The Politics of Peace
A Global Cold War History
Published on 21. March 2019
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-0-19-537083-6 (ISBN)
Description
During a television broadcast in 1959, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked that "people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days our governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." At that very moment international peace organizations were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace and mounting the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations.
This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations, during the early cold war. It traces the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over a seemingly universal concept. These dynamic interactions involved three sets of global actors: cold war states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. These transnational networks challenged and eventually undermined the cold war order. They did so not just with reference to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, but also by addressing the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. As Petra Goedde shows in this work, deterritorializing the cold war reveals the fractures that emerged within each cold war camp, as activists both challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace and challenged each other over the best strategy to achieve it.
The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the scientists, journalists, publishers, feminists, and religious leaders who drove the international discourse on peace after World War II laid the groundwork for the eventual political transformation of the Cold War.
This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations, during the early cold war. It traces the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over a seemingly universal concept. These dynamic interactions involved three sets of global actors: cold war states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. These transnational networks challenged and eventually undermined the cold war order. They did so not just with reference to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, but also by addressing the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. As Petra Goedde shows in this work, deterritorializing the cold war reveals the fractures that emerged within each cold war camp, as activists both challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace and challenged each other over the best strategy to achieve it.
The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the scientists, journalists, publishers, feminists, and religious leaders who drove the international discourse on peace after World War II laid the groundwork for the eventual political transformation of the Cold War.
Reviews / Votes
The Politics of Peace is a striking-and remarkably successful-break from old patterns. Goedde sweeps around the world and across the quarter century from World War II to the heyday of superpower detente in the early 1970s. Anchored in exhaustive reading and meticulous research in U.S. and West European archives, this approach enables Goedde to examine parallels in different national experiences and to assess the overall importance of peace activism to the broad contours of the Cold War. * Mark Atwood Lawrence, Journal of American History * Insightful and clearly written....Drawing on extensive research in the United States and Germany, as well as in France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, Goedde shows how concepts of peace transformed the Cold War....Goedde's sophisticated analytical framing defines this book. The Politics of Peace is rich in theoretical insights. 'Peace' has no single meaning. Realism and idealism are false binaries. Not least, older moderates, more than young radicals, tend to forge stronger transnational networks because they have more years and resources to establish relationships. With so much of the 1960s historiography fixated on youthful firebrands, Goedde offers something different: an appreciation for the mostly 'middle-class, middle-aged activists' who changed the world through their pragmatic idealism. * Christopher Endy, American Historical Review * [A] fine book ... Looking at the Cold War from the perspective of peace is not only an innovative and novel approach but also a revealing one. * Guenter J. Bischof, sehepunkte * All in all, Goedde has written a readable book that seeks to expand our understanding of peace activism in the global Cold War ... The Politics of Peace is likely to have a lasting historiographical impact and will find its way onto the reading lists of university courses on the Cold War. * Christoph Laucht, Journal of Contemporary History * Petra Goedde's The Politics of Peace is a welcome intervention in the historiography of the Cold War and the United States in the world, neither of which has taken 'peace' seriously as an aspiration, as a social movement, or as a central theme of the Cold War and international relations since 1945...For too long, historians of the Cold War and international politics have treated peace activists with the same 'benign contempt' as their contemporaries did. Goedde shows us that the way forward is to re-conceptualize peace as a politics, to deconstruct Cold War binaries, and to focus on the complex interplay between non-state and state actors 'in both national and transnational contexts over time. * Leilah Danielson, Diplomatic History * In a masterful act of recovery, Petra Goedde reveals how much we have missed by seeing the Cold War as a series of military and political conflicts, for it was equally a struggle over the pursuit of peace. Elegantly written and with sweeping transnational reach, The Politics of Peace shows how peace activists leveraged Christian ethics, human rights, environmentalism, and more-and concludes with a new and convincing explanation of the origins of detente. * Barbara Keys, author of Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s * Petra Goedde's book is transnational history at its best, and its subject could hardly be more timely or important. Bold and ambitious, sweeping in its reach, the study is nevertheless fully grounded in its sources. Equally assured in its treatment of grassroots social movements, anticolonial liberation struggles, and the policies of states, The Politics of Peace is a sparkling contribution to the literature of the global Cold War. * Andrew J. Rotter, Colgate University * In The Politics of Peace, Petra Goedde offers a fresh and important new perspective on the first decades of the Cold War. Based on multinational archival research, this transnational study demonstrates the pervasive influence of the various peace movements and their intersection with political, religious, and feminist currents. * Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut * Goedde's wonderfully imaginative and original work of transnational scholarship flips the lens of Cold War analysis from conflict to the subtleties and contradictions of struggles over peace. Goedde offers fresh interpretations of such often-told stories of the Berlin crisis and Cuban missile crisis as well as uncovering new cultural and political dimensions of global Cold War through a focus on a range of peace actors including Absurdist writers, filmmakers, and philosophers. * Penny Von Eschen, Cornell University *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
15 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
634 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-537083-6 (9780195370836)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
01/2019
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€19.49
Available for download
E-Book
01/2019
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€19.49
Available for download
Person
Petra Goedde is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. She is the author of GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 and the co-editor of The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (OUP, 2012), and The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (OUP, 2013).
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "If You Want Peace, Prepare for War"
1. Old and New Left Internationalism and the Search for World Peace
2. Peace with the Planet: The International Struggle Against Nuclear Weapons
3. "Bridges of Reconciliation": The Religious Conceptualization of Peace in the Cold War
4. Gendered Peace, Women's Peace
5. War on Peace: Decolonization's Challenge to the Global Discourse on Peace
6. The Politics of Peace
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
1. "If You Want Peace, Prepare for War"
1. Old and New Left Internationalism and the Search for World Peace
2. Peace with the Planet: The International Struggle Against Nuclear Weapons
3. "Bridges of Reconciliation": The Religious Conceptualization of Peace in the Cold War
4. Gendered Peace, Women's Peace
5. War on Peace: Decolonization's Challenge to the Global Discourse on Peace
6. The Politics of Peace
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index