The Peace Movement

In our frequent focus on leading diplomats and practitioners of statecraft, we tend to downplay nongovernmental individuals and agencies, that is, people or groups that work, at least in part, outside of traditional political channels. At best, they are perceived as bit players, seldom occupying center stage. One group of nongovernmental agencies in particular, peace movements, is additionally handicapped, for it is seen as at best naive, at worst destructive. According to conventional wisdom not yet fundamentally challenged, peace movements naively sought disarmament at any price, even doing so in the face of predatory and genocidal powers. They thereby endangered the very world stability they sought to preserve. In their respective books, Cecelia Lynch and Matthew Evangelista take issue with such views. Lynch has the more foreboding task, that of recovering the reputation of the peace movement between the 1919 settlement and the outbreak of World War II. She does include a prefatory chapter on American and British movements, when Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts established societies, as well as a concluding chapter dealing with the role played by such groups in constructing the United Nations. The heart of her study, however, includes a defense of peace activity during the interwar period

Disarmament · Face (sociological concept · Peace movement · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reputation · Settlement (finance · Social science · Sociology · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies