The Politics of Peace

"During a live television broadcast with Harold MacMillan 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." At that very moment international peace organizations, some with roots in the First World War and others responding to the post-World War II environment, were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace. These groups, which included the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the World Peace Council (WPC), mounted the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations. The Politics of Peace examines both the ideals and pragmatic aspects of international relations during the early cold war. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and '60s as a result of the gradual convergence between idealism and realism and through the dynamic interaction among three global actors: Cold War states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. As discourses on peace emerged in a variety of places, transnational networks emerged that challenged and eventually undermined the Cold War order. This book deterritorializes the Cold War by revealing the multiple divides that emerged within each Cold War camp, as peace activists challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace. The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed."--Provided by publisher.