most peace advocacy in earlier ages – as I shall show later in the case of Desiderius Erasmus. The second task requires the peace historian to go further, and often to challenge accepted truths in the established fields of war history and international relations. Both tasks are well illustrated if we consider how peace historians may approach the history of the 40 years and more of Cold War. It is already a major exercise to chart and analyse the influence of the anti-war and peace movements upon the course of the Cold War (as has been done brilliantly by the US historian Lawrence Wittner). It is a separate but equally essential exercise to submit conventional views of the Cold War to rigorous scrutiny and to show how, in many respects, they are flawed. The peace historian, in this instance, has to become a war historian – or at least a Cold War historian.

      ‘What is peace history?’ asks the peace historian Charles F. Howlett in a recent history of the American peace movement. ‘It is defined as the historical study of non-violent efforts for peace and social justice’.(1)  ‘Peace history’ is sometimes regarded as a shortened version of the phrase ‘peace research in history’, which also implies a focus upon peace activism and argument. (The Peace History Society in the US changed its name in 1994 from the original name of the Council for Peace Research in History, chosen when it was first set up in 1963–64). Peace history has also been defined as the study of ‘ideas, individuals and organisations concerned with the promotion of peace and the prevention of war and international conflict’. (2) Taken literally, this type of definition can lead to a form of ghettoization of peace history in which the peace advocates of today spend most of their time researching and celebrating the peace advocates of the past. And since the advocacy of their predecessors was usually unsuccessful, this can expose contemporary peace history to the charge of being irrelevant to the ‘real world’. However, it is also realized that the study of ‘[peace] ideas, individuals and organisations’ should lead on to a broader critique of majority historical narratives. The history of peace advocacy in the US, writes its chronicler Charles Chatfield, is part of a challenge to the dominant consensus view of history. (3) Another US historian, David Patterson, suggests that ‘the best peace research will be related to questions of broader, more universal concerns’, noting that it has already offered ‘penetrating critiques of the Cold War and its redefinition of national security targets in terms of military power’. (4)

Periodization of peace

There are a number of books in print which offer a history of warfare, or a timeline of wars, sometimes taking the narrative back as far as the late Bronze Age. No one would query the conceptual approach behind such works: wars can be named and assigned to a chronology; the science of war can be discussed and its development can be charted. Questions may be raised, however, if a peace historian adopts the same approach, surveying the science of peace over past millennia, or constructing a timeline of ‘peaces’ (there is no logical reason not to use the word in the plural, and yet it jars). It is easier to regard peace as the interval between wars than to regard war as the interval between peaces, and yet for the peace historian the two propositions are equally valid. Formal ‘peaces’ such as those established by treaty (e.g. the Peace of Nicias, 421 BC; the Peace of Westphalia, AD 1648) may be readily identified. Broader periods of peace, in which substantial populations enjoy freedom from war over a significant length of time (the Ptolemaic Peace, 287–225 BC; the European Peace, AD 1818–48) are also visible. Their limitations may be discussed – for instance, the ultimate reliance on armed force, as in the Pax Romana, or the persistence of social violence and local conflict – but they remain periods of predominant peace. When we consider the phenomenon of war in human society, we are entitled to take equal account of the phenomenon of peace. Pioneering work in the quantitative study of war was carried out from the 1930s through to the 1950s separately by Lewis Fry Richardson, Pitirim Sorokin and Quincy Wright, from whose work some conclusions on the frequency of peace may be drawn.  (5) Otherwise, only isolated attempts have been made. One study of peace in the ancient world challenges the view of its history as a tale of unrelieved war: the authors, Matthew Melko and Richard Weigel, identify ten ancient ‘world periods of peace’, starting with the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (1991–1720 BC) and concluding with the Hispanic-Roman period on the Iberian Peninsula (19 BC to AD 409) (6). An idiosyncratic work by a German scholar in the 1950s, advocating a United States of Europe, sought to show that European Union would be the successor to a series of ‘epochs of peace’ which included long war-free periods in China, Japan and Latin America. (7) The US peace scholar Kenneth Boulding has attempted a more general definition of war and peace as ‘proportions of human activity’ through calculating the proportion of GDP spent on the war industry (defined very widely) in the US and other major countries, concluding that it is doubtful whether war over time ‘has averaged more than 5 or at most 10 per cent of human activity’. (8).  We may conclude that the periodization of peace (which is only meaningful if allied to a rigorous definition of peace) is a field wide open for further research, though its findings would still be subject to different interpretations. If it is true, for example, that periods of peace in excess of a quarter of a century are extremely rare (as argued by Sorokin), is such a period to be regarded as short or long?

      In restoring peace to a historical narrative dominated by war, the peace historian also seeks to counter the bias of ‘democratic peace’ theory, which effectively minimizes the significance of both actual peace and action for peace in the centuries of pre-modern, and largely pre-democratic or less ‘civilized’, history. Exponents of ‘liberal peace’ show little interest in peace thought and argument before Immanuel Kant, who is seen as foreshadowing their theory in his essay on Perpetual Peace. The theory also has a vested interest in showing that peace has become more widespread in more modern democratic and ‘civilized’ times. Influential exponents today include the war historian Azar Gat, for whom liberal democracy has fundamentally reduced the prevalence of war, and the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, whose latest work argues in very broad terms that modernity and culture have brought about a drastic decline in violence. (9)

      Further clarification of the periodization of peace will assist the peace historian to investigate the conditions under which peace has been secured and the means by which it is maintained. The reasons for its breakdown are also of obvious interest, although this area is more likely to have been covered by the war historian. The imbalance of studies of societies at war and societies at peace has long been noted, though this has begun to be redressed in recent decades. Publication of A Natural History of Peace (1996), edited by Thomas Gregor, following a conference which brought together scholars from various disciplines, was a significant step forward. In the concluding essay on ‘understanding peace’, John Vasquez argued that ‘a successful peace is not a negative achievement’ but a positive and rational process which established ‘rules of the game’ and combined self-interest with issues of legitimacy and morality. (10)  A volume of essays by European scholars has also sought to adopt a more historically sensitive approach to both peace and war on the European continent, rejecting what the editors regard as the ‘essentially ahistorical view of war and peace that dominates most IR theory’.(11)

Classical peace

The standard view of ancient and classical history has been to regard it as dominated by martial values and chronic warfare, stretching from pre-dynastic China through the empires of the Near East to Greece and Rome. The Greek example has been especially prominent over a whole millennium, from Mycenaean Greece to the Persian, Peloponnesian and subsequent wars of city-state Greece. A recent editor of the Iliad describes Homer’s work ‘as a glorification of war and as the definition of a man as a skilled fighting machine’, while a textbook on warfare in ancient Greece tells us that ‘a hostile relationship was assumed to be the norm between Greek states’. ( 12) Yet we are faced with what one classical scholar has described as ‘the paradox of war’ in ancient literature: that ‘the prominence of war is disproportionate to its frequency and significance in practice’. (13) A more nuanced view has begun to emerge in recent classical scholarship, in which war is regarded more as a social than as a purely military phenomenon, and as a result more attention is paid to the ancient Greek concern for peace, and the means adopted to achieve or maintain it.

      An early attempt by the Italian scholar-diplomat Gerardo Zampagliano to explore ‘the idea of peace’ in both classical Greece and Rome (1967) is still the only general survey of this topic. (14) However, the conventional view of Homer as wholly concerned with strife and warlike qualities has been considerably modified. More weight is now attached to the peaceful images conveyed in Homer’s famous similes, which provide a pacific counterpoint to his narrative of war. His equally famous description of the Shield of Achilles, decorated for the most part with scenes of peace rather than war, has also received more attention. Homer’s message is that humans aspire not to blood and violence but to such hedonistic pursuits as song and dance, feasting and making love, the Oxford classicist Oliver Taplin has suggested. (15)

      More emphasis is also placed now on the elaborate institutions of interstate diplomacy in classical Greece, through which considerable efforts were made to keep the peace by truce and treaty. The single-minded Thucydidean emphasis on war, it is noted, says little about periods of peace, and sometimes ignores successful peace diplomacy altogether. Greek drama has also been scrutinized for more insight into popular attitudes towards war and peace; the plays of Euripides, for example, reveal a deep concern with the immorality of war. The murderous behaviour of Sophocles’ Ajax is seen by the classicist (and Vietnam veteran) Lawrence Tritle as showing the symptoms of what we now know as Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome. (16) By contrast, scholarly perception of early Chinese attitudes to peace and war has hardened in recent scholarship in a more war-oriented direction. The earlier view, strongly influenced by the research into Chinese science and civilization of the Cambridge sinologist Joseph Needham, and later by the US China historian John K. Fairbank, saw the emerging Chinese imperial system as one which emphasized pacific (wen) over martial (wu) values. Thus, for the emperor to resort to war was an admission that he had failed to deliver good government. (17) This concept of a ‘pacifist bias’ in the Chinese tradition has been questioned more recently by some military historians: the fact that the Chinese government explicitly bases its claim to be pursuing a ‘harmonious’ foreign policy upon the legacy of Confucian philosophy gives this subject a political edge. Across the ancient world generally, it is accepted more widely that while wars were very common in antiquity, relations between the ancient ‘society of states’ from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia featured a wide range of devices, from treaties to kinship bonds, designed to inhibit and avoid violence: it may even be said that ‘‘natural’ peace, not a war of all against all, was widely regarded as the default state of international relations’.(18)

Peace in the modern age

Taking a very long view of modern history, we may detect four separate strands of peace-and-war thought and argument over the last millennium. First is the realist approach, whose origin is popularly associated with Machiavelli (although it has older antecedents with Thucydides, among other classical sources). The realist approach had particular appeal in the age of the rise of nation-states, was later associated with the ruthless outlook on humanity of Social Darwinism, and flourished again in the amoral age of Cold War nuclear strategy. Second is the theory of just war, often traced back to St Augustine (though he said less on the subject than is claimed), and then through Thomas Aquinas and other theologians of the age of the Crusades to the more secular approach of Grotius, Vattel and other jurists credited with founding international law. Dormant for obvious reasons for most of the Cold War, just war theory has been reinvigorated by more recent debate on the ethics of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘war against terror’. A third strand is the continuous narrative of peace thinking which can be traced from the time of Erasmus and fellow-humanists of the Renaissance, through Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment, to the peace societies and conferences of the nineteenth century, whose efforts to find international mechanisms for peaceful negotiation of differences between states seemed for a while to produce tangible results in the creation of new institutions for arbitration and for the limitation of war. Though these hopes were dashed by 1914, they paved the way ahead for the League of Nations, and ultimately for the United Nations. The fourth strand is the history of pacifist thought and action (for pacifist conviction frequently led to martyrdom), which ultimately dates back to the early Christian fathers. Though the pacifist record has been obscured or obliterated by persecution, it can still be detected throughout medieval history as an undercurrent of dissent, surfacing in ‘heretical’ sects such as the Lollards, Cathars, Waldenses, Mennonites and Anabaptists. It becomes more visible in the Quaker movement, and was later inspired by the ideas of Tolstoy and Gandhi and the example of conscientious objectors in the two world wars.

      These separate strands have been woven very unevenly into the generally accepted scholarship and history of international relations. Generally speaking, much more attention has been focused on just war theory and the realist approach than upon the narrative of peace thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, or upon Christian pacifism and non-combatant dissent. Both of the latter strands received more attention in the interwar years, when a new search began for a more peaceful international order, with studies of the ‘history of peace’ and of Christian attitudes to war and peace which are still quoted today.(19)  Serious inquiry in more recent decades has remained limited to relatively few scholars: these include Robert P. Adams on humanism, war and peace in the age of Erasmus, and Merle Curti and Peter Brock on the history of pacifist protest and non-conformity in Europe and the US. (20)  Rather more attention has been focused on anti-war argument and peace society activities before and after the First World War, with significant works by Sandi Cooper and Cecilia Lynch, among others. (21)  Few mainstream historians have integrated this material into their conventional narrative of international diplomacy (Barbara Tuchman remains an outstanding exception). (22) The story of peace initiatives during this war (which were not confined to the peace movement) – such as the 1917 ‘peace letter’ of Lord Lansdowne, the former British foreign secretary – remains underexplored. Remarkably, no adequate biographical account of Bertrand Russell’s critique of First World War policy (or, decades later, of Cold War strategy) has yet been written. However, with the approach of the ‘Great War’ centenary years (2014–18), more significant work has begun to appear both on anti-war opposition during those years and on the ever-contentious subject of the origins and causes of the war. (23)

      Some useful attempts have been made to anthologize the literature of modern peace thought, most notably in the Garland Library of War and Peace, a project launched in 1971 to make available some 360 titles of out-of-print literature on war and peace. These materials, Curti observed in his introduction to the project, have an international range in both time and space, and a great many of these books ‘approach[ed] war in terms of its alternatives’ – an essential feature of peace thought which should ‘provide insight into the resurgence of peace advocacy’. The last two decades have also seen the publication of several comprehensive readers in peace studies, and of the Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Peace. (24)

      The treatment of the extensive writings of Erasmus on peace is an instructive illustration of the lack of attention generally given to peace thought. These writings are not usually found in bookshops or libraries, in contrast to the works of his contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli (both Erasmus and Machiavelli witnessed the seizure of Bologna in 1506 by the ‘warrior pope’ Julius II, although they drew opposite conclusions from the event. It is intriguing to speculate on their conversation if they had met!). Erasmus was widely read in his time by kings and counsellors – he was invited to the courts of England and France – and his works circulated throughout Europe. Though some war historians have dismissed his anti-war arguments as utopian, he appealed to the rational self-interest of the rulers whom he addressed as well as to their Christian conscience. The long-term consequences of war are so damaging, he argued, that it is very rarely worth the risk. He identified the false logic which often serves as justification for war, and the way it might serve the interests of princes but not of people. He also raised, well ahead of his time, the possibility that war could be prevented by arbitration. Erasmus was greatly admired by the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, and he was read by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, yet his peace writings are now little known outside the field of Renaissance studies. The work of Robert P. Adams cited above, published over 50 years ago, still stands almost on its own. (25)

Peace history in the twentieth century

Peace research ‘as an organised, purposeful scholarly activity’ in the twentieth century is of particular interest and value, we are reminded by the US peace scholar Peter Wallensteen, since it has been ‘one of the most violent centuries of humankind’. (26)  How successful, then, have peace historians been in applying a distinctive view to this protracted historical period of violence? To generalize broadly, they have had more success in illuminating the ideas and activities of peace campaigners throughout this period than in interrogating the dominant narrative of its international relations and presenting a coherent counter-narrative. These two aspects of peace history are not always separate and have been successfully combined by some peace scholars, as shown in the early work of Merle Curti, who focused on the pre-war diplomatic efforts (led by US Secretary of State Bryan) to promote international treaties on the settlement of disputes through arbitration, before going on to chronicle the history of US peace activism over three centuries. (27) The inverse connection between social deprivation and peace, embodied in the charter of the League of Nations, was also well understood by interwar peace writers. As Jane Addams put it in 1930, peace was an integral part of ‘that new internationalism promoted by the men of all nations who are determined upon the abolition of degrading poverty, disease, and ignorance.’ (28)  In the aftermath of the First World War, searching questions were asked about the driving forces behind modern war by social historians and educationalists, including Caroline Playne and Maria Montessori – and in the famous exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in 1932.

      The range of subjects which offered itself to the peace historian expanded hugely in the second half of the twentieth century, and continues to do so today as our world becomes ever more complex and globalized. The past has become ever more relevant to understanding the present, and seeking to avert future calamity. Although peace scholarship suffered from political disapproval during the earlier decades of the Cold War (when the very word ‘peace’ was tainted), some influential voices were heard. The history of the development of nuclear weapons, and the failure of disarmament negotiations in the 1950s, was an area for study with obvious contemporary implications. The Nobel Peace Prize winner (1959) Philip Noel-Baker led the way with his ground-breaking study of The Arms Race. (29)  Social scientists such as C. Wright Mills deconstructed the false assumptions behind superpower rivalry and nuclear deterrence logic in books with a popular appeal.  (30)  In a world where large economies were dominated by military production, economic historians such as Seymour Melman and John Nef discussed the connection between war and industrial society and ways of converting military to civilian production. (31)

      Charting the history of the peace movement itself across several continents has also required an assessment of its impact upon the actual policies of the super- and great powers. This task is the more complicated because political and military establishments have usually denied that they were to the slightest extent affected by public opinion. However, the work of Lawrence Wittner, among others, makes a strong case that public protest against nuclear testing, and alarm over the 1962 Cuba crisis, added significant pressure, helping to bring about the Nuclear Test-ban Treaty. (32) Opposition to the renewed superpower arms race of the 1980s led by the European Nuclear Disarmament movement (END) encouraged polycentric tendencies in Europe and influenced Mikhail Gorbachev.

      Interest has also revived in the history of just war doctrine and related questions of international law as this doctrine is redeployed in the post-Cold War era to justify so-called humanitarian (and pre-emptive) intervention, with significant recent assessments by Richard Falk and Andrew Fiala. (33)

      The hardest task facing peace historians today is to question and reassess the conventional narrative of international history, particularly since the end of the Second World War, and to challenge the dominant ‘realist’ approach. As Peter Wallensteen has perceptively written, peace research has grown as ‘a critical and constructive analysis of the basic tenets of the “conventional wisdom” of violence’, much of which dates back to Machiavelli. (34) Questions about the origins of the Cold War, casting doubt on the established view that it could be entirely blamed on the Soviet Union, were raised in the 1960s and 1970s by ‘revisionist’ scholars who would not necessarily regard themselves as peace historians. (35) The course and development of the Cold War, and the question of whether opportunities were missed to bring it to an earlier end, have received rather less attention. (36) Johan Galtung and other peace scholars have sought to counter the triumphalist view that the US and its allies ‘won the Cold War’, which continues to have a harmful impact on conventional thinking today. (37) Yet the voices of peace historians are heard much less frequently, and they have far less effect on policy formulation, than those of the war historians. In this vast field, much remains to be done.

Notes

(1)F. Howlett Charles, ‘American Peace History since the Vietnam War’, AHA Perspectives on History, December 2010, http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2010/american-peace-history-since-the-vietnam-war, accessed 11 March 2014.

(2)Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen, Peace Movements and Political Cultures (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), preface.

(3)Charles Chatfield, ed. Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken, 1973), xix–xxx.

(4)David S. Patterson, ‘Commentary: The Dangers of Balkanization’, Peace and Change 20, no. 1 (1995): 79. This special issue of the journal marked an important stage in the discussion of peace history.

(5)Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: Volume III (New York: American Book Co., 1937); Lewis F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, eds Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1960).

(6)Matthew Melko and Richard Weigel, Peace in the Ancient World (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1981).

(7)Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, From War to Peace (London: Cape, 1959).

(8)Kenneth Boulding, ‘Peace and the Evolutionary Process’, in The Quest for Peace: Transcending Collective Violence and War among Societies, Cultures and States, ed. Raimo Vayrynen (London: Sage, 1987), 54.

(9)Azar Gat, War in Human Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2011).

(10)Gregor Thomas, Thomas Gregor, ed., A Natural History of Peace (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 1996).

(11)Anja Hartmann and Beatrice Heuser, War, Peace and World Orders in European History (London: Routledge, 2001), xiii.

(12)(George Chapman), Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey, ed. Jan Parker (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2000); Michael Sage, Warfare in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996), 129.

(13)Simon Hornblower, ‘Warfare in Ancient Literature: The Paradox of War’, in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare: Volume I, eds Philip Sabin and Hans van Wees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22.

(14)G. Zampaglione, L’Idea della pace nel mondo antico (Turin: Eri-Edizioni Rai, 1967), translated by R. Dunn, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973). See also Nathan Spiegel, War and Peace in Classical Greek Literature (Jerusalem: Mount Scopus Publications, 1990).

(15)Oliver Taplin, ‘The Shield of Achilles within the “Iliad” ’, Greece & Rome 27, no. 1 (April 1980), 4. See also Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles (London: Faber, 2011), and my own discussion of the Iliad in John Gittings, The Glorious Art of Peace (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 40–47.

(16)Lawrence A. Tritle, From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival (London: Routledge, 2000), 44–45.

(17)John K. Fairbank, ‘Introduction: Varieties of the Chinese Military Experience’, in Chinese Ways in Warfare, eds John K. Fairbank and Frank Kierman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Fairbank’s approach is shared by Joseph Needham in his introduction to Science and Civilisation in China: Volume V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6.

(18)Hans van Wees, ‘Peace and the Society of States in Antiquity’, in Peace, War and Gender from Antiquity to the Present: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, eds Jost Dülffer and Robert Frank (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2009), 26.

(19)A. C. F. Beales, The History of Peace (New York: Dial Press, 1931); John C. Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1919).

(20)Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962); Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle 1636–1936 (Boston: Canner & Co., 1959); Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

(21)Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980); Cecelia Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1999).s

(22)Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War 1890–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1962); A. J. P. Taylor ignored altogether the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 in his classic The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918.

(23)See especially Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Study of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War (London: Pan, 2011); Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile, 2013); Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days: The Truth behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London: Verso, 2014).

(24)Blanche Wiesen Cook, Charles Chatfield and Sandi Cooper, The Garland Library of War and Peace [introductory catalogue] (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 9–10. See also Charles Chatfield and Ruzanna Ilukhina, Peace/Mir: An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994); David P. Barash, ed. Approaches to Peace: A Reader in Peace Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nigel J. Young, ed. Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Peace, 4 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

(25)The Erasmus Project of the University of Toronto has published almost all of his works in more than 80 volumes. A few modern scholars, including Dr Peter van den Dungen of the University of Bradford, have sought to keep alive Erasmus’s peace philosophy.

(26)Peter Wallensteen, ‘The Growing Peace Research Agenda’, Kroc Institute Occasional Paper 21:OP:4 (December 2001).

(27)Merle Curti, Bryan and World Peace (Northampton: Smith College Studies); Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., [c1936]).

(28)Quoted in Jane Addams, Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 251.

(29)Philip Noel-Baker, The Arms Race (London: John Calder, 1959).

(30)Charles W. Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).

(31)John Nef, War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Seymour Melman, The Demilitarized Society: Disarmament & Conversion (Montreal: Harvest House, 1988).

(32)Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb: Volumes I–III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993–2003); Lawrence Wittner, Confronting the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

(33)Richard A. Falk, The Costs of War: International Order, the UN, and World Order after Iraq (London: Routledge, 2008); Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).

(34)Peter Wallensteen, ‘The Origins of Peace Research’, in Peace Research: Achievements and Challenges, ed. Peter Wallensteen (Boulder: Westview, 1988), 1.

(35)We owe a special debt to Noam Chomsky and to Gabriel and Joyce Kolko for their dissection of the official Cold War narrative in works too numerous to cite here.

(36)I have looked at some of the evidence for missed opportunities during the Cold War in The Glorious Art of Peace (2012), 191–203.

(37)See the essays by Johan Galtung, April Carter and David Cortright in Why the Cold War Ended: A Range of Interpretations, eds Ralph Summy and Michael Salla (Westport: Greenwood, 1995). For British policy, the work of Mark Curtis, including The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Zed Press, 1995), is significant.





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