{"id":41939,"date":"2014-04-21T13:09:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T12:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=41939"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:35:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:35:05","slug":"david-cortright-peace-a-history-of-movements-and-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/04\/david-cortright-peace-a-history-of-movements-and-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"David Cortright – Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 376pp.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Peacemaking has always been an art rather than a science. As with painting, there is a pallet with a range of colors, and it is up to the artist to know how to combine these colors, sometimes in pure form and at other times mixed together to paint a picture, sometimes of a peaceful field and at other times a scene of revolt. David Cortright, Director of Policy Studies at Notre Dame\u2019s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and an activist especially on nuclear arms issues, has set out a clear and up-to-date history of the ideas and movements that make up the colors on the peace pallet. While the book has been out for some time, I review it now as a first rate overview of peace efforts and ideologies.<\/p>\n

As with colors in art, there are a limited number of ideas which can be used, sometimes alone and sometimes in combinations. Likewise, there are a limited number of people in the peace brigades, and they are usually found in different campaigns, often the same people in different uniforms. Open conflicts provide us with test cases of how ideas concerning peace and conflict resolution can be put together, and we see how the peace brigades will form themselves to meet the challenge.<\/p>\n

Cartright gives us a good overview of the development of the 19th<\/sup> century peace societies. They were born in the USA and England from the success of collective action against slavery and the slave trade. If the age-old institution of slavery could be abolished by a combination of law, religious concern and changing public opinion, could not war be abolished in the same way? Religious-motivated action, work to influence public opinion, and legal restraints on war have continued to be the chief colors of the peace pallet.<\/p>\n

The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 were milestones in the development of world law, of faith in the power of mandatory arbitration, and for the need of world courts. The Hague legal spirit was most prominently displayed slightly later by President Woodrow Wilson who had long espoused arbitration, the strengthening of international law and multilateral cooperation. The League of Nations and the United Nations are the embodiment of the Wilsonian vision. As H.G. Wells wrote in The Shape of Things to Come <\/em> \u201cFor a brief interval Wilson stood alone for humankind\u2026in that brief interval there was a very extraordinary and significant wave of response to him throughout the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson remains the \u2018father figure\u2019 of peace through law and multilateral governmental action just as Mahatma Gandhi does for non-violent action. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote \u201cGandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.\u201d Peace efforts require images for a complex set of ideas, and Wilson and Gandhi provide that image of the heroes of peace.<\/p>\n

Wilson and Gandhi represent the two steady sources of inspiration for peace workers \u2014 those working for the rule of law and human rights and those working to translate religious insights into political action. It is not always easy to get the two traditions to work together. As Cortright notes \u201cIn May 1999, nearly 10,000 peace advocates from around the world gathered in Holland for the Hague Appeal for Peace\u00b8 one of the largest citizen peace conferences in history\u2026The 1999 Hague Appeal was intended to launch a new era of citizen-initiated peacemaking. As preparations for the conference took place, however, NATO forces launched a bombing campaign against Serbia to force its withdrawal from Kosovo. While the official conference proceedings unfolded, hundreds of activists gathered in basement conference rooms for impromptu sessions to debate the pros and cons of NATO intervention. It was a heated discussion in which colleagues who had worked together for disarmament in the 1980s found themselves on opposite sides of the question of intervention in Kosovo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, as the conflicts in Syria grow in intensity and spill over to influence Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, we face many of the same issues that faced peace workers in the conflicts of former Yugoslavia: what are the sources of legitimate government and when does a government cease to be legitimate? Is there really a \u2018duty to protect\u2019 and when does this duty become only a cover for power politics as usual? How do peace workers act in \u201cfar away places\u201d in which both legal and moral issues are not clear.<\/p>\n

Peace remains a painting in process; the colors are often the same, the shapes painted change. David Cortright has given us a good history, but there are no \u2018how to\u2019 guides for action.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Cortright, Director of Policy Studies at Notre Dame\u2019s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and an activist especially on nuclear arms issues, has set out a clear and up-to-date history of the ideas and movements that make up the colors on the peace pallet. While the book has been out for some time, I review it now as a first rate overview of peace efforts and ideologies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}