Overview

"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."

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9780195370836

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Reviews

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

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 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 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 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

Author Information

Petra Goedde is Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for the Humanities 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).

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